Tom Gauld

Tirinha.

Laranja Mecânica

"It's funny how the colors of the real world only seem really real when you viddy them on the screen."

Pálido Ponto Azul

Já foi postado provavelmente, mas achei uma versão em HD. Ciência é poesia.

Invictus & Se...

Parte I - Invictus
http://www.naointendo.com.br/fotos/invictus

Parte II - Se...
http://www.naointendo.com.br/fotos/se

Earth at Night

A NASA me emociona.

Fonte: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_2403.html

E tem o vídeo que é legal também.

2001

KUBRICK: It's not a message that I ever intend to convey in words. 2001 is a nonverbal experience; out of two hours and 19 minutes of film, there are only a little less than 40 minutes of dialog. I tried to create a visual experience, one that bypasses verbalized pigeonholing and directly penetrates the subconscious with an emotional and philosophic content. To convolute McLuhan, in 2001 the message is the medium. I intended the film to be an intensely subjective experience that reaches the viewer at an inner level of consciousness, just as music does; to "explain" a Beethoven symphony would be to emasculate it 
by erecting an artificial barrier between conception and appreciation. You're free to speculate as you wish about the philosophical and allegorical meaning of the film -- and such speculation is one indication that it has succeeded in gripping the audience at a deep level -- but I don't want to spell out a verbal road map for 2001 that every viewer will feel obligated to pursue or else fear he's missed the point. I think that if 2001 succeeds at all, it is in reaching a wide spectrum of people who would not often give a thought to man's destiny, his role in the cosmos and his relationship to higher forms of life. But even in the case of someone who is highly intelligent, certain ideas found in 2001 would, if presented as abstractions, fall rather lifelessly and be automatically assigned to pat intellectual categories; experienced in a moving visual and emotional context, however, they can resonate within the deepest fibers of one's being.

A Morena e eu, tão próximos mas tão longe nesse Cosmos

Eu estava vendo o único verbete sobre o tudo da maior enciclopédia conhecida nesse tudo: o Universo. Não é o Guia do Mochileiro das Galáxias, algo próximo mas não tão engraçado, a Wikipedia.

Lendo em inglês, que é a lingua franca atual.

Diz o verbete:

The universe is commonly defined as the totality of existence,^[1][2][3][4] including planets, stars, galaxies, the contents of intergalactic space, and all matter and energy.^[5][6]

Fui ver as referências e gostei dessa:

2. ^ "Universe", Encyclopedia Britannica, "the whole cosmic system of matter and energy of which Earth, and therefore the human race, is a part"

Carl Sagan usou um sinônimo: "O Cosmos é tudo o que existe, existiu ou existirá. A mais insignificante contenmplação do cosmos emociona-nos – provoca-nos um arrepio, embarga-nos a voz, causa-nos a sensação suave de uma recordação distante."

Mas tudo isso fica gravemente desfalcado de sentido se meu amor pela Priscilla Casagrande não for correspondido. Até o ateu mais materialista irá concordar que não haveria pecado maior caso isso ocorresse.

P.S. Parabéns pela condecoração, Morena!

O Sétimo Selo

Filmão do Ingmar Bergman.

Clipe do Dia nº 448

Jorge Ben, personagem tanto do "Noites Tropicais" e do "Vale Tudo - O Som e a Fúria de Tim Maia", ambos do Nelson Motta, bem como do "Tropicália", documentário imperdível.

Melhor ficção científica da história

6 - Ascent of Man

A new animal was abroad on the planet, spreading slowly out from the African heartland. It was still so rare that a hasty census might have overlooked it, among the teeming billions of creatures roving over land and sea. There was no evidence, as yet, that it would prosper or even survive: on this world where so many mightier beasts had passed away, its fate still wavered in the balance.

In the hundred thousand years since the crystals had descended upon Africa, the man-apes had invented nothing. But they had started to change, and had developed skills which no other animal possessed. Their bone clubs had increased their reach and multiplied their strength; they were no longer defenseless against the predators with whom they had to compete. The smaller carnivores they could drive away from their own kills; the larger ones they could at least discourage, and sometimes put to flight.

