“Korean designers Seo Jeonghwa and Hanna Chung have collaborated the ‘ripple effect’ tea table that features a water layer on the top to make ripples when the users move cups on it. As a result, both your movements and the cups’ movements will cause a change on the table.”
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee
“You know, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency? The other thing that Douglas Adams wrote?
The wild nonlinear romp through causality, the life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and alien ghosts?
…well, the BBC is making an hour-long special out of it, with possible series to follow, if it does well enough”
Via Mario!
sad ian, celestial soul portrait (by timoni grone)
Lots more here.
http://www.prguitarman.com/index.php?id=302
http://lol-comics.livejournal.com/78367.html
This was pretty much the general reaction to that new trailer when I went to see Scott Pilgrim (which was AWESOME, btw.)
Yup. That’s what happened when I saw it, too.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted at length in William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience. I happen to agree with Emerson that without exception, even among the sociopathic, moral justice effects internal punishments without regard for worldly circumstance, not for supernatural reasons so much as for the plain fact that love is what makes life worth living, and to act against love devalues the life you live immediately. A violent life, a selfish life, a superficial life might not reap material punishment in a lawless and imperfect world, but such a life will invariably lack what makes life worth living. A life without love is its own inexorable sentence, its own slow punishment.
Although I am not religious, this self-enforcing quality of moral law seems almost magical to me, as important and profound as the comprehensibility of the universe and the constancy of its laws. But it needn’t be: think of the wrathful, the malicious, the cruel, and ask yourself if you’d rather be one of them, however rich or powerful they may be. We intuitively recognize that their lives must be frenzied nightmares, twisted and deluded, and even if they can escape awareness of their immorality they remain pitifully precluded from the “highest happinesses” life can involve: love, devotion, courage, charity, compassion.
Emerson again:
“If you love and serve men, you cannot by any hiding or stratagem escape the remuneration. Secret retributions are always restoring the level, when disturbed, of the divine justice. It is impossible to tilt the beam. All the tyrants and proprietors and monopolists of the world in vain set their shoulders to heave the bar. Settles forevermore the ponderous equator to its line, and man and mote, and star and sun, must range to it, or be pulverized by the recoil.”
Morality is typically considered a kind of restraint -you do not do what you want for either supernatural or abstract reasons- but it is really a kind of existential guide for those seeking happiness, particularly in the moral system of the Buddhist religion. It is not uncommonly suggested that in other religions, in which magical narratives admonish believers in lieu of arguments that morality yields the only real happiness, such stories and purported afterlives exist to persuade believers of what they cannot see with reason. Religion isn’t only for philosophers.
James quotes Voltaire as well: ”All comes out even at the end of the day, and all comes out still more even when all the days are over.” One great challenge of morality -particularly of forgiveness- in practice is remaining aware of time: of the temporal triviality of urges in comparison to the duration of regret, the weight of the present versus the vastness of the future and what Martin Luther King Jr. called the long arc of justice. In a culture obsessed with the present and with shallow successes, it is hard enough to think of the end of the day, let alone of “when all the days are over” and the material rewards of society are useless trinkets out of reach from the deathbed. But what Thomas Mann called “a mindfulness of death” reminds us: a life lived immorally is scarcely a life at all, whatever delightful dross might mask its meaninglessness.
(via mills)or search:
