Dystopian Myopia

nerdaliztix: wow this is quite powerful

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 23:08:30 -0400

wow this is quite powerful

“Tourists get the full experience of the power of a...

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 04:01:33 -0400

“Tourists get the full experience of the power of a calving glacier while on a boat trip off Ilulissat, Greenland. Fortunately, and somewhat amazingly, nobody was hurt.”

Check this video out, be it dream or nightmare fuel, it’ll be sure to leave some kind of impression on your mind. :50 is where life starts to get interesting.

photojojo: For his latest project, Tim Tadder found a bunch of...

Thu, 23 Aug 2012 00:15:28 -0400

photojojo:

For his latest project, Tim Tadder found a bunch of bald men and threw water balloons at their heads, literally!

Water Wigs - Halos Made of Water by Tim Tadder

via Behance

eximplode: docgelegentlich: this is really great i give you a...

Tue, 21 Aug 2012 22:24:45 -0400

eximplode:

docgelegentlich:

this is really great

i give you a hamburger

…Youtube comments as surrealist performance art?

Well, the comment did its job. I actually want to make a Cuil a measurement of abstraction.

mishasminions: RELEVANT TO HUMANITY

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 10:18:53 -0400

mishasminions:

RELEVANT TO HUMANITY

reachling: theluckymagicrabbit: Tiny Gardens~~ oh...

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 10:15:51 -0400

reachling:

theluckymagicrabbit:

Tiny Gardens~~

oh gosh

Ladies and gentlemen - my secret weakness. I am enamored with itsy bitsy growing things, add in the miniature furnishings, and I’m a damn kid all over agan.

Life with a sword in my hands.: Harvard cracks DNA storage, crams 700 terabytes of data into a single gram

Mon, 20 Aug 2012 10:13:30 -0400

Life with a sword in my hands.: Harvard cracks DNA storage, crams 700 terabytes of data into a single gram:

sifu-kisu:

Scientists have been eyeing up DNA as a potential storage medium for a long time, for three very good reasons: It’s incredibly dense (you can store one bit per base, and a base is only a few atoms large); it’s volumetric (beaker) rather than planar (hard disk); and it’s incredibly stable — where other bleeding-edge storage mediums need to be kept in sub-zero vacuums, DNA can survive for hundreds of thousands of years in a box in your garage.

It is only with recent advances in microfluidics and labs-on-a-chip that synthesizing and sequencing DNA has become an everyday task, though. While it took years for the original Human Genome Project to analyze a single human genome (some 3 billion DNA base pairs), modern lab equipment with microfluidic chips can do it in hours. Now this isn’t to say that Church and Kosuri’s DNA storage is fast — but it’s fast enough for very-long-term archival.

Just think about it for a moment: One gram of DNA can store 700 terabytes of data. That’s 14,000 50-gigabyte Blu-ray discs… in a droplet of DNA that would fit on the tip of your pinky. To store the same kind of data on hard drives — the densest storage medium in use today — you’d need 233 3TB drives, weighing a total of 151 kilos. In Church and Kosuri’s case, they have successfully stored around 700 kilobytes of data in DNA — Church’s latest book, in fact — and proceeded to make 70 billion copies (which they claim, jokingly, makes it the best-selling book of all time!) totaling 44 petabytes of data stored.

Looking forward, they foresee a world where biological storage would allow us to record anything and everything without reservation. Today, we wouldn’t dream of blanketing every square meter of Earth with cameras, and recording every moment for all eternity/human posterity — we simply don’t have the storage capacity. There is a reason that backed up data is usually only kept for a few weeks or months — it just isn’t feasible to have warehouses full of hard drives, which could fail at any time. If the entirety of human knowledge — every book, uttered word, and funny cat video — can be stored in a few hundred kilos of DNA, though… well, it might just be possible to record everything (hello, police state!)

It’s also worth noting that it’s possible to store data in the DNA of living cells — though only for a short time. Storing data in your skin would be a fantastic way of transferring data securely…

Data transfers through handshakes? I have this bizzarre image of playing tongue hockey with someone, swabbing my mouth afterwards and checking out their public profile with what I come up with. (though I doubt it would be that simple…)

The mind boggles.

Clicky the linky for the full post, and links to the original article.

What I wanna know is what happens if you sneeze?

"This is one more piece of advice I have for you: don’t get impatient. Even if things are so tangled..."

Sun, 19 Aug 2012 21:43:21 -0400

“This is one more piece of advice I have for you: don’t get impatient. Even if things are so tangled up you can’t do anything, don’t get desperate or blow a fuse and start yanking on one particular thread before it’s ready to come undone. You have to figure it’s going to be a long process and that you’ll work on things slowly, one at a time.”

- Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami (via thatkindofwoman)

How wind-blown Japanese tsunami debris may move across the...

