Who are these ships and where are they from? Answer on our Facebook page and win Space & Beyond!
May222012
May212012
Jurassic Squid Ink Same as Modern Squid Ink
Ink from 160-million-year-old giant squid is essentially identical to today’s squid ink.
The discovery suggests that the ink and the ink-screen escape mechanism of squid have not evolved much (if at all) since the Jurassic Period. The finding, published in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, might just prove that if it isn’t broken, nature isn’t going to fix it.
4PM
Poor little mini!
10AM
“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”
CARL SAGAN (via Advice to Writers)
(Source: kadrey, via wilwheaton)
10AM
![theatlantic:
Choosing Our Own Adventures, Then and Now
If you were a kid during the ’80s and read any books at all, you probably read at least one Choose Your Own Adventure, probably by either R.A. Montgomery or Edward Packard. And if you read one, you read more than one. They were addictive, candy for our brains, but also, they empowered us in a way that normal books did not. At key plot points, the reader got to make decisions that actually changed the course of the story. For example: “If you make a hasty retreat to your car, [upon being attacked by a bunch of monkeys] turn to page 29.” Alternatively, “If you decide that the chimpanzees are not as dangerous as they look and rush to give aid to the man, turn to page 3.” Many of us simply could not choose, or chose both, and so we read them twice, or thrice, or we simply read all of the endings, or we read the whole book with our fingers placed at various points so we could backtrack and try again if things didn’t go as hoped. For a lot of us, growing up as we did in our early-computer existences (remember Atari?), this was our first dose of “interactivity.”
That doesn’t mean that the era of the Choose Your Own Adventure has ended, even if it is some 30 years (egad) after the original series began.
Read more at The Atlantic Wire.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m46pyq1dXZ1qcokc4o1_500.png)
Choosing Our Own Adventures, Then and Now
If you were a kid during the ’80s and read any books at all, you probably read at least one Choose Your Own Adventure, probably by either R.A. Montgomery or Edward Packard. And if you read one, you read more than one. They were addictive, candy for our brains, but also, they empowered us in a way that normal books did not. At key plot points, the reader got to make decisions that actually changed the course of the story. For example: “If you make a hasty retreat to your car, [upon being attacked by a bunch of monkeys] turn to page 29.” Alternatively, “If you decide that the chimpanzees are not as dangerous as they look and rush to give aid to the man, turn to page 3.” Many of us simply could not choose, or chose both, and so we read them twice, or thrice, or we simply read all of the endings, or we read the whole book with our fingers placed at various points so we could backtrack and try again if things didn’t go as hoped. For a lot of us, growing up as we did in our early-computer existences (remember Atari?), this was our first dose of “interactivity.”
That doesn’t mean that the era of the Choose Your Own Adventure has ended, even if it is some 30 years (egad) after the original series began.
May182012
There are definitely things worth protesting for.
3PM
David Lynch’s hair compared to famous artwork
via Jimmy Chen
(via bryanbryanbryan)
3PM
What color was yours?
3PM
(Source: geekygaymale)
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