Franker

Feb 2

Miracles

We are miracles.

No, seriously, we are heterogametic miracles. Think of the sperm. Think of the odds! Think of your masturbatory ancestors, paging through their furtively borrowed father’s stash of Playboys and spurting on bathroom floors, or the promiscuous ones unloading at wartime brothels or else casting spent condoms filled with the now extinguished prospect of life from the backseat of vinyl upholstered automobiles—and here, miraculously, is you. You were not in those condoms, or brothels, or on those floors: You are here, among the born.

Jul 19

“I don’t believe in god, so I don’t have to make elaborately sounded structures. I hate Vachel Lindsay, always have; I don’t even like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just go on your nerve. If someone’s chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don’t turn around and shout, ” Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep.” Frank O’Hara, “Personism: A Manifesto” (via themheavy)

Jun 5

“Never believe any of that about a scythe and a skull,” he told her. “It can be two bicycle policeman as easily, or be a bird. Or it can have a wide snout like a hyena.” - Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro

Apr 29

“Our imagination is stretched to the utmost not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.” Richard Feynman

Apr 4

Spring

Barbeque may not provide the textbook definition for our standing as higher-order animals, but pitmasters know differently. The transformation of the raw to the cook through the marriage of the elements of fire and wood nourishes the body, feeds the family, and attracts the neighbors. It also links us with our ancient progenitors who gathered around campfires, where the men reveled in their exploits on the savannah, holding a meaty wildebeest leg in one hand and a starchy tuber in another, telling tall tales of riding elephants bareback and fighting lions to a draw with a stick, while the women snickered. The meal was followed by drumming, dancing, altered states, and the casting off of animal skins for concupiscence under an acacia tree.

Apr 2

“It’s plausible that babies are actually aware of much more, much more intensely, than we are… . Less of their experience is familiar, expert, and automatic, and so they have fewer habituated unconscious behaviors.” Alison Gopnik, The Philosophical Baby

Apr 1

“Given the demand for salmon, it is no surprise that a Frankenfish has emerged — a lab-created hybrid that could soon become the first genetically engineered animal approved by the Food and Drug Administration for human consumption. The company behind these manufactured fish promises that they will not affect ones from an ancient and wild gene pool… . Here we go again. It is human to think we can trick nature, or do it one better. It is human to think a tsunami would never knock out a nuclear plant, a hurricane would never bury a city and a deepwater oil drill would never poison a huge body of water. In the gods of technology we trust… . Until they fail. And then, we feel helpless and small and wonder what they — or we — were thinking… . The newfangled fish comes from AquaBounty Technologies, a company in New England, where many species of the water world are now extinct. They have patented an “AquAdvantage Salmon,” a sterile Atlantic female with a Chinook gene that can “grow to market size in half the time of conventional salmon,” says the company.” Timothy Egan

Plastics

- Some half of the nearly 600 billion tons of plastics produced each year goes into single-use products
- “Pouring so much plastic into disposable conveniences has helped to diminish our view of a family of materials we once held in high esteem. Plastic has become synonymous with cheap and worthless, when in fact those chains of hydrocarbons ought to be regarded as among the most valuable substances on the planet.”
- “we can’t hope to achieve plastic’s promise for the 21st century if we stick with wasteful 20th-century habits of plastic production and consumption. We have the technology to make better, safer plastics — forged from renewable sources, rather than finite fossil fuels, using chemicals that inflict minimal or no harm on the planet and our health.”

“A few months ago, Steven Pinker of Harvard asked a smart question: What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit? … Evgeny Morozov, the author of “The Net Delusion,” nominated the Einstellung Effect, the idea that we often try to solve problems by using solutions that worked in the past instead of looking at each situation on its own terms… . Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University writes about the Focusing Illusion, which holds that “nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it.” … Culture is an emergent system. A group of people establishes a pattern of interaction. And once that culture exists, it influences how the individuals in it behave… . Emergent systems are bottom-up and top-down simultaneously. They have to be studied differently, as wholes and as nested networks of relationships.” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/opinion/29brooks.html?_r=1

“Your job is to collect ideas. The best way to collect ideas is to read. Read, read, read, read, read. Read the newspaper. Read the weather. Read the signs on the road. Read the faces of strangers. The more you read, the more you can choose to be influenced by.” http://www.austinkleon.com/2011/03/30/how-to-steal-like-an-artist-and-9-other-things-nobody-told-me/