Smriti

“I can only speak for myself here; I don’t know the reasons for other people’s searches, just as I don’t know why User #2446971 spent, according to her search timestamps, a sizeable portion of her Mother’s Day asking a data-mining algorithm why her son has abandoned her. Perhaps this is simply another iteration of calling out into the dark, whispering prayers on bended knee, or lying under the stars. The singing of psalms, the singing of qawwali. Augustine and his pears, Sartre and his nausea. A teleology of adaptation, a continual movement of our despair.”

- Existential Googling

mollycrabapple:

old piece from “All Around the World” (a Transmetropolitan art book). Going through five years worth of art for my next art book with IDW

“There are innumerable examples of this, but my favorite is George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Before this novel’s rise to prominence, any discussion of intrusive surveillance was singularly bloodless. ‘‘I don’t like how it would feel,’’ you could say, or, ‘‘It would change my behavior, make me self-conscious.’’ These are highly abstract, rather unconvincing arguments, especially when weighed against the technological narrative of surveillance: ‘‘With total information awareness, we will be as gods, our eye upon each sparrow as it falls from the tree. No evil deed will go unobserved and unpunished.’’ After all, it stands to reason that if you can watch everyone, you can see everything, and punish every bad deed.

But a science fiction writer, Orwell, has given us a marvelous and versatile vocabulary word for discussing this: now we can say, ‘‘Your surveillance idea is a bad one because it is Orwellian’’ – we can import all of that novel and its horrors with one compact word. The argument becomes a duel of narratives: the cool, impartial intelligence apparat that catches the bad guys versus the human reality of the corrupting nature of power and the way that our social contract and good behavior are eroded by constant surveillance and a culture of suspicion.”

Cory Doctorow: A Vocabulary for Speaking about the Future

"… taken to its logical conclusion, every story is sad, because at the end everybody dies. Birth, copulation, and death. No exceptions, except maybe for the copulation part of it. Some guys don’t even get that far, poor sods."

Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin (via hateshiploveship)

animalstalkinginallcaps:

I LOVE YOU.

HOW MUCH?

AS MUCH AS YOU LIKE GNAWING ON DEER LEGS.

THAT’S NOT ENOUGH.

AS MUCH AS AMERICA LOVES WHITEWASHING ITS HISTORY OF IMPERIALISM AND CONSTANTLY DENYING OR DOWNPLAYING THE INSTALLATION AND MILITARIZATION OF FOREIGN REGIMES SYMPATHETIC TO ITS FINANCIAL INTERESTS.

BETTER, BUT STILL NOT ENOUGH.

I LOVE YOU AS MUCH AS KANYE WEST LOVES LAUGHING AT HIS OWN PUNCHLINES IN HIS SONGS.

NOW YOU’RE JUST LYING. NOBODY LOVES ANYTHING THAT MUCH.

“…But new evidence suggests a breathtaking possibility. Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory and University of Washington researchers found that the skin of the cuttlefish Sepia officinalis, a color-changing cousin of octopuses, contains gene sequences usually expressed only in the light-sensing retina of the eye. In other words, cephalopods—octopuses, cuttlefish, and squid—may be able to see with their skin.

The American philosopher Thomas Nagel once wrote a famous paper titled “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Bats can see with sound. Like dolphins, they can locate their prey using echoes. Nagel concluded it was impossible to know what it’s like to be a bat. And a bat is a fellow mammal like us—not someone who tastes with its suckers, sees with its skin, and whose severed arms can wander about, each with a mind of its own. Nevertheless, there are researchers still working diligently to understand what it’s like to be an octopus.”

- Deep Intellect via Orion Magazine

When Arunachalam Muruganantham hit a wall in his research on creating a sanitary napkin for poor women, he decided to do what most men typically wouldn’t dream of. He wore one himself—for a whole week. Fashioning his own menstruating uterus by filling a bladder with goat’s blood, Muruganantham went about his life while wearing women’s underwear, occasionally squeezing the contraption to test out his latest iteration. It resulted in endless derision and almost destroyed his family. But no one is laughing at him anymore, as the sanitary napkin-making machine he went on to create is transforming the lives of rural women across India.

- An Indian Inventor Disrupts The Period Industry

wilwheaton:

“Uhura” comes from the Swahili word UHURU meaning “freedom”. Uhura was pretty much the first ever black main character on American television who was not a maid or a domestic servant in 1966. TV network NBC refused to let Nichelle Nichols be a regular, claiming Deep South affiliates would be angered, so Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry hired her as a “day worker,” but still included her in almost every episode. She actually made more money than any of the other actors through this workaround, and it was kept secret from the other actors, but it was still a humiliating second-class status. The network people made life hard for Nichols, constantly trying to pare down her screen time, purposefully dropping racist comments in her presence and even withholding her fan mail from her. This deplorable state of affairs led Nichols to make the decision to quit after the 1st season, but then she happened to meet the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. who pleaded with her to stick with the show because as a Black woman she was portraying the first non-stereotypical role on television.

(Source: deejaybird)

"We shall have to adapt ourselves to the shadowy screen and to the cold machine. A new form of writing will be necessary. I have thought of that and I can feel what is coming. But I rather like it. This swift change of scene, this blending of emotion and experience … in life, too, changes and transitions flash before our eyes, and emotions of the soul are like a hurricane. The cinema has divined the mystery of motion. And that is greatness."

Leo Tolstoy, from a letter to a friend on the advent of cinema (via confusionis)

(via loveandzombies)

curiositycounts:

The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories, lovely collection of visual micro-narratives about our shared humanity curated by Joseph Gordon-Levitt

thedailywhat:

Invalid Argument of the Day: I have no idea what you’re talking about… so here’s a photo of world-renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma on the floor of a bathroom with a wombat.

[@petersagal.]

curiositycounts:

Harmless Weapons, clever series by artist Kyle Bean

smithsonianmag:

The Great Battles of History, in Miniature

The Museo de los Soldaditos de Plomo houses the largest collection of toy soldiers and miniature figures in the world.

Photograph by Derek Workman

(via smithsonianmag)

"She reads books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live; she read books as one would breathe ether, to sink in and die."

Annie Dillard, The Living (via thebronzemedal)

curiositycounts:

For Mark Train’s 176th birthday today, pages from his brilliant and funny little-known children’s book, Advice for Little Girls

Smriti

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