feat. Robert Zubrin, Carl Sagan, Brian Cox, and Penelope Boston
There’s something wonderfully serene about watching water droplets skate their way across the surface of a pool. Here the pool of water is being vibrated at a frequency just below the Faraday instability - meaning that no standing waves form on the surface. Instead, the bounce is just enough to create a thin layer of air between the droplet and the pool to prevent coalescence. With each bounce, gravity’s effect on the water tries to drain the air away, but each rebound lets more air rush in to hold the droplet up. Eventually, gravity wins and the droplets coalesce into the pool. In high-speed that process is mesmerizing, too. (Video credit: K. Welch)
Our Atmosphere is Escaping!
Oh gahd! Quick! Take a deep breath!! Someone save Minute Earth!!!
What’s that? Oh … we have nothing to worry about? It’s only losing hydrogen and helium? And it will take billions of years to lose that stuff? Whew.
Bonus: Check out my YouTube vid about just how small (and shared) our atmosphere really is.
Oklahoma Tornado Survivor Finds Missing Dog Mid-Interview
Don’t mind me, just uncontrollably sobbing at my desk at work.
If you have 22 spare minutes…
If you have a heart….
If you think you need some perspective….
If you want to be reminded of all the good this world still has…
Watch this.
Absolutely breathtakingly, soul shakingly, heartbreakingly awesome.
‘Global Capitalism: A Monthly Update’ published on May 15, 2013
Economics Professor Richard Wolff publishes these monthly updates on developments relevant to capitalism around the world. His analysis is really on point. It’s long but it’s worth watching, listening to & learning from.
- Professor Wolff’s website
- Professor Wolff’s podcast
- Democracy at Work (an organization co-founded by Richard Wolff)
“When capitalism got going, say in England in the 18th and 19th century. It produced horrible conditions for people, paid them horrible wages, they lived in horrible slums. You know how we know that? Because we all read, or I hope we did, the novels of Charles Dickens because that’s what he wrote about..The descriptions of Charles Dickens are absolutely spot on for Dhaka, Bangladesh. So here’s the irony, we live in the 21st century of modern capitalism, and the success is rendered by the fact that the bulk of the working men and women producing for 21st century capitalism are living in 19th century conditions in third world countries around the world. And you know what was a typical feature of 19th century british workshops, if you read Dickens? Fires. Fires, because they’re all old wooden structures and they couldn’t cope with the risks and dangers of machine production so they had fires in which working men and women died in huge numbers. The exact same…it’s as if, not that capitalism has changed. It hasn’t. What’s changed is the idea, in the minds of Americans particularly, that we don’t have a system that works that way. Even though it’s been working that way for two hundred years, three hundred years.”
That’s a great one. I could quote the whole thing, but that’s a really good one. Please watch & reblog.
I understand that this is some dry material for people, but Wolff is actually pretty great at making the subject matter both interesting and relate-able. His comments on the economy, student debt, and global capitalism are so much more important than what most people talk about today. Please, take some time to get a bit of perspective. The more you know.
Robert Sapolsky on the Limbic System (por StanfordUniversity)
- olfactory bulb takes up 40% of a rodent brain’s projections
- rhine encephalon — originally viewed as to do with olfaction in all species
- gathers whatever sense-data pertains to emotions
- Paul McLean’s triune brain (phylogenetic conservation): hypothalamus⊕pituitary⊕brainstem⊕midbrain⊕thyroid⊕pancreas⊕heart (robotic, boring—until it goes wrong) + the limbic system (mostly a mammalian invention: birds, reptiles, fish have less complex limbic systems) ⊕ emotional complexity + cortex (gleaming analytical machine of cognitive expertise — greatly expanded in vertebrates, in mammals, in primates, in us — cortex tied to limbic system, not independent)
- decisions made under duress
- think about your own mortality (kicking out “CRH”)
- so limbic influences cortex and vice versa
- we are “a fancy species”
- Odene’s curse — lose the capacity for automatic breathing (you die of sleep deprivation)
- Antonio DiMasio, Descartes’ Error
- James Pabes
- the limbic regions compete to control the hypothalamus (they can shush each other up)
- edge/network/synaptic distance to the hypothalamus
- every sense has to go through ge;3 synapses to tell the limbic system anything—except olfaction can hop 1.
- olfaction takes up only 5% of our brain
- grey matter (nuclei) vs white matter (axon cables wrapped in myelin)
- amygdala, hippocampus, septum, mammilary bodies, hypothalamus, thalamus, prefrontal cortex
- frontal cortex: where am I being touched? which note are you playing? how do I do long division? which limb do I want to move? plus long-term planning, gratification postponement, emotional regulation, impulse control
- frontal cortex is most recently evolved, relatively largest in humans, not fully mylenated until age 25;size of prefrontal cortex in primates grows as size of typical social group
- amygdala tells you to be afraid and pings the hippocampus: “Hey, remember to be afraid of this in future”
