THE AGGREGATE OF OUR JOY AND SUFFERING

Beautiful beautiful Brian Cox talks about the impact Carl Sagan had on his life. He incorporates clips from Cosmos (now available for viewing on Hulu), interviews with Carl, and interviews with Annie Druyan. The clip will only be available for a few days, so do yourself a favor and spend an hour of your life listening to this.

On a related note, I try to push the Space episode of RadioLab onto everybody I care about. It combines everything I love: Annie and Carl, romance, the Golden Record, Philip Glass, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and, of course, the cosmos and every feeling of wonder and insignificance that is associated with it. Each time I listen to it my heart breaks. Recommended listening environment: warm, dark room, headphones, no distractions.

It infiltrated my brain crevices and hasn't left yet.

Robot Luv

This is so fuggin cute and makes me so fuggin happy.

"Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal.

....

Over the course of the following months, throughout numerous missions, the Tweenbots were successful in rolling from their start point to their far-away destination assisted only by strangers. Every time the robot got caught under a park bench, ground futilely against a curb, or became trapped in a pothole, some passerby would always rescue it and send it toward its goal. Never once was a Tweenbot lost or damaged. Often, people would ignore the instructions to aim the Tweenbot in the “right” direction, if that direction meant sending the robot into a perilous situation. One man turned the robot back in the direction from which it had just come, saying out loud to the Tweenbot, "You can’t go that way, it’s toward the road.”"

Yesterday I watched an absurdly large hawk stun itself on the glass walls of the Wexner Center bus stop.


Bad omens, unsettling dreams. I've been sleeping on the wrong side of the bed.

"Long live the proletariat revolution! Love, Dad"

I love my daddy so very much.

Just a few hours to myself.

Western communication has what linguists call a "transmitter orientation"--that is, it is considered the responsibility of the speaker to communicated ideas clearly and unambiguously. Even in the case of the Air Florida crash, where the first officer never does more than hint about the danger posed by the ice, he still hints four times, phrasing his comments four different ways, in an attempt to make his meaning clear. He may have been constrained by the power distance between himself and the captain, but he was still operating within a Western cultural context, which holds that if there is confusion, it is the fault of the speaker.

But Korea, like many Asian countries, is receiver oriented. It is up to the listener to make sense of what is being said.

--Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers

Communication has never been my strong point. It's snowing in April.

No more reading The Savage Detectives while eating breakfast.

Too much heavy sadness, too early in the morning.