Jul
6th
Mon
6th
Jul
5th
Sun
5th
Vancouver’s plan to dedicate one lane of the Burrard Bridge to bicycles is really about how the Mayor, Council and senior staff can get away at the lowest political cost with a bicycle facility that will least offend the drivers of the 80% of the vehicles on the Burrard Bridge that have only one passenger. This inefficient use of valuable road space needs to be confronted, not accommodated.
How do you balance the need for a less corrupt future society, with the pressing demands of today’s demanding missions, which beg for today’s corrupt leaders?
Try to stretch your imagination here: imagine a future America where it’s genuinely patriotic and honorable to abandon elective office. Imagine a future America where major power-players never bother with formal elective offices; that’s for saps, flunkies and flak-catchers, and all the real power, money and clout are elsewhere. “Washington” is not the capital of the nation, but the out-of-it enemy of the civil populace. How far are we from that situation?
Jul
3rd
Fri
3rd
danish breakfast commercial (via mattydabatty)
Curved origami (via hearnmit)
Now the natural question is, where are we in this putative cycle of extinction? Our solar system has just passed the midplane of the Milky Way, on its way up. If the past is any guide, we are on the downside of biodiversity, a few million years from hitting bottom. Our cosmic-ray hypothesis may not be the right mechanism, but it should be testable by simply looking for specific kinds of radiation from gas clouds just on the galaxy’s northern side. We now must try to understand the 62-millionyear cycle itself by seeking correlations with things like the rate of seabed fossil formation or the rates of species origination and extinction. Only by gathering these clues can we fathom the diversity recession that seems to lie in our geological future.
… most of Michael Jackson’s signature 1980s dance moves were inspired (i.e. lifted wholesale) from the Snake in the Grass sequence from the 1974 film “Little Prince”. Even the signature loafers with white socks look is pulled from this. MJ refined the dancing a lot, and did go with a different hat - but the mannerisms, body language, and moves are so utterly unmistakable.
