Men flow into life, and ebb into death.
Stderr
All the unbuffered error messages
Men flow into life, and ebb into death.
I have heard the expression “stop on a dime and give you 3 cents change” but I’ve never seen an airplane do it. PZ’s recent post “Competence Porn” [pha] about the P-51 augering into a field reminded me of this little bit of wonderfulness.
For this one, I had an illustration in mind. Unfortunately, I cannot find the object I planned to use to illustrate it, so you’re just going to have to use your imagination.
Miniature versions of things are fascinating; the smaller and more intricate they are the harder they are to do – and the more we appreciate them.
What is complete
The valley spirit never dies.
Call it the mystery, the woman.
The mystery,
the Door of the Woman,
is the root
of earth and heaven.
Forever this endures, forever.
And all its uses are easy.
Where are my boxcutter blades? Get me some cardboard! [Read more…]
Imagine you’re a graduate student in American History and you write a thesis that’s so good, so striking, and so timely that it’s deservedly a best-seller: 200,000 copies. As Ray Wylie Hubbard says, “careers have been built on less.”
Here’s another one to add to the list of “ideas that won’t happen.” In high school, a friend of mine and I hit upon the idea of writing an illustrated book of “unusual family customs.” Sort of a Martha Stewart idea guide gone horribly wrong: quirky and surrealistic customs that families could enact with great seriousness, raising their kids as though the custom was perfectly normal. In his book The Anansi Boys, Neil Gaiman hits on one: the kids in the family are taught that, on presidents’ day, you are supposed to go to school and cosplay your favorite president. Other schoolkids did not understand why the child showed up claiming to be Millard Fillmore.
By now, you ought to have heard about A/2017 U1 – a large rock that whipped through our solar system at an odd angle off the plane of the ecliptic, moving so fast that it almost certainly could not have come from within our solar system. [rt]