definitive list of awesome
In no particular order:
162: The saddest image in the world:
161: The Daytime-Nighttime Bird:
160: ‘Fifteen Ways to Stay Married for Fifteen Years‘ by Lydia Netzer. Gold.
159: The Fluffington Post. Real fluff. All the time.
158: Coldplay’s beautiful tribute to mark the untimely passing of Adam Yauch:
157: Bertrand Russell wrote a 1951 piece for New York Times Magazine called ‘The Best Answer to Fanaticism: Liberalism‘. The original article is subject to the NYT paywall, but is totes worth the read. The article includes what could be termed a secular 10 commandments (reprinted here) which is, like most of Mr Russell‘s writing, brilliance. ‘When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory’.
156: ‘All time-saving devices, amongst which we must count easier means of communication and other conveniences, do not paradoxically enough, save us time but merely cram our time so full that we have no time for anything. Hence the breathless haste, superficiality, and nervous exhaustion with all the concomitant symptoms – craving for stimulation, impatience, irritability, vacillation, etc. Such a state may lead to all sorts of other things, but never to any increased culture of the mind and heart‘ ~ Jung, on Nature, Technology & Modern Life. More pearls here. Also somewhat paradoxically, it is not clear if reading Jung via the interwebs is part of the problem or solution).
155: The Secret Pet Society ~ the surreal imaginings of Travis Louie who paints in the style of vintage photography. And there is a story behind each creature and their person.
154: ‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past’. The best last line of any novel, ever. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
153: Zen Threads: beautiful eco-friendly tees custom screen printed to order by hand.
152: Marcel the Shell with Shoes On. And again.
151: Archbishop Rowan Williams and Professor Richard Dawkins have a chat.
150: During his 2010 TED talk, Sir Ken Robinson quoted Abraham Lincoln thus: ‘The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise – with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country’. Or as the uncommonly brilliant Jo would say: ‘New shit has come to light’.
149: Jack Kerouac’s letter to his first wife, Edie, 1957: ’It’s all like a dream. Everything is ecstasy, inside. We just don’t know it because of our thinking-minds. But in our true blissful essence of mind is known that everything is alright forever and forever and forever. Close your eyes, let your hands and nerve-ends drop, stop breathing for 3 seconds, listen to the silence inside the illusion of the world, and you will remember the lesson you forgot, which was taught in immense milky way soft cloud innumerable worlds long ago and not even at all. It is all one vast awakened thing. I call it the golden eternity. It is perfect. We were never really born, we will never really die. It has nothing to do with the imaginary idea of a personal self, other selves, many selves everywhere: Self is only an idea, a mortal idea. That which passes into everything is one thing.’
148: Kristine Noelle’s lovely Letter from the Universe.
147: A Thousand Reasons. One tweet from Linda Grant on International Women’s Day created a storm.
146: Beekeepers. Mr P is currently embarking on his lifelong dream via an urban beekeeping course at Regents Park. This little movie (via Made by Hand) shows Megan Paska extracting honey from her rooftop hives in Brooklyn at sunset. Stunning.
145: Huit Denium David & Clare Hieatt, who founded Howies, are back making beautiful denium, beautifully: ‘I think the important thing is to be yourself. That way you don’t have to act, you never get found out, and you don’t have to lie to yourself or anyone else. It is much easier this way. I want to create one of the most creative denim companies there has ever been. I want to change how business models work not just which brand of jeans you buy. I want to put our energy into that and not trying to get people to believe we are cool, or the next fad. We will be judged by how great our ideas are. I want to be transparent about our dreams’.
144: Gabourey Sidibe: ‘People always ask me, ‘You have so much confidence. Where did that come from?’ It came from me. One day I decided that I was beautiful, and so I carried out my life as if I was a beautiful girl….It doesn’t have anything to do with how the world perceives you. What matters is what you see. Your body is your temple, it’s your home, and you must decorate it.’
143: The most insane letter ever written by a child to a TV weather presenter.
142: The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop, Nailsworth. The loveliest bookstore in the universe.
141: Independence is so freakin’ beautiful. Especially when it comes to books and coffee.
140: Banksy on advertising:
139: ‘x=y’ / ‘it is what it is’ : mathematical translations of popular refrains. Genius.
138: The serious drawings of Marc Johns:
137: Theoretical physics as interpreted by Lawrence Krauss ~ ‘Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements – the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution and for life – weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today.’
136: Coffee people. They is mah peeps (Future Soul Job Business Rules note to self: one member of the team must sport a spectacular ginger mo).
135: The Universe: photographed. A 360-panoramic view of the sky taken by Nick Risinger who trekked 60,000 miles across the western United States and South Africa. The final image is composed of 37,000 separate photographs, has a zoomable view and info about constellations. And here is the scale of every known thing in the universe. Just awesome.
134: Infographics. Making stats fun and accessible for those of us without a maths degree.
133: Mrs Cameron’s Diary.
132: The Pale Blue Dot: this photograph of planet Earth was taken in 1990 by Voyager 1 when they were about 6 billion kilometers from Earth. Carl Sagan provides poetic perspective: ‘That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam’.
131: Lucian Freud and the way he painted people: ‘his subjects could scarcely be more palpable, more awkwardly or inelegantly there’.
129: Quantum theory. Using proper science to prove what the mystics have claimed for centuries: we are all connected to each other and everything else in the universe, because we are all made of what Sagan called ‘star stuff’. Prof. Brian Cox explains why everything is connected to everything else in 100 seconds.
128: ‘Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart’ ~ Mr Jobs
127: How to be emotionally stable without getting bored.
126: The Do Lectures. Specifically this one.
125: Marmalade.
124: Muriel Rukeyser ~ ‘The universe is made of stories, not atoms.’
123: Ms Jeanette Winterson ~ ’Love demands expression. It will not stay still, stay silent, be good, be modest, be seen and not heard, no. It will break out in tongues of praise, the high note that smashes the glass and spills the liquid’ (from Written on the Body).
122: Crop circles. The ‘Mowing Devil’ was first documented in the 1600′s in England and we still don’t really know what creates these beautiful patterns. I especially love the Wilton Windmill circle, based on Euler’s Identity where the pattern of partly concentric rings is partially incorrect and one part of the formula translates as ‘hi’ rather than ‘i’. Its no doubt they are created by
