Pearltree is a curating site that allows one to collect bookmarks for different sites and organize them for later use. It can be used to save content for specific subjects such as this one here for blog creation and design, or it can be used for other purposes such as telling a story with links to the other sites that add content. One can drag and drop the tree. In the lower right hand corner are zoom buttons to zoom in and out. Clicking on a pearl, (ie. bubble, circle) will present a frame displaying information about it. Clicking on it again will zoom the content in the frame. Clicking on the frame will allow one to maximize the frame full screen. When in full screen one can move forward and backward through the tree by pressing the navigation buttons in the lower left of the screen. The frame can be drag and dropped. To navigate the tree into deeper levels, double click on the pearl. Here is an example of an embedded pearl from my tree. I find it easier to navigate at the Pearltree site for such a large tree, but it is still pretty decent even embedded. What do you think?
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Monday, January 31, 2011
40 UI Design Tools and Resources - Noupe Design Blog
UI, because it is all about how we interact with our environment. Check out these 40 design tools and resources to assist you with your UI needs. Be inspired, be moved, and create the tools to move your clients.
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Creating a Freaking Awesome Menu with JQuery
Line25 provides a most excellent tutorial covering Menu design from design building in Photoshop, Layout in HTML, Styling in CSS, and finally a dash of JQuery to tie it all together.
Amplify’d from line25.com
In this tutorial we’ll be building a cool navigation list complete with a sliding hover effect. Learn how to build the concept in Photoshop, lay out the basic HTML elements, style everything up in CSS then tie it all together with a few lines of jQuery to create a semantic, accessible and degradable menu design.
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Guide to Choosing Color Combinations
Check out this decent article on Color Combinations for websites. Did you know that Red and Yellow induce hunger by speeding up metabolism and that is the reason that companies that center on food and dining use those colors alot? Check out this article for more interesting facts of color usage to help you with your site.
Amplify’d from www.1stwebdesigner.com
Every graphic designer knows that choosing the color combinations is among the most important parts of the design making process, on print or on the web. There is no universal color combination that will please all types of clients. For some designers, it is a matter of trial and error. But trial and error means you wasting plenty of precious time. Time is an important commodity in the graphic designer’s fast paced world. Through proper research, sense of style and good common sense, you can eliminate the long time of experimentation.
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How To Create Your Own Custom WordPress Theme
Head over to Line25 to review their tutorial on how to create your own custom WordPress Theme.
Amplify’d from line25.com
Follow this overview of the build process to create your own custom WordPress theme. We’ll be taking my latest theme design from its basic HTML and CSS mockup and inserting the various WordPress template tags to build a fully working theme ready to install on your blog.
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Sunday, January 30, 2011
Transparency in the age of Obama
Amplify’d from english.aljazeera.net
Opinion
Signing the healthcare reform bill clearly was reason to smile for Democrats, as it will most likely prove to be a significant boon for some of their campaign donors [Getty]
My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.
Government should be transparent. Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing.
Taken from the White House Website - A message from President Obama to his staff.
From the outset of Barack Obama's political career, up until his presidential election victory, a large part of his political platform was the concept of transparency in government. As a legal scholar of Constitutional Law, having taught the subject at the prestigious University of Chicago Law School, his promotion of political decision making transparency, at the time, seemed to be more substance than rhetoric.
The political chattering classes were championing his credentials; many talking heads on the 'liberal left' were predicting the closure of Guantanamo, amendments to the Military Commissions Act of 2006 removing the suspension of habeas corpus, thorough Congressional investigations into warrantless wiretapping etc etc. The 'wish list' was endless, the previous president had spent the majority of his time in office eroding our Constitutional rights and civil liberties at home and tarnishing our image abroad - all sandwiched between his primary pursuit in office: family holidays at Kennebunkport.
