“If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal.”
–Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot
This video has been making it’s rounds on the interwebs this week and I just thought it would be appropriate to remind everyone what a thoughtful, passionate and remarkable human being Carl Sagan was. I mean if [...]
Pance is a consumer of all media and a celebrator of life.
09/30/09
Sagan
09/09/09
Rock Namesakes
In the curious field of taxonomy, a realm populated by a cultish lot to begin with what with them decorating their shadow world with obscure latin names for everything in creation willy-nilly, there is a curious trend. Meet Heteropoda davidbowie, a Malay spider recently discovered and named by Peter Jäger and another in a long [...]
08/21/09
Figurines
I wish I had more to say. This project is great. Teddy is good at things. I sort of helped him with this. I am so tired. I cannot wait to go the beach.
08/12/09
Science is Fiction
“You who do not practice the defeatist motto: “It’s better than nothing”; you who have a strong enough cinematic eye to impose it on subjects you feel something for; you who will not agree to make a film about sugar production for the simple reason your grandfather was diabetic; you who scorn saccharine sentimentality and [...]
08/02/09
Cryptomnesia
I was visiting a friend on Lake Winnipesaukee last Saturday when he started playing a guitar riff that sounded very familiar. I asked him the name of the song, and he said it was the theme from Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1960 masterpiece, L’avventura (seen & heard in video above). I suggested that it sounded very similar [...]
…errr, sort of. Thanks, NASA? via Wired
07/14/09
RIP Dash Snow
Word twittering about New York is that he OD’d last night. Truely an artist and certainly uncompromised. Check this profile from NY Mag and the “confirmation” from gawker.
07/03/09
The Evil Dr. Luis von Ahn
Have you ever solved one of these? Well that’s called CAPTCHA and this is the dude who made it up. It basically started as a test to determine legitimate users vs. spamming software and it worked very well. But Luis thought he was wasting too much of Humanity’s time (±1.666 Million hours in 2007). So [...]
The obvious answer is that drug dealers have a larger DVD collection. The other more ominous answer lies within a slightly more challenging debate. Yes, we have physicians in this country that are some of the best healers in the world, but we also have quacks who are licensed nickel-baggers whom, whilst worrying about taxes, [...]
06/20/09
صبح بخیر
“In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The Government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors.”
–Abraham Lincoln
March 4, 1861
First inaugural address
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