Sun, 19 Aug 2012 01:34:00 -0400

How wind-blown Japanese tsunami debris may move across the Pacific

“Objects that float mostly above the surface of the water, like chunks of styrofoam, are more affected by the speed of the wind than the speed of the water, so they scud quickly across the ocean surface. This means they have “high windage,” and are shown by the red dots in the model. Objects that float half-in, half-out of the water, like fishing buoys and containers, have medium windage and move somewhat faster than the water (green dots). Objects that don’t float above the surface of the water, like fishing nets and plastic crates, have low windage and move the same speed the water (purple dots).

This explains why debris objects appear to be showing up earlier than scientists originally expected – high windage objects such as the dock found in Oregon and the soccer ball found in Alaska moved relatively quickly across the ocean.”

Click through to see a full graphic of the movement.

crankyangela: REDUCE THE NEED FOR PLASTIC BAGS WITH A...

Sun, 19 Aug 2012 00:57:51 -0400

crankyangela:

REDUCE THE NEED FOR PLASTIC BAGS WITH A TRADITIONAL JAPANESE ECO BAG

Furoshiki is a traditional Japanese wrapping cloth which is used to carry many different items and can be a great way to help the environment by using as a re-usable eco-shopping cloth.

I saw this maybe a year ago, and like the stunning genius I am, never saved it in any capacity for future reference. Fixed that. I attempted the fourth from the bottom using one of my old bandanas with a hot lunch I carried back to work, it didn’t look half as pretty as these photos do, though.

thedestroyerinshadow: loveincolororg: God has spoken! THE...

Fri, 17 Aug 2012 13:24:24 -0400

thedestroyerinshadow:

loveincolororg:

God has spoken!

THE LORD HATH SPOKEN

I disagree. At least in the case of straight males, I do.

Why?

Cuz of this quote: ”Homophobia: the fear that gay men will treat you the way you treat women.”

To be fair, this still applies to someone who is a complete asshole.

chiazu: mieaou: bedroom—hymns: I’m going to get...

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 02:45:08 -0400

chiazu:

mieaou:

bedroom—hymns:

I’m going to get arrested.

I’ll pay for your lawyer.

19 day-old Rungwe and his mother N’Dala. [x] 19 day-old...

Mon, 13 Aug 2012 00:26:13 -0400

19 day-old Rungwe and his mother N’Dala. [x]

19 day-old Rungwe just got a gander at your search history.

Really? I’m kinda relieved that he was stupid enough to...

Sat, 11 Aug 2012 16:58:20 -0400

Really? I’m kinda relieved that he was stupid enough to pick someone who’d essentially alienate the majority of the voting public, outside of the swing states that are feverishly working hard on insuring anyone who isn’t white and above middle class income will have to go through bureaucratic hell to vote.

If he’d selected Condoleezza Rice, he would’ve had a veep with enough political and demographic lure to have a chance with those voters. All we really need now is for enough of the voting public who don’t want these jackasses in office to show up to the damn polls. But how very sad that this campaign, and my own personal vote, will not be to keep President Obama in office, but to keep Rn’R of the R’s the hell out.

I… kinda ran free with this one. I might start using this...

Fri, 10 Aug 2012 07:57:21 -0400

I… kinda ran free with this one. I might start using this shading technique in more of my work, not sure. I also used to think liver spots were scorch marks.

Hothead. This guy actually had that hair in the original photo....

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 15:57:00 -0400

Hothead.

This guy actually had that hair in the original photo. The only embellishment I added was the smoke.

Another beautiful face, along with fun hair to draw to boot....

Thu, 09 Aug 2012 07:32:23 -0400

Another beautiful face, along with fun hair to draw to boot. Pictures like this one make it hard to convince myself to ever return to white paper.

One of a series based off photos I found in this awesome...

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 16:00:33 -0400

One of a series based off photos I found in this awesome ol’ 70’s book on the American southwest, filled with tons of candid shots of great faces.

This could be a sketch for a painting to come? I’ve fallen...

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 07:32:27 -0400

This could be a sketch for a painting to come? I’ve fallen in love with the appearance of the slow drip of bright, intense color against a dark background.

valley-of-the-dolls: The jewish barber’s speech from The Great...

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 02:47:10 -0400

valley-of-the-dolls:

The jewish barber’s speech from The Great Dictator (1940). A poor jewish barber looks just like the bad dictator and is mistaken for him. He uses his chance to deliver a speech to the people disguised as the Dictator. A speech of love and kindness.

Chaplin managed to create one of the most beautiful and epic speeches of all time in the end scene of The Great Dictator. This was also Chaplin’s first true talking picture and his best grossing film ever. This film and speech has also great significance because it was delivered just before the WW2 broke loose.

Funny thing, how time has only made these words even more relevant now.