Obama was going to be different, he planned to send Mr Lobbyist out of Washington, government was going to be clean, efficient and focused on the public good. He knew exactly the dirty secrets of government, an Obama '08 document entitled Restoring Trust and improving Transparency states "Oil and gas executives met with Vice President Cheney to write our energy laws, with the goal of increasing their profits and saddling the public with their environmental and public health costs; Cheney went to the Supreme Court to keep the names of these lobbyists secret." The gig was up for backdoor deals and the time of what Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig calls 'institutionalised corruption', was over. A new sheriff was coming to town.
So in January 2009, the nation turned to 'the great hope', Barack Obama, a man so familiar with the US Constitution one could imagine him being able to recite it backwards. As it turns out, it seems he interprets it backwards as well.
The first major event on the political calendar was healthcare reform, Democrats (and the tens of millions without healthcare insurance) were hoping to succeed where the Clintons had previously failed. Progressives were optimistically exuding large swathes of hope, dreaming of a public option. The Beltway political landscape was about to undergo a facelift, with the healthcare insurance lobby - one of the biggest 'cartels' in town - about to receive a swift boot to the unmentionables, better yet we were all going to see it live on national TV - Obama promised at least eight times that a debate on the healthcare issue would be televised.
We got screwed. We did get a televised debate, several Democrats went up against several Republicans spewing their respective talking points - no doubt written by political consultants and not by people in medical/public health field - an event watched by the 8 or 9 people constantly tuned into C-Span and the three others streaming it from the White House website. Don't worry if you missed the healthcare discussion, your in the company of the elected officials who allegedly took part in it.
The real debate took place behind the closed doors of the Oval Office, with a strict guest list including insurance executives and none other than the lobbyists who were supposedly being ushered out of town and back to Dodge.
Worst still, healthcare reform had miraculously overnight transformed into healthcare insurance reform, somehow the healthcare insurance industry had snagged the deal of the century, Obama had agreed to a policy that included a provision that every American had to buy healthcare insurance!
Talk of a public option, had been locked in a box, left in Dennis Kucinich's office on Capitol Hill - with the keys somewhere at the bottom of the Potomac - placed there to taunt him for the rest of his political life. I don't remember having the opportunity to tune into my local affiliate of the "I'm liberal, really I am" channel to watch that discussion, were those meetings available for view in your market?
Okay, so Obama dropped the ball on healthcare, lobbyists are extremely well entrenched in Washington DC, maybe he was softening them up for the knockout punch some time down the line… or not. So turning once again to Obama's transparency platform, from the aforementioned campaign document - a rich source of political perfidy: "It is no coincidence that the disastrous policies of the Bush-Cheney years have been accompanied by unprecedented secrecy…"
In 'his' literary masterpiece Decision Points, George Bush, no doubt through the auspices of a ghostwriter, transparently admits, (enthusiastically to the point of being overzealous) that he ordered the use of waterboarding, an act that clearly falls under the traditional definition of torture. We, the US, openly admits to torturing individuals, what little moral capital the US once held, has disintegrated faster than that of Tiger Woods.
Many of us knew years ago that waterboarding (along with other inhumane practises) was being used on (mostly) illegally detained individuals in prisons that remain open and active under the Obama regime. Is the Obama regime prosecuting or even investigating these crimes that have been openly admitted to by the instigators like Berkeley Law professor John Yoo and the torturers? Heck no! Obama has famously said that we need to "look forward, not backward."
Next time I get pulled over for speeding, I hope the police officer has the moral vision of our president and accepts my pleas of 'I won't do that again, I promise'. I mean if it works for mass torture, surely… humour aside, the entire corruption of the interpretation of Constitutional Law in regards to Gitmo/'terror' detainees has not only led to a substantial reduction in the civil rights of most Americans; but also made it legally impossible to lawfully prosecute those who were genuinely out to cause harm. The case is building against teachers of Constitutional Law, it seems such a career is the best preparation for a life of subverting the Constitution.
