"The World Will Never Starve For Want Of Wonders, But For Want Of Wonder. We Should Always Endeavor To

If we think hard and cooperate with one another, we can make Slytherin great again, but only if we try really, really hard.

guy who sees the gorilla the first time on the gorilla test

It's still so strange to me how apparently taboo it is to like a post on someone's Instagram from a month ago when there are posts still circulating on Tumblr from 1550 BCE

Bruckner Expressway, South Bronx, 1958

NYC Municipal Archives

interviewer: can you explain this gap in your resume?

me: mhm so that’s called a lacuna. it refers to when manuscripts have missing parts, lost to time. for example, the epic of gilgamesh has

Today I learned raw image files are sometimes incorrectly described as "digital negatives". Like transparency film and unlike negative film, raw image pixels contain positive exposure measurements. The raw datasets are more like undeveloped film: a raw image can be developed by software in a non-destructive manner to reach a complete image that resolves every pixel in an RGB color space.

Art is like religion in that it represents something that is beyond the reach of empiricism. The element of fantasy is inextinguishable. Spinoza made the chief distinction that religion, unlike superstition, was founded on knowledge rather than ignorance. But what if, in stark contrast to things forged from knowledge, art is, at times, profoundly further from knowledge than it appears? And there, we might see that art isn't necessarily deep; it's just a mirror, and the mind is an abyss. Yes, I say this as someone who both appreciates and creates art. Criticizing art; classic artist move.

Flame Skimmer (Libellula saturata), Libellulidae, Chambers Bay, Pierce Co., WA, USA

photograph by Steve Russell

One of the funniest things about communism is that it rests on a premise that's basically like, "Hey, once everybody voluntarily gives up a specific set of strategies and advantages, everything will be wonderful. So, once we figure out how to coerce everybody into voluntarily giving those up, we'll be set."

The origins of modern genetics. From Mendel's principles of heredity, by W. Bateson.

(cont.) These F₂ plants were again allowed to fertilise themselves and the offspring of each plant was separately sown. It was then found that the offspring, F₃, of the recessives consisted entirely of recessives. Further generations bred from these recessives again produced recessives only, and therefore the recessives which appeared in F₂ are seen to be pure to the recessive character, namely, in the case we are considering, to dwarfness. But the tall F₂ dominants when tested by a study of their offspring (F₃), instead of being all alike (as the dwarfs or recessives were), proved to be of two kinds, viz. (a) Plants which gave a mixed F₃ consisting of both talls and dwarfs, the proportion showing again an average of three talls to one dwarf. (b) Plants which gave talls only and are thus pure to tallness. The ratio of the impure (a) plants to the pure (b) plants was as 2 to 1. The whole F₂ generation therefore, formed by self-fertilisation of the original hybrid consists of three kinds of plants: 25% pure dominants, 50% impure dominants, 25% pure recessives. Or three dominants : one recessive.