Life
“Go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.” —
Kurt Vonnegut, with your friendly weekend reminder to get creative.
[Quote from his 2006 essay collection A Man Without a Country]
(via jasonweinberger)
“As I write this, I can’t help thinking how very strange it all was. It was chance that led me to walk along the road to P.C.L. and, in so doing, the road to becoming a film director, yet somehow everything that I had done prior to that seemed to point to it as an inevitability. I had dabbled eagerly in painting, literature, theater, music, and other arts and stuffed my head full of all the things that come together in the art of the film. Yet I had never noticed that cinema was the one field where I would be required to make use of all I had learned. I can’t help wondering what fate had prepared me so well for this road I was to take in life. All I can say is that the preparation was totally unconscious on my part.” — From Akira Kurosawa’s autobiography, which I’m currently enjoying. The sentiment sounds familiar, no? (via hv23)
“Would your revved up immune system (from your predisposition to psoriasis) abrogate your susceptibility to tuberculosis, or are they operating through independent pathways? Perhaps, unpredictably, they synergize with each other to produce a tertiary disease in a separate part of the body.” — Medicine: A Tough Pill to Swallow
“As a result, medical students are trained to view patients as nothing more than a grocery list of risks – a dehumanizing process (for both us and the patients) that may have limited utility. For both the patient and physician, the care of health operates at the level of the individual, not the population. Rather than understanding what is “normal” for the patient in front of us, we are trained to define “normal” relative to the population. Ideas like population-based normality and risk factors are tools for regulating public health and, as such, serve as a wonderful resources for institutions – the CDC, the WHO, governments, cities, etc. – because they can use these population-based averages to implement large-scale health interventions. If, for example, African Americans living in a particular zip code have higher rates of colon cancer and diabetes, the city government might team up with civil engineers and city planners to reduce the number of fast food chains and increase the number of grocery stores (read more on food deserts)” — http://toughpill.wordpress.com/
Awesome. (ht: @micah)
(via hv23)
Breaks down how different frequency ranges are perceived by the user. Simple and imprecise, but it provides a framework for mixing & EQ.
Spiral staircase in the Galerie Vivienne (by Vincent Montibus - OFF)
Panoramic photo stitching using Hugin
“In immaculate, glass-walled and neon-lit rooms resembling intensive care units, rows of identical machines emit a busy hum. The Illumina HiSeq 2000 is a top-of-the-line genome-sequencing machine that carries a price tag of $500,000. There are 128 of them here, flanked by rows of similar high-tech equipment, making it possible for the Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI) to churn out more high quality DNA-sequence data than all U.S. academic facilities put together.” — China Is Rewriting the Book on Genome Research - Newsweek