Not only is Obama against rescinding the scope of presidential executive orders - extended via the various post 9/11 security Act amendments collectively referred to as the Patriot Act - he has added a few extras, one being what I like to refer to as his "Presidential Execution Program" (PEP), PEP talks in the Oval Office have a distinctly different outcome, to pep talks in the locker room.
Obama has bestowed upon himself, the decision of which 'suspected' "evil doer" (we might as well use Bush rhetoric, since we are still very much beholden to his policies) gets to live or die. Very much reminiscent of the demented Robot Santa from Futurama, Obama maintains a list of 'naughty' individuals whose fate will undoubtedly involve a drone, some hellfires and ironically, little hope…
According to attorney, Maria LaHood, of the Centre for Constitutional Rights, who represents the father of the only person we know for sure that is on the list, Anwar al Awlaki, the list is not only secretive, but a Federal Court recently barred any discussion of releasing even the standards for what puts one on Obama’s hit list. Who knows, Anwar al Awlaki may be guilty of some treasonable offense, but where in the name of our legal system does a mere president of the USA get to decide without due process in a court of law who must die?
I can’t even begin to fathom the lack of moral outrage in this country against the PEP - no matter where any of us are on the political spectrum, such an affront to morality and legal procedure should be met with the most extreme rejection and hostility. Yet, I doubt if a majority of Americans even know that such a program exists.
Another flagrant violation of transparency began last April when the biggest environmental disaster in US history occurred in the Gulf of Mexico after an oil rig leased by BP blew up due to lax maintenance and weak governmental regulations favouring oil companies. A recent report from a study done on this catastrophe boldly states that the Obama administration engaged in a concerted cover up to underestimate the amount of oil released and the impact it had on the environment, humans and animal life.
The lingering affects of the oil mixed in with the dispersant, Corexit, are combining to give the residents of that region horrible health complications. Also, according to the above-mentioned report, the oil was only dispersed, not disappeared, and could be in the fragile ecosystem for decades before it fully goes away! The cover up of a disaster of this magnitude should be fodder for prosecution and removal from office of everyone involved - but while Ken Feinberg's Law firm pockets $850,000 per MONTH to administer the $20 bn BP victims’ fund, the people suffer economically and physically with very limited accountability, if any.
On his first day in office, Obama did restore the Freedom of Information Act, but, according to the Los Angeles Times, 14 months after the beginning of this era of "transparency," the Obama regime had denied more FOIA requests than that of Bush! Of course, the recent War on Transparency waged by the Obama administration has to be the current persecution of the WikiLeaks organization and one of its founders, Julian Assange. Even vice president of the USA, Joe Biden recently said that the disclosures provided no "substantive damage," even though there was some embarrassment to the 'Empire'.
If, as Biden says, the WikiLeaks disclosures don’t do substantive damage to the Empire (if they did, there’s always the thousands of nukes we have to back us up), then why the persecution of Assange and the threat of severely limiting everyone’s free and unfettered access to the internet? In the same week the latest document dump happened, the US government closed down 70 websites, just to show us that it could, and now the United Nations is discussing a global governmental committee to regulate the world-wide-web!
Transparency should, but doesn’t begin at the top of the power pyramid. The increasing surveillance and persecution of peace and social justice activists coupled with the escalating use of full body scanners in US airports tells me that the only 'transparency' Obama wanted was for our clothes and our lives, not his administration.
What is the moral of the series of articles on Barack Obama? Do I believe that Obama is "evil incarnate?" No, but I believe the system that he is at the same time an advocate for, and tool of, is becoming increasingly evil, misguided and out of control with its wars abroad and oppressions at home.
Whether Obama came into Office with a naive agenda of liberating the US Public from the hold of the Lobbying Industry, or if he played the Left like Yo-Yo Ma plays the Cello, doesn't really matter. What matters is we are essentially experiencing the third term of G W Bush minus a few wins on the domestic front for the centre left - albeit wins by the two branches of Government Obama doesn't reside in. The status quo has had us gripped for over a decade now, it's time for a change.
