This is surely the definitive word on Safe Hex. A tasty bit of the cake:
…We have entered the hopefully-short era of the Microtheft, the smallest possible unit of larceny, the atomic level of sin. We’ve boiled down the act of being immoral to one string of numbers being in your possession, one collection of digits representing you being bad and worthy of punishment…
I finally got around to watching The Inner Life of the Cell from the Biovisions at Harvard initiative (via Make’s blog a week or so ago). The animation is, well, amazing. The narration tumbles along polysyllabically (can you say ‘Leukocyte Extravasation’? I thought you could…), and it’s a damn good thing that one can watch and re-watch, and that there won’t be a quiz… On a more serious note, the watching prompted me to scratch my head again over the challenge of Gardner’s comment to my Grand Jeté post, which ends with this interesting observation/question:
…the notion that knowledge is dynamic, ever-circulating, breathing in and out, washing some books up to shore while washing others away to the great unbounded deep, works very well for certain of the humanities, but works only occasionally for the physical sciences. A test case: what about advances in medical knowledge? Are they part of this great sussuration of knowledge, or are we really getting somewhere? Do we really need to rethink, oh, the idea of a cell?
My continuing immersion in the seemingly-bottomless project of scanning negatives from former lives probably sensitizes me to ruminations on the past. This bit, the opening sentences of John Lahr’s review of J.M. Barrie and Tom Stoppard plays seems to have been written with my own obsessions in mind:
Can we agree that we’re all haunted? The ghost world is part of our world. We carry within us the good and the bad, the spoken and the unspoken imperatives of our missing loved ones. As children, we are dreamed up by our parents; as adults, when our parents die we dream them up in turn. Conversations rarely stop at the grave.
(New Yorker March 5 2007 pg 92)
Many of the people in the ghost-images I’m rediscovering are lost in the present (that is, I’ve lost track of them –they probably sail on, and now and again I’m able to reconnect with their current incarnations), but they’re certainly as real to me now, seen via Photoshop and Flickr, as they were then. Maybe even realer.
This fragment from a recent episode of This American Life tells me more than enough about my own proclivities (1:12)