Kali & the Kaleidoscope: The Billiards Of Chaos →
….from Silent Running (1972), dystopian sci-fi film set on a bioreserve forest aboard a spaceship.
This circular pool table has an off centred hole which makes the the game way more difficult. Incidentally, the mathematical version of this problem is known to be very complicated. In the…
And I don’t believe that the NSA could save every domestic phone call, not at this time. Possibly after the Utah data center is finished, but not now. They could be saving the all the metadata now, but I’m skeptical about that too.
— Schneier on Security: Is the U.S. Government Recording and Saving All Domestic Telephone Calls? *knotesy
Because of its simplicity, the ABC Conjecture is well-known by all mathematicians. CUNY professor Lucien Szpiro says that “every professional has tried at least one night” to theorize about a proof. Yet few people have seriously attempted to crack it.
— The Paradox of the Proof | Project Wordsworth *knotesy
Wetting surfaces to wipe it off only made the dust stick more firmly. It’s like the silicate minerals all over Mars’ surface — if they mix with water in human lungs, they will become more damaging, combining to create dangerous chemicals.
— We need to tackle Mars dust before launching manned mission (Wired UK) *knotesy
Disunion - The guillotine simulator for Oculus Rift. (by André Berlemont)
This is the cover I wanted to run with. Ah well.
19 emotions for which English has no words, in an infographic by design studen Pei-Ying Lin.
Among the most beautiful is toska.
“Thinking for a living is a luxury few have, and asking the big questions is rare once we leave college.” Marina Petrova reviews Jim Holt’s existential detective story, Why Does the World Exist?
Jim Holt is an expert at nothing. He has gone on a world tour of modern philosophers, physicists, theologians, and writers, and asked them a question that is, he writes, “so profound it would occur only to a metaphysician, yet so simple it would occur only to a child.” Why is there something rather than nothing? Holt visited esteemed thinkers — Richard Swinburne, Steven Weinberg, Adolf Grünbaum, and John Updike — in their natural habitats, places like Oxford or Café de Flore in Paris. Holt presents their theories in Why Does the World Exist?: An Existential Detective Story in a manner a layperson could grasp, and with wit and dry humor a cynic can appreciate. A philosopher, author, and essayist, Holt gives these great minds physical bodies, allowing his readers a glimpse into the lives of our own endangered species — humans that think for a living.
True heroism is you, alone, in a designated work space. True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer.
— Divine Drudgery by Jonathan Raban | The New York Review of Books *knotesy
