On the outside of the box, there is a question mark and it says that the image on the puzzle is a mystery, but it’s a good mystery and so you should buy it anyways. You should give it a try.
And so you do.
You put the puzzle together and not until that last, gigantic piece do you realize that the image of the puzzle is a photograph of you doing that exact same puzzle. You’re even wearing the same clothes. It’s clear that the picture was taken from right behind you and so you turn around, slowly. Terrified.
“Um…hello?”
“Hi,” I say. ”Hi there. Hi. Hello. Hi.”
And around my neck is a special kind of camera that can take pictures and immediately make them appear on puzzles.
Taken with Instagram at North Cove Marina
“The strangest thing about Silicon Valley’s libertarian politics is how few people here recognize how the Internet came about. ARPANET, the earliest large-scale computer network that morphed into the Internet, was funded by the U.S. Defense Department, as was the research into fundamental technologies like packet switching and TCP/IP. Delve deeper into the network and you get to the microprocessors that run the world’s computers—another technology that wouldn’t have come about [without] loads of federal research grants.
Even the Web itself can trace its founding to government grants. Tim Berners-Lee worked at CERN, the research group funded by Europeans governments, when he worked on the HTTP protocol. Marc Andreessen worked at National Center for Supercomputing Applications—which is funded by in a partnership between the federal government and the state of Illinois—when he created the Mosaic Web browser. Then you’ve got GPS, a technology that makes much of the mobile revolution possible, and one that is wholly created and operated by the U.S. government.”
— What Eduardo Saverin Owes America
hugs =^.^=
(via fuckyeahlizlemon)
“You can lose playing on the lowest difficulty setting. [But it’s] still the easiest setting to win on. The player who plays on the “Gay Minority Female” setting? Hardcore.” — Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is
“Well, there actually is a large constituency in America for a political leader who is willing to take responsible positions — to call for more investment in the nation’s education and infrastructure, to propose bringing down the long-run deficit through a combination of spending cuts and tax increases. And there is in fact a political leader ready and willing (maybe too willing) to play that role; his name is Barack Obama.
So why Americans Elect? Because there exists in America a small class of professional centrists, whose stock in trade is denouncing the extremists in both parties and calling for a middle ground. And this class cannot, as a professional matter, admit that there already is a centrist party in America, the Democrats — that the extremism they decry is all coming from one side of the political fence. Because if they admitted that, they’d just be moderate Democrats, with no holier-than-thou pedestal to stand on.”
— Paul Krugman, Thing Falls Apart
“Similarly, [in the real world] if we make maximizing profits as the absolute objective, we fail to take into consideration the social and environmental consequences.” — Vincent Ocasla, The Totalitarian Buddhist Who Beat Sim City
The Loneliest Whale in the World.
In 2004, The New York Times wrote an article about the loneliest whale in the world. Scientists have been tracking her since 1992 and they discovered the problem:
She isn’t like any other baleen whale. Unlike all other whales, she doesn’t have friends. She doesn’t have a family. She doesn’t belong to any tribe, pack or gang. She doesn’t have a lover. She never had one. Her songs come in groups of two to six calls, lasting for five to six seconds each. But her voice is unlike any other baleen whale. It is unique—while the rest of her kind communicate between 12 and 25hz, she sings at 52hz. You see, that’s precisely the problem. No other whales can hear her. Every one of her desperate calls to communicate remains unanswered. Each cry ignored. And, with every lonely song, she becomes sadder and more frustrated, her notes going deeper in despair as the years go by.
I need to go talk to some frozen yogurt about this.
(Source: erickimberlinbowley)
Just thinkin’ (Taken with instagram)