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“LIVING AND WORKING BEING CONNECTED IS KIND OF MY THING. I DON’T MEAN TO DISMISS OUTSIDE INFLUENCES, AS I’M SURE THEY’RE IMPOSSIBLE NOT TO ABSORB, BUT I FIND A SLIGHTLY UNHEALTHY, INTROSPECTIVE INSULATION SEEMS TO WORK BEST FOR ME.”

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This enhanced-color Cassini view of southern latitudes on Enceladus features the bluish “tiger stripe” fractures that rip across the south polar region.

(via Space Images | Enceladus the Storyteller)

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Let life kick you off your pedestal time and time again, until you lose all interest in being on pedestals.

Jeff Foster (via thecalminside)

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Artists House Russel Wright’s Handmade Rock Home in New York, 1950 

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Todd Webb | Georgia O'Keeffe, Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, 1969

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Materialism alone cannot explain the riddle of consciousness – Adam Frank | Aeon Essays

See on Scoop.it - Philosophy everywhere everywhen

Materialism holds the high ground these days in debates over that most ultimate of scientific questions: the nature of consciousness. When tackling the problem of mind and brain, many prominent researchers advocate for a universe fully reducible to matter. ‘Of course you are nothing but the activity of your neurons,��� they proclaim. That position seems reasonable and sober in light of neuroscience’s advances, with brilliant images of brains lighting up like Christmas trees while test subjects eat apples, watch movies or dream. And aren’t all the underlying physical laws already known? From this seemly hard-nosed vantage, the problem of consciousness seems to be just one of wiring, as the American physicist Michio Kaku argued in The Future of the Mind (2014). In the very public version of the debate over consciousness, those who advocate that understanding the mind might require something other than a ‘nothing but matter’ position are often painted as victims of wishful thinking, imprecise reasoning or, worst of all, an adherence to a mystical ‘woo’. It’s hard not to feel the intuitional weight of today’s metaphysical sobriety. Like Pickett’s Charge up the hill at Gettysburg, who wants to argue with the superior position of those armed with ever more precise fMRIs, EEGs and the other material artefacts of the materialist position? There is, however, a significant weakness hiding in the imposing-looking materialist redoubt. It is as simple as it is undeniable: after more than a century of profound explorations into the subatomic world, our best theory for how matter behaves still tells us very little about what matter is. Materialists appeal to physics to explain the mind, but in modern physics the particles that make up a brain remain, in many ways, as mysterious as consciousness itself. When I was a young physics student I once asked a professor: ‘What’s an electron?’ His answer stunned me. ‘An electron,’ he said, ‘is that to which we attribute the properties of the electron.’ That vague, circular response was a long way from the dream that drove me into physics, a dream of theories that perfectly described reality. Like almost every student over the past 100 years, I was shocked by quantum mechanics, the physics of the micro-world. In place of a clear vision of little bits of matter that explain all the big things around us, quantum physics gives us a powerful yet seemly paradoxical calculus. With its emphasis on probability waves, essential uncertainties and experimenters disturbing the reality they seek to measure, quantum mechanics made imagining the stuff of the world as classical bits of matter (or miniature billiard balls) all but impossible.

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This planet briefly pulls its star into a cepheid variable stage

The pulses cause seismic waves to move through the atmosphere of the star.

A planet 370 light years away gives its home star tiny little pulses to show it cares.

The planet, HAT-P-2b, orbits an F-type star slightly larger than the Sun. At eight times the mass of Jupiter, the planet is fairly massive and orbits its star in a little more than five days. As the planet moves along, it induces seismic waves in the surface of its star.

The star itself is right at a boundary called the Delta Scuti instability strip, which leads to stars that brighten and dim called cepheid variables. The presence of the planet momentarily pushes the star over this limit in intervals of roughly 87 minutes. So far, it isn’t understood if there’s any abnormal effect from the star HAT-P-2 to its planet aside from creating intense amounts of heat thanks to its proximity to its star.

“It is not impossible that there is a transfer of energy from the planet orbit to the star to induce these pulsations, but it is a long-term effect whose amplitude will depend on the exact process behind these pulsations so we will need more work to figure all that out,” Julien de Wit, a co-author of the paper published today in The Astrophysical Journal, says. ~ Astronomy Magazine

Image credit: NASA (edited by MIT News)

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Re(i)makes

COMME des GARÇONS BLACK AW2015 vs Fenty X PUMA AW2017

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Happy Monday! Working on something for #TAUTF that I’m excited to share this week🎉🙃!

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James Baldwin at his typewriter, Istanbul, 1965 Photo: Sedat Pakay

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As soon as you look at the world through an ideology you are finished. No reality fits an ideology. Life is beyond that. That is why people are always searching for a meaning to life. But life has no meaning; it cannot have meaning because meaning is a formula; meaning is something that makes sense to the mind. Every time you make sense out of reality, you bump into something that destroys the sense you made. Meaning is only found when you go beyond meaning. Life only makes sense when you perceive it as mystery and it makes no sense to the conceptualizing mind.

Anthony de Mello (via lazyyogi)