Their massive teeth were growing smaller, for they were no longer essential. The sharp-edged stones that could be used to dig out roots, or to cut and saw through tough flesh or fiber, had begun to replace them, with immeasurable consequences. No longer were the man-apes faced with starvation when their teeth became damaged or worn; even the crudest tools could add many years to their lives. And as their fangs diminished, the shape of their face started to alter; the snout receded, the massive jaw became more delicate, the mouth able to make more subtle sounds. Speech was still a million years away, but the first steps toward it had been taken.

And then the world began to change. In four great waves, with two hundred thousand years between their crests, the Ice Ages swept by, leaving their mark on all the globe. Outside the tropics, the glaciers slew those who had prematurely left theft ancestral home; and everywhere they winnowed out the creatures who could not adapt.

When the ice had passed, so had much of the planet's early life - including the man-apes. But, unlike so many others, they had left descendants; they had not merely become extinct - they had been transformed. The toolmakers had been remade by their own tools.

For in using clubs and flints, their hands had developed a dexterity found nowhere else in the animal kingdom, permitting them to make still better tools, which in turn had developed their limbs and brains yet further. It was an accelerating, cumulative process; and at its end was Man.

The first true men had tools and weapons only a little better than those of their ancestors a million years earlier, but they could use them with far greater skill.

And somewhere in the shadowy centuries that had gone before they had invented the most essential tool of all, though it could be neither seen nor touched. They had learned to speak, and so had won their first great victory over Time. Now the knowledge of one generation could be handed on to the next, so that each age could profit from those that had gone before.

Unlike the animals, who knew only the present, Man had acquired a past; and he was beginning to grope toward a future.

He was also learning to harness the forces of nature; with the taming of fire, he had laid the foundations of technology and left his animal origins far behind. Stone gave way to bronze, and then to iron. Hunting was succeeded by agriculture. The tribe grew into the village, the village into the town. Speech became eternal, thanks to certain marks on stone and clay and papyrus. Presently he invented philosophy, and religion. And he peopled the sky, not altogether inaccurately, with gods.

As his body became more and more defenseless, so his means of offense became steadily more frightful. With stone and bronze and iron and steel he had run the gamut of everything that could pierce and slash, and quite early in time he had learned how to strike down his victims from a distance. The spear, the bow, the gun, and finally the guided missile had given him weapons of infinite range and all but infinite power.

Without those weapons, often though he had used them against himself, Man would never have conquered his world. Into them he had put his heart and soul, and for ages they had served him well.

But now, as long as they existed, he was living on borrowed time.

Viva la révolution!

Em 14 de julho de 1789 ocorria a tomada da Bastilha, estopim da Revolução Francesa. Uma frase interessante no verbete da Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_revolution):

The modern era has unfolded in the shadow of the French Revolution. The growth of republics and liberal democracies, the spread of secularism, the development of modern ideologies, and the invention of total war^[5] all mark their birth during the Revolution.

Clipe do Dia nº 331

Today is Bob Dylan's Day!

One Nine Nine Four

Não consigo imaginar a vida sem música. Não consigo entender aquelas pessoas que não gostam de música. Não consigo entender aquelas pessoas "ecléticas" que dizem "gostar de todo tipo de música", o que nada mais é do que outra forma de dizer que não se gosta de música alguma.

Dentre as coisas que me emocionam profundamente nesse magnífico planeta em que habitamos e nessa peculiar espécie à qual pertencemos é o fenômeno da música.

E foi o punk rock dos anos 90 que abriu essa porta pra mim: Offspring, Green Day, Pennywise, NOFX e Rancid foram o meu ponto de partida para adentrar o incrivelmente fascinante mundo da música. Não que eu não tivesse escutado nada antes, mas nada do que tinha escutado antes tinha me motivado a buscar mais música como aquela, e a me informar sobre as pessoas que faziam aquela música, e a querer ir em todos os shows que aquelas bandas tocassem na minha cidade.

Talvez por isso eu tenha esperado tão ansiosamente pelo lançamento desse documentário.

Evolution of The Moon

Vídeo da NASA.

Escher

Atrani, Costa de Amalfi, 1931. Litografia, por M. C. Escher.

Edward Hopper

Li hoje na Veja (o semanário fascista) sobre uma exposição do Edward Hopper... em Nova Iórque. É brabo morar na periferia. A pintura aí de cima é 'Gas', de 1940.