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Saturday, January 29, 2011
The Ultimate Collection Of Brilliant Web Design Tutorials - Noupe Design Blog
Photoshop Tutorials on creating diffrent kinds of web site designs.
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50 Useful Articles and Resources You May Have Missed - Noupe Design Blog
50 Useful Web Design Articles worth checking out.
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Thursday, January 27, 2011
Ice Age Graveyard Found Near Popular Ski Resort Unearths New Insights
Amplify’d from www.telegraph.co.uk
Ice age graveyard reveals its secrets
An ice age graveyard where dozens of huge animals including mammoths, mastodons and a giant ground sloth died up to 150,000 years ago has been unearthed near a popular mountain ski resort.
The fossilised remains, which were discovered in sediment at the bottom of a drained reservoir in the Rocky Mountains, Colorado, are thought to be one of the largest collection of animals from the last ice age to be found in one place and it is already providing scientists with new insights into the prehistoric environment.
Contractors preparing the ground for the construction of a new dam at the reservoir near Snowmass Village, which is part of the Aspen ski resort, uncovered the bones of a mammoth and now more than 600 bones have been recovered from beneath the lake bed before heavy snow halted the excavation.
Palaeontologists leading the dig found the remains of four Columbian mammoths; 10 American mastodons, a distant relation of the mammoth and elephant; four ice age bison, which were twice the size of modern bison; a species of ice age deer; and a Jefferson's ground sloth and a tiger salamander.
They expect to find more fossils when the return to the site when the snow melts in the spring.
Researchers, including experts at the Royal Holloway University of London, are now attempting to piece together how the animals came to be buried in one place and what the ice age landscape would have looked like at the time.
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CSS3 Techniques Video Free with Membership til February
Amplify’d from marketplace.tutsplus.com
This item is January's Free File of the Month!
Each user is entitled to one free regular license.
Discover Cutting Edge CSS3 Techniques
In this 7-part video series, we’ll dive into the latest CSS3 tricks and techniques, while still paying close attention to older browsers that do not support the latest advancements in CSS – things like transitions, gradients, etc.
To do so, we’ll, as a bonus, play around a bit with JavaScript, canvas, and the excellent Modernizr browser to provide feature detection.
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Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Inkscape vs. Illustrator
Decent article on the subject presenting an objective review. Not providing any direct conclusions from the writer, however providing a comparison of strengths and weaknesses for making an educated decision.
Amplify’d from www.brighthub.com
Inkscape vs. Illustrator
Article by Ronda Levine (51,770 pts)
Edited & published by Michele McDonough (171,293 pts
Related Guides: AdobeAdobe IllustratorOpen Source
Inkscape has been billed as being a viable alternative to Adobe's Illustrator. Can Inkscape really replace Illustrator as a SVG graphics editor? Learn about the issues when comparing Inkscape vs. Illustrator in this helpful Bright Hub article.
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Sunday, January 23, 2011
After 13 Years Duke Nukem Makes a Comeback
Visit blastr.com for the video trailer.
Amplify’d from blastr.com
We've waited 13 years, but Duke Nukem Forever is FINALLY here!
In 1991, Duke Nukem was a groundbreaking platform videogame that spawned a popular first-person shooter franchise. But the long-awaited sequel, Duke Nukem Forever, has for 13 years been a running joke—a sequel that everyone has waited for but no one actually expected.
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Saturday, January 22, 2011
Rollyo: Roll Your Own Search Engine
Create a search engine to search a website or multiple websites at once.
