Reasoned Consideration

The 'art world' should be ashamed that one of the last refuges of artistic beauty and value is not in the art world, but in the art produced by the artists of the video game industry ... I think there is more beauty and value in a single screenshot here than in all the works of the "Tate Modern" put together: http://www.videogamer.com/wii/secret_files_tunguska/screenshot-4.html (And there's plenty more like this out there.) Even the garbage bin is beautiful The rich, expansive virtual worlds created by video game artists are, in a loose sense, 'virtual art galleries' - they're often 'larger' than 'real' art galleries, you can comparably 'explore' them, and every virtual detail is almost like a small piece of art in its own right. If you're ever in London, try this "experiment": Visit the National Gallery (for its classical paintings collection) in the morning, and the Tate Modern in the aftern...

Neat app to help visualize/understand the scale of ... everything , from the observable universe down to the Planck length.

Hrm, evidently Friday was International Women's Day ... maybe a good opportunity to reflect on a seldom-discussed but common form of violence against women - namely, how "modern", "civilized" society continues to brutally violate the rights of many innocent women by forcibly locking them in cages for victimless consensual crimes: http://www.csun.edu/~psy453/prosti_y.htm Decriminalization of (adult, consent-based) prostitution would restore to the justice system its proper role of protecting the natural rights of citizens, rather than violating them - providing not only protection against being locked up at gunpoint, but also legal remedies against abuse by the very forces who are supposed to protect society's most vulnerable: http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/Most-sex-workers-abused-by-police-study-20120822 "About 70% of sex workers have been abused by police" ... "Sex workers experience violence during arrest by police officers...

On cosmic and species time-scales, natural selection must ultimately select for space-faring species. If the dinosaurs had a colony on Mars, they might still be alive today. These Russian meteorite videos  are a helpful reminder that all our metaphorical eggs are in one tiny, fragile basket - if we don't set our sights on inhabiting new worlds, we'll probably eventually go the same way the dinosaurs went , or via some other 'galactic threat', such as a nearby supernova.

Some beautiful high-resolution images of Mars . (Mars has a few interesting geological features we don't really have on Earth, like subsurface sublimation of frozen carbon dioxide, cf. " Spring Fans " and " Seasonal Erosion ".)

From this post, " Moderate Rationality ": "First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice ... who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom" - Martin Luther King Jr. "Imagine what "moderation" in mathematics would mean. It would mean not that 2 + 2 = 4, but that it's more or less 4, maybe we can "agree" that 2 + 2 = 4.2. You don't land a man on the moon with this sort of attitude about ideas. The field of ethics is even more important than the field of m...

I think the Hubble UDF/XDF is probably  one of the most interesting images  in astronomy ... in short, every one of those dots/blobs is an entire galaxy , each with (on average) in the order of hundreds of millions of stars ... and the staggering part is that this image shows only an extremely tiny portion of our sky (much smaller than the visual area the Moon occupies). The implication is that the number of galaxies in our 'observable' sliver of the universe alone is probably in the hundreds of billions. So a crude low-ball estimate of the number of stars in the observable universe would probably then be ~15,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, give or take (and based on observations of our own galaxy so far from the Kepler observatory, if our galaxy is representative, it's probable that a large percentage of these stars have planets, though that is 'scientifically speculative'). So when you look at the night sky, consider that in each roughly Moon-sized a...