What is consciousness?
Blindsight is an example of how brain damage can abolish the conscious experience of a phenomenon (in this case vision) without abolishing the phenomenon itself.
Why American astronauts drink Russian urine
“We collect it in bags, and then the crew hauls it over to the U.S. side,” Layne Carter, who manages the ISS water system for NASA, told Bloomberg. “We don’t do 100 percent of the Russian urine. It depends on our time availability.”
Rose Gold v Pink – Semiotics and Consumer Technology
Rose gold, however, has quite a different symbolic valence. Deliberately adulterated, it is gold that has an inclination to be something else. Rose gold is perverse. Unlike yellow gold—but like its cooler cousin, white gold, which is an alloy with nickel or manganese that has also risen and declined in popularity throughout the years—rose gold is subject to the vagaries of fashion. The desire it stimulates is inherently temporary. In rose gold, a substance of enduring value is transformed into a consumer item with the half-life of all things modish. Rose gold is decadent. It is gold for people who already have enough gold gold.
California wildfires – from space
The #ValleyFire burned brightly this morning. Easily detectable from space, even through cloud layer. #cawx H/T @NASA pic.twitter.com/7AO7HmyRT8
— NWS Sacramento (@NWSSacramento) September 13, 2015
Everything in your past—and future—is encoded in the digits of pi
“Pi is an infinite, nonrepeating decimal – meaning that every possible number combination exists somewhere in pi. Converted into ASCII text, somewhere in that infinite string of digits is the name of every person you will ever love, the date, time, and manner of your death, and the answers to all the great questions of the universe. Converted into a bitmap, somewhere in that infinite string of digits is a pixel-perfect representation of the first thing you saw on this earth, the last thing you will see before your life leaves you, and all the moments, momentous and mundane, that will occur between those two points.