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$4 to be the New Baseline for Gas Prices then $5 Next Year
Amplify’d from consumerist.com
With the economy kinda sorta picking up, and consumers in China, India and Brazil buying cars in droves, gas prices are expected to keep going up, and may hit $4 a gallon by early spring, when Americans finish scraping the ice off of their windshields and begin planning road trips. And unlike 2008, when gas last broke the $4 barrier, only to later drop to lower prices, $4 may be a new baseline, followed by $5 gas as early as next year.
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Thursday, January 20, 2011
Untitled
Pearltrees the social curation community. Discover, Organize and Share stuff you like.
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Instapaper: Save interesting web pages for reading later
Instapaper allows one to quickly bookmark a site with the press of a bookmark button. Manage bookmarks by creating folders and placing the bookmarks into them. Share bookmark contents through RSS Feeds or read them on a RSS reader. Print to paper, ebook, kindle, etc. for reading offline.
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Instapaper for Bookmarking
Amplify’d from www.instapaper.com
How it works
Instapaper gives you a Read Later bookmark.
- When you find something you want to read, but you don't have time, click Read Later.
- Come back when you have time, or read your articles on the go.
Create a free account to get started.
Read anywhere
Computer
Paper
iPhone, iPad,
and iPod touch
Kindle
and ePub readers
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Wednesday, January 19, 2011
In Lieu of all the Freaky Stuff Figured This Video Was Appropriate
Amplify’d from www.youtube.com
See more at www.youtube.com
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Octopuses are Beached in Portugal
Has Neptune kicked out his creatures? Has the BP spill spread and caused this madness? Or, maybe it is just sea creatures trying to evolve to be on land? What ever it is... it needs to stop. Don't they know that the land is our domain...our kingdom? But for real though...WTF?
If ya don't know what I am ranting about check out my last 2 posts prior to this.Amplify’d from news.bbc.co.uk
Thousands of dead octopuses wash up on Portugal beach
Thousands of dead octopuses have washed up on a beach in northern Portugal, in what is being called an environmental disaster.
They cover a 5-mile stretch of Vila Nova de Gaia beach - no reason has yet been found for their appearance.
The authorities have warned the public not to eat them.
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Whales are Beached in New Zealand
Video available at source.
Amplify’d from news.bbc.co.uk
Hundreds of whales die in New Zealand
Conservation workers in New Zealand have attempted to coax pilot whales back into the sea, after they got stranded on a beach.
Hundreds of volunteers tried to keep the mammals wet throughout the day.
Around 125 whales died, whilst 43 others managed to swim free from Colville Beach on the North Island's Coromandel peninsula.
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In Italy Whales Beached
Video available at source.
Amplify’d from news.bbc.co.uk
Sad mystery of Italy whale deaths
Biologists are baffled as to why nine whales beached themselves off Italy's southern coast, in what experts say is an highly unusual event.
Only two of the whales managed to escape after they became trapped, five have died and hopes are fading for the remaining two.
Owen Thomas has the details.
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Tuesday, January 18, 2011
How Can One Believe In Science and Religion at the Same Time
I found this response intelligent and insightful so thought it might be a good read for others as well.
