If you want to keep growing emotionally and spiritually for the rest of your life, accept this as your mantra and try to live as if it were true:Everything that I experience from another human being is either love, or a call for love.
A NASA-funded peep into the farthest reaches of the cosmos has uncovered this "feeding black hole" 12 billion light years away. APM 08279+5255, as this compacted mass of inescapable doom is affectionately known, has been gorging on water vapor and spewing out energy. How much H2O exactly? It's only the "largest and farthest reservoir of water ever detected in the universe," and it weighs in at 140 trillion times the amount in our oceans.
Amazing. The universe is really crazy. Imagine a gigantic amount of water just floating in space. I know that blew my mind just now.
I love Backblaze. It's employee owned, not VC backed. They publish everything about how they do it.
Granted the comparison is not fair, because S3 is way more performant at scale and for concurrent access... Backblaze is designed for more or less cold storage. But for backups, that's exactly what you want.
I'm about to build an Unraid server myself -- 10TB for under $1000 using commodity hardware including storage, expandable to 30 TB pretty easily. So I guess I'm a bit of a storage nerd. I believe all things should be stored forever. With companies like Backblaze, it looks like it may well be within humanity's grasp.
One of the things you learn as a college president is that if an undergraduate is wearing a tie and jacket on Thursday afternoon at three o'clock, there are two possibilities. One is that they're looking for a job and have an interview; the other is that they are an a**hole. This was the latter case.
Really brilliant copy. I love it.
This was originally posted a year ago: The Real Life Social Network v2 (via slideshare.net)
It went on to become Google Circles.
Now that person is being blocked by Google from publishing a book on the academic research supporting Circles... mainly because he now works at Facebook.
Poor audio quality but very worthwhile! Magic takes advantage of the ways we perceive the world in fascinating ways. Our mental machinery is easily fooled to great effect.
Stare at the middle of the video at the X and watch as your brain constructs increasingly grotesque faces!
It goes to show how our visual cortexes work and how easily our brains can be tricked by simple effects.
via metafilter
Excerpted from a dialogue between Ken Wilber and Larry Wachowski -- Ken Wilber passes on his own take on the Matrix trilogy and why people hate 2 and 3 so much.
As you know, I think it's incredibly gutsy because the whole key to the Matrix trilogy—this is my interpretation—is given in really in the last fifteen, twenty minutes of the third film; that the Rosetta Stone is when Neo, for example, is saying of the machines, "If you could only see them like I see em...they're all light. They're made of light", and so on...That interpretation is the key to all three of the films, and it's incredibly gutsy, because film number one—so many people sort of relate to film number one because it makes sense. You think it makes sense if you don't see the other two; it seems a very simple story if you look at just film one. It's very Manichean actually, which is, everything in the matrix is bad, everything outside of the matrix is good, everybody in the matrix is trapped, everybody outside of the matrix is free—and that very simple kind of dualistic thing—the machines are bad and they're trying to hurt freedom and so on. And so everybody goes “wow that's great!”
And then you go and you watch part two, and you get to the part where Neo's talking to the Oracle and says "you're not human are you?" She goes "no." He says "You're a program aren't you?" "Yeah." And everybody starts scratching their head, because now all of a sudden—and I've told you this, and again this is in my opinion—we're taken out of the realm of movie and into the realm of complex literature, because this is a very sophisticated plot now, with a whole lot of pieces, and a lot of the pieces of the puzzle aren't really given until that last part of the third film.
And that's where all of a sudden things really start to fall into place. They start to fall into place with the speech from the Architect, they start to fall into place actually with the first talk with the Oracle. Smith is a real key to all of this, and anyway, it's that overall interpretation, which is really that body, mind, and spirit appear in the Matrix trilogy, both in their alienated forms, and then in their resurrected, or healed, or more integrated forms, which happens towards the end of the third part. And that's why it's very confusing to some people if they don't get that overall big picture, that's why sorta part one makes sense and then they get lost a little bit in part two and part three.
DJ Earworm, for those not in the know, is one of the most amazing mashup artists of the past 5 years.