Alan Jacobs

Backlit screens are something we’ve grown very used to without realizing what they’ve done to our way of thinking. They are hypnotic, arresting, and distracting. No matter how small a backlit screen is, it quickly occupies your whole field of vision. It ruins your sense of your surroundings in the same way a flashlight ruins your night-vision. It is, to my mind, the single biggest reason that we find ourselves trying to divide our attentions between a “real-life” world and a “digital” world – an unnecessary and ultimately wearisome paradigm.

‘It’s a big puzzle,’ said Russell D. Gray, head of the Auckland lab. 'Why [the New Caledonian crow]? Why is this species on a small island in the Pacific able to not just use but to manufacture a variety of tools, and in a flexible rather than a rote or programmatic way? Why are they able to do at least as well as chimpanzees on experiments of cognition that show an understanding of the physical properties of the world and an ability to generalize from one problem to the next?’

river maps

The Mississippi river system as an Underground-style map. More info here; thanks to Matt Frost for the tip.

iconoclassic:

daydreaming (by hollie chastain)

wesleyhill:

I just read this quote from W. H. Auden: “In times of war even the crudest kind of positive affection between persons seems extraordinarily beautiful, a noble symbol of the peace and forgiveness of which the whole world stands so desperately in need.”

And it reminded me of the picture everybody, including me, has been passing around on the internet.

Just wanted to note the connection.

landscapelifescape:

Phander, Ghizar, Pakistan

Morning.. (by Atif Saeed)

Particularize

The Harrowing of Hell: one of the great 15th-century alabasters from Nottingham. See others here.

from the tomb of Agilbert, Bishop of Wessex, at Jouarre Abbey, France

Egypt, like many Arab societies, has a wealthy and well-armed elite at the top and a fanatical and well-organized Islamic fundamentalist movement at the bottom. In between lies a large and unorganized body of people who have never participated in politics, whose business activities have been limited by corruption and nepotism, and whose access to the outside world has been hampered by stupid laws and suspicious bureaucrats. Please note that the Egyptian government ‘s decision to shut down the entire country’s Internet access over the weekend—something it can do because Internet access is still so limited—had almost no impact on the demonstrators. For all the guff being spoken about Twitter and social media, the revolution in Cairo appears to be a very old-fashioned, almost 19th-century revolution: People see other people going out on the streets, and they join them