Amplify’d from www.quora.com
I am a scientist by training. By the time I graduated college I'd already poured thousands of hours into procedures, scored publications in peer-reviewed journals, presented my work at national conferences, and in total spent nearly a third of my life working in various research labs. Why? Because I figure if I want to understand what's going on in this strange world around me, there's probably no better method than to directly study the blueprints.You have to admit, science in the last several hundred years has been immensely successful--we've cured smallpox and polio, gotten men to the moon, invented the internet, and tripled lifespans.But I think one of the most important experiences you gain from a life in science is that once you walk the pier of what is currently known, at some point, you reach the end of the pier. And beyond that end is everything we don't know--it's all the uncharted waters, the deep mysteries that we don't have insight into yet, like why mass and energy are equivalent, or what dark matter/dark energy are, or why there are multiple spatial dimensions, or how you build consciousness from mechanical pieces and parts. That's the real lesson that science provides--the vastness of our ignorance.Now, rest assured that with every generation, we will undoubtedly continue to add more slats to the pier...but it's a huge ocean, and we have no guarantee how far we'll get, and certainly in our brief twinkling of a 21st century lifetime, we're simply not going to live to see the end. So again: science hammers home the message that what we know is so vastly outstripped by what we don't know.So given all this, I find that this question has at its core a popular misconception that's become increasingly widespread over the last decade, particularly in the political arena: that scientists don't have the capacity to gamble beyond the available data, and they act like they've got it all figured out with various equations that perfectly capture the picture of the whole cosmos.That's actually a very poor description of how science operates.Science is in some ways about disproving other people's hypotheses (including those posited by religion), but it's so much more than that. Science is really about creativity in making up new hypotheses--and part of the scientific temperament is a tolerance for holding multiple hypotheses in mind at the same time. What we actually do is we make up new stories in lab every day and then we go and we seek evidence to weigh in favor of some stories over others.But it's often the case that some questions are too far out right now. They're beyond the toolbox of science, and as a result we're unable to gather evidence for them. That's ok--science is fine with holding multiple hypotheses on the table. That ambiguity is accepted as part of the relationship we have with mother nature. It's just part of the vast mysteries around us.== A little on religion... ==
I was raised by a microbiologist mother who was a very devout Christian who insisted I read the Bible and learn all its stories and go to church. Despite my many years as a scientist I still find comfort in praying to God even though I know He might not exist/care, and I have seen various circumstances that I could attribute to "power of prayer", although my cynical side calls it "placebo" and "coincidence". So I categorize myself loosely as being "religious".Consider this: there are 2000+ religions on the globe, and everyone already knows what it's like to be an atheist, because all you need to do is look at someone else's religion and say "Well it's patently ridiculous that you would believe in that", and of course they're looking back at you and thinking the same thing.Try an experiment: the next time you meet someone new/random, whether it's on an airplane or in a bar, ask them if they've ever heard of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field Experiment. I guarantee you the number of people who have will be outweighed heavily by the number who haven't. But everyone will be able to tell you all the details of whatever cultural story they grew up on.You don't need to be an anthropologist to recognize that our nervous systems absorb whatever our cultures pour into us. So if you grew up in Saudi Arabia, chances are you love Islam. And if you were born in Rome, you probably love Catholicism; in Tel Aviv, Judaism; in Springfield, Ohio, Protestantism (apologies for the broad brush strokes here, I'm clearly overgeneralizing, but I think you get the point).So it's not a coincidence that there's not a blossoming of Islam in Springfield, Ohio, and there's not a blossoming of Protestantism in Mecca. It's because we're products of our culture, and we accept whatever's poured into us. If there were one truth, you would expect that it would spread everywhere evenly, but clearly the data doesn't support that. The crazy part is, our cultures pour this stuff into us, and then sometimes people are willing to fight and die over their particular stories.Are you familiar with the creation story of the Bakuba kingdom of the Congo? It goes like this: there was a white giant named Mombo who had a sharp pain in his belly, and he vomited up the earth and the sun and the moon and the stars. Then he had a second pain, and he vomited up the animals and people and trees. Included in that second ejection was the leopard, the anvil, the eagle, woman, the monkey Fumu, firmament, medicine, man, and lightning.If you find the creation story of the Bakuba to be an unlikely explanation as to how we got here, keep in mind that if you were Bakuba, you would find equally bizarre the Western story of the naked couple and the talking reptile and the prohibited produce. AND if you were Bakuba living in Kansas, you would be fighting to get your story into your children's textbooks.The holy books written by the world's religions are often quite beautiful, and crystallize hard-won wisdom, but keep in mind the fact that these were written millenia ago by people who didn't know about the size of the cosmos, or the Big Bang, or bacterial infection, or DNA, or computation, or even very much about neighboring landscapes/cultures. Ralph Waldo Emerson pointed out that the religious stories of one generation become the literary entertainment of the next--and indeed, you can see that nobody's fighting over Isis and Osiris anymore, or the Greek/Roman gods.== So how do you combine the two? ==
I'm not suggesting that the Bakuba story is wrong or that the Adam and Eve story is wrong because the two are competing stories...as a scientist, I'm suggesting that they're wrong because all the available evidence weighs against them.For example, the biblical story suggests that the world is 6000 years old while our best science tells us that it's 4.5 billion years old, which means the biblical account has to somehow explain how the Japanese were making pottery 4000 years before the earth existed.For my money, this sort of thing puts me somewhere in the middle. I've felt for a long time that we know too little to commit to strict atheism, yet we know far too much to commit to a particular religious story.So what surprises me is the amount of certainty I find out there. When you walk into a bookstore, you'll find books by the neo-atheists and books by the fundamentally religious, and they argue with each other and they polarize each other and they spend all of their energies on that.Maybe there should be another voice here? That seems far too limited for a modern discussion. Because if you think about the space of possibilities...
