science & technology

“When I look up at the night sky and I know that, yes, we are part of this Universe, we are in this Universe, but perhaps more important than most of those facts is that the Universe is in us. When I reflect on that fact, I look up — many people feel small, because they’re small, the Universe is big — but I feel big, because my atoms came from those stars. There’s a level of connectivity — that’s really what you want in life. You want to feel connected, you want to feel relevant. You want to feel like you’re a participant in the goings on and activities and events around you. That’s precisely what we are, just by being alive.”
-Neil deGrasse Tyson
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Christopher Eric Hitchens, nicknamed “Hitch”, (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011) was a British American author and journalist whose books, essays, and journalistic career spanned more than four decades. He was a columnist and literary critic for The Atlantic, Free Inquiry, The Nation, Salon, Slate, Vanity Fair, World Affairs, and became a media fellow at the Hoover Institution in September 2008. He was a staple of talk shows and lecture circuits and in 2005 was voted the world’s fifth top public intellectual in a Prospect/Foreign Policy poll. read the rest of this entry »

i dedicate my 500th blog post to an inspirational discussion about nothing!

Alan Wilson Watts (6 January 1915 – 16 November 1973) was a British philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and popularizer of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience. read the rest of this entry »

marcin jakubowski is open-sourcing the blueprints for 50 farm machines, allowing anyone to build their own tractor or harvester from scratch. and that’s only the first step in a project to write an instruction set for an entire self-sustaining village (starting cost: $10,000).

open source ecology is a network of farmers, engineers, and supporters that has been imagining and creating the global village construction set, an open source, low-cost, high performance technological platform. these diy-fabricated industrial machines can be used to build a sustainable civilization with modern comforts. the gvcs lowers the barriers to entry into farming, building, and manufacturing. it is a life-size lego-like set of modular tools that can create entire economies. [openfarmtech.org]

a less species-specific envisioning of dr. sagan’s stirring passage from his book “the pale blue dot” created by joshua sellers.

carl edward sagan (november 9, 1934 – december 20, 1996) was an american astronomer, astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science popularizer and science communicator in the space and natural sciences. during his lifetime, he published more than 600 scientific papers and popular articles and was author, co-author, or editor of more than 20 books. in his works, he advocated skeptical inquiry and the scientific method. he pioneered exobiology and promoted the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (seti). [wikipedia]