ted talk on happiness

An interesting little nugget from Matt Killingsworth’s fascinating TED talk on happiness:

“Mind-wandering is likely a cause, and not merely a consequence, of unhappiness.”

EDIT He’s just launched a ‘new scientific research project that investigates what makes life worth living’. Interesting.

 

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palindrome

This is nuts. With more than 62 vigintillion individual notes (that’s 62 with sixty-three zeros) this is the longest palindrome ever composed:

Composed by Daniel Starr-Tambor, this piece has been crafted to include the ‘musical signature’ of it’s author: the stereo imaging is arranged to reflect the exact position of the solar system at the moment of his birth, from the perspective of the Sun as it faces the constellation Libra, so that each note chronicles his birthday on every planet. In-fucking-sane.

He explains:

Over the summer, I had begun to think about Mandala a little more and wondered if I could do Scriabin justice and figure out the actual ‘sound’ of the solar system with which to combine its rhythm. I revisited both ancient and modern philosophies and explorations into ‘Musica Universalis’ and the planetary pitches, but each theory seemed to draw upon relative distances and ratios within the heavens, which I found unconvincing. It was my belief that for actual sound to exist, there would have to be undeniable evidence of an organic sine wave pattern, and relative distance simply didn’t translate to that. It was while twisting an acorn between my fingers that I realized the surfaces of each planet move through space following the shape of a sine wave, because when the speed of revolution is faster than that of rotation, nothing ever circles ‘backwards’ as we might sometimes imagine. It was a very exciting time and the next three weeks were spent working on the math. It felt as though the patterns of the universe were beginning to unravel before me, and every day a new revelation presented itself, and every night I found myself dreaming in numbers! At times it was exhilarating, and at others it was excruciating, but by August 21 I had the notes of each planet calculated and recognized the parallels to JS Bach and his ‘Art of the Fugue’, which like Scriabin’s Mysterium, was left unfinished at the time of the composer’s death. I played the haunting nine-note chord on the piano, then wrote a letter to an old professor in which I outlined my intention to further uncover the sound and rhythms of the entire solar system, including its moons and beyond.

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Riding a roller coaster at the speed of light. 

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“One Of The Greatest Speeches Ever Made”

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“This is the Woody doc everybody has been waiting for, and I am delighted that this creative giant is finally assuming his rightful place in the American Masters library” — Susan Lacy, creator and executive producer of American Masters.

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The Flashed Face Effect

Here is some really surprisingly research coming out of the University of Queensland. While working on an unrelated project, researchers aligned a bunch of faces at the eyes. The surprise came when the faces were played back in succession while not looking directly at them. Viewed in the periphery, what you perceive is a procession of horrific, scary, monster-like faces. But stop the video on any one of them, and each turns out to be a pretty, pleasing face.

According to the researchers, Sean Murphy and Matt Thompson, what your brain keys on are all the specific differences between each face. As the center of your brain’s attention, those differences appear magnified and greatly distorted.

Watch this video twice. First do as it says, and keep your eyes on the cross. Note how ugly the faces are that go by. And then play it a second time, looking directly at the faces, and pausing it whenever you like. There is not an ugly one to be found.

Amazing!

by Brian Dunning.

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Splitscreen love story

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This blew my mind as a kid.

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The Sopranos in nine minutes. 

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“I shot a photo roughly every two miles between take-off in San Francisco and landing in Paris CDG to make this airplane time lapse”.

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MillionYoung and Teen Daze team up to cover Pink Floyd’s “Us and Them”.

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The Shining (The Happy Version)

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Carl Sagan: The Backbone of Night (tribute)

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Surveillance camera + computer vision + motorized curtain

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Pixies – Where Is My Mind? (8-Bit Remix)

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Science Saved My Soul

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Pay attention #futuredad

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