- Take the Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions--bam! That's one point in the possibility space.
- Take the eastern religions--bam! That's another point.
- The idea that we're just mechanical pieces and parts and we shut off when we die, that's yet another.
- We were planted here by space aliens...sounds absurd, but heck, it's still a possibility.
When you start populating the possibility space with these 2000+ data points, what you realize is that there are vast landscapes in between these possibilities as well. All of these points are infinitesimally unlikely, but together they add up to this possibility space, and there hasn't been enough discussion about this space as a whole. Instead, the discussion has been limited to what I consider a false dichotomy--God vs. no God....and that's where the conversation has ended. :-(True, there are some people in the middle, and they sometimes describe themselves using the term "agnostic". I don't use that term because it's typically used as a weak term--often when people say they're "agnostic", what they mean is "I'm not sure if the guy with the beard on the cloud exists or doesn't exist".So I call myself a "Possibilian". And the belief behind Possibilianism is an active exploration of new ideas, and a comfort with the scientific temperament of creativity and holding multiple hypotheses in mind. As a Possibilian, anything goes...at first. And then I import the tools of science to rule out parts of the possibility space. For instance, while it would be really cool if ESP existed, to the extent that we can measure things now, we cannot find any evidence to support it.Possibilianism basically picks up where the toolbox of science leaves off, when we no longer have the tools to address the questions we have, and must simply understand the space of possibilities, some of which we can rule out, but others which we are unable to at this time.The reason it is so important to keep that open-mindedness about the parts that we don't know is because we know for certain about the magnitude of things we don't know. In every generation of scientists, people have always felt that they have all the pieces and parts that they need in order to answer what is going on around them in the cosmos. But just imagine trying to explain the Northern lights without an understanding of the magnetosphere, or trying to explain the heart before the concept of a pump was invented, or trying to understand how muscles work before electricity was discovered. You would make theories, but you would be doomed to be incorrect. And that's where, in many instances, people found comfort in religion, superstition, the supernatural, etc.We're in that same position now.Example 1: We've got Newtonian physics, and Einsteinian physics and quantum mechanics, and we think, ok, we've sort of got all the pieces and parts. But astrophysicists look at the movement of the planets and galaxies, and they look at the gravitational pull, and they realize...something's missing. There's something out there that we can't quite see or smell or touch, but it must be there to make things the equations work. So they call this fudge factor "dark matter"--we don't exactly know what it is, but we require it to make the equations balance out. Some of you may already know: dark matter isn't a small fudge factor, it's 90% of all known matter--that's a lot to sweep under the rug!Example 2: Consider the human brain. It's the most complicated device we have ever found; it's essentially an alien computational material. It is so dense in its connectivity that if you were to take a cubic millimeter of brain tissue, there are more connections in there than stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Yet somehow, this wet, mechanical networked system is YOU. It's all your hopes and dreams and aspirations and emotions. If you were to lose a little part of your pinky, you wouldn't really be any different, but if you lost an equivalently sized piece of neural tissue, that would completely change your conscious state.The problem is, we don't know how to take mechanical pieces and parts and build private subjective experience out of that. Imagine if I gave you a trillion tinker toys and told you to start hooking them up. At what point do you add one more tinker toy and say, "Ah-ha! It's experiencing...the taste of feta cheese now"?That's the problem. We don't have any way to apply our equations to determine how we perceive the redness of red or the smell of a fart. Not only do we not have a theory of how the brain works...we don't even know what such a theory would look like.== Conclusion ==
