The life of an author — particularly an author of fiction – is necessarily connected to that which is most dangerous: our consciousness. It is often through the exploratory process of creative literature that we touch the exciting possibilities and subversive consequences of our capacities as a species. Yet for all of the grandiose ways […]
Continue readingAside from catching chicken pox as a kid, nobody would ever go out of their way to get sick. Why would they? The best you can hope for is a few days off from work, and really, playing hooky isn’t as fun since Bob Barker stopped hosting The Price Is Right. However, there are a […]
Continue reading“In the theatre there are 1,500 cameras rolling at the same time- in the cinema, only one,” as quoted by Orson Welles, the prolific director of the most studied film of all time, Citizen Kane. Within the last century cinema has grown from pioneering silent films into orchestrated musicals, “spaghetti westerns” and has taken us […]
Continue readingBeing diagnosed with any incurable disease is misfortune enough, but society for some reason looks upon the diagnoses of rare diseases as a special kind of grim fate dealt by the universe, the house which always wins. But sometimes — a one in ten million or more sometimes — a person is stricken with a […]
Continue readingPaul of Tarsus Saul of Tarsus, a.k.a. Paul the Apostle, Paul of Tarsus [?-65 c.e.] was a Hellenistic Jew and student of Gamaliel the Elder who served as enforcer for the Pharisaic Sanhedrin against the apostate Christian sect following the crucifixion of Jesus. Around 33 c.e. he experienced a dramatic conversion experience while on the […]
Continue readingThe world is out to get you. That’s how I ended up feeling after compiling this list of horrifying, permanently scarring, eternally terrifying rare diseases. Genetic, infectious, parasitic and everything in-between, these 15 diseases scar their victims for life and scar us mentally having looked at them. 15. Blaschko’s Lines So, it turns out we […]
Continue reading
Those who are inspired by a model other than Nature, a mistress above all masters, are laboring in vain. – Leonardo Da Vinci Biomimicry – The practice of developing sustainable human technologies inspired by nature. Sometimes called Biomimetics or Bionics, it’s basically biologically inspired engineering. 1. Velcro The most famous example of biomimicry was the […]
Continue readingThere are hundreds of iPhone applications available on the market, from games through to photo editing and sharing applications, many of which are available through the Apple App Store. It is a well known fact that the 2 megapixel iPhone camera isn’t the best phone camera around and even more disappointingly is that it cannot […]
Continue readingIn more repressed times, people were not always allowed to express themselves freely, for fear of persecution. Gossiping, criticizing the government or even talking about current events were often punishable by death. In order to communicate at will, clever rhymes were constructed and passed around to parody public figures and events. The first nursery rhymes […]
Continue reading