All of this calls for a bit of intellectual humility.While we can't prove the existence of God, being unable to prove He exists doesn't necessarily mean He's nonexistent either--our current tools may simply be insufficient for the task. So I keep both religion and science at my side--in some cases, science gives me the answers I seek; in others, it doesn't, and when the current toolbox of science doesn't allow me to gather data to understand how/why a seemingly miraculous phenomenon occurs, I'm happy to simply chalk it up to the wisdom/grace of an all-knowing force until science steps up its game. If science will never be able to answer, then, eh, I'm ok with that.For the smart-alecks out there who would suggest that not committing to anything is more fitting of politicians, I concede that people like people who can firmly commit to a decision. If you're trying to decide whether you should marry someone, or sell some property, or move to a different city, those things require a firm choice.But what I'm going to suggest is that there are some domains where it's appropriate to be decisive, and some domains where it's not so appropriate. Would you stop a guy on a random ranch in the middle of nowhere and ask him if he thinks there are extraterrestrial civilizations? Do you care what his opinion is? Would you value it more than, say, an astrobiologist's? If not, that suggests that there are some domains in which it is not appropriate to commit and act like you have an answer in the absence of having good evidence.I feel that people these days are sick and tired of people acting as though they're certain about things that they can't possibly be certain about. As Voltaire said, uncertainty is an uncomfortable position, but certainty is an absurd position.So whatever. As a Possiblian, I would rather geek out and be creative with new narratives and hold multiple possibilities in mind with comfort. And I always feel free to cite the gospel of science, the most important three words that science ever gave to humankind: I don't know.For anyone struggling to reconcile their seemingly conflicting views on religion and science: try to seek comfort with having multiple narratives and having uncertainty. This is not just a plea for simple open-mindedness, but for an active exploration of new ideas. This is important for our education, for our legislation, perhaps even for the future of our warfare (or lack thereof). In short, be free from dogma and full of awe and wonder. See if you can live a life that celebrates possibility and praises uncertainty. :-)~~~~~
I want to give credit where it's due: the overwhelming majority of this answer came from a talk given by my neuroscience professor David Eagleman a few months ago on the subject. I found myself in complete agreement with him and I thought this question was an appropriate opportunity to share his ideas with even more people, so if you're impressed, I want to say that I'm really just standing on the shoulders of a giant here. :-)A citation with links if you're interested in reading more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pos...
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Facebook's Ad Revenues Increase to $4B by Year's End, says eMarketer
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eMarketer predicts that social network advertising will account for nearly 11% of all online ad spending in the United States by the end of this year. According to the research firm, US marketers will spend a little over $3 billion to advertise on social networking sites this year, up 55 percent from the $1.99 billion advertisers devoted to social networks in 2010.
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Monday, January 17, 2011
Online Color Theory
Author of the site claims: "Vision and color are at the heart of painting. Here is the most comprehensive discussion for artists of color perception, color psychology, "color theory" and color mixing available online, and one of the most comprehensive available anywhere in any format."
Amplify’d from handprint.com
modern color theory (concepts)
modern color theory (applications)
three guiding principles • 27 color study topics
tonal value
color wheels
the artist's color wheel — CIECAM version (HTML • PDF)
watercolor mixing complements
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