The Blue Duck

judy-huang:

This Is Water - David Foster Wallace

Amazingly, frighteningly true. 

allthisandhips:

Now all other cotton candy is just boring.

(via thebrasslocket)

Life Waits for No One.

Leaving it all behind isn’t for everyone. it takes a strong person. you WILL feel alone, you WILL doubt your decision, but if it’s something you’ve always wanted to do you will be grateful in the end and you’ll become a better version of yourself. If you truly want something out of life, go get it. Period. Let nothing stop you. That death bed is coming for you, same as it is for everyone else. Are you okay with spending your time where you are for the rest of your life? Or would you look back with regret? We get so caught up in life we forget that we only have this one chance to do what we love. Don’t be curious forever… go find out. Go after what you want. The price was steep, but i paid it gladly. It was an investment in myself. In the end the decision must be based on the real question you must ask yourself. The question: WHO do you want to be? Not WHAT do you want to be. The person who left, or the person who stayed?

Reposted from Reddit

Tweenbots by Kacie Kinzer:

Given their extreme vulnerability, the vastness of city space, the dangers posed by traffic, suspicion of terrorism, and the possibility that no one would be interested in helping a lost little robot, I initially conceived the Tweenbots as disposable creatures which were more likely to struggle and die in the city than to reach their destination. Because I built them with minimal technology, I had no way of tracking the Tweenbot’s progress, and so I set out on the first test with a video camera hidden in my purse. I placed the Tweenbot down on the sidewalk, and walked far enough away that I would not be observed as the Tweenbot––a smiling 10-inch tall cardboard missionary––bumped along towards his inevitable fate.

The results were unexpected. Over the course of the following months, throughout numerous missions, the Tweenbots were successful in rolling from their start point to their far-away destination assisted only by strangers. Every time the robot got caught under a park bench, ground futilely against a curb, or became trapped in a pothole, some passerby would always rescue it and send it toward its goal. Never once was a Tweenbot lost or damaged. Often, people would ignore the instructions to aim the Tweenbot in the “right” direction, if that direction meant sending the robot into a perilous situation. One man turned the robot back in the direction from which it had just come, saying out loud to the Tweenbot, “You can’t go that way, it’s toward the road.”

The Tweenbot’s unexpected presence in the city created an unfolding narrative that spoke not simply to the vastness of city space and to the journey of a human-assisted robot, but also to the power of a simple technological object to create a complex network powered by human intelligence and asynchronous interactions. But of more interest to me, was the fact that this ad-hoc crowdsourcing was driven primarily by human empathy for an anthropomorphized object. The journey the Tweenbots take each time they are released in the city becomes a story of people’s willingness to engage with a creature that mirrors human characteristics of vulnerability, of being lost, and of having intention without the means of achieving its goal alone. As each encounter with a helpful pedestrian takes the robot one step closer to attaining it’s destination, the significance of our random discoveries and individual actions accumulates into a story about a vast space made small by an even smaller robot.

Simply Amazing.

(via thebrasslocket)

priceonomics:

Applying to colleges in the United States is a stressful, competitive process. In 1970, the acceptance rate at Stanford University was 22.4%. Today, only 5.7% of applicants are accepted into the school. Across the country, nearly every top school like Harvard, MIT and Yale are…

setlightrun:

starwarsgroup:

No, this is a variation on a circle parry and a counter circle parry. Both are commonly taught in French and Italian style foil fencing.

A circle parry is when you avoid your opponents blade by moving your blade around theirs in a circle. A counter circle parry is circling around your opponents circle so that they can’t get their blade past to stab you.

When two fencers know each other well, this often happens. It becomes a game of chicken, it only ends when someone is willing to risk leaving an opening so that they can launch a different attack.

The foil version of this happens at least once a practice on my college fencing team. The only difference is that the blades are horizontal rather than diagonal.

This reminded me about how much I wanted to take up fencing.

And become a Jedi.

But I’ll take what I can get. 

Why not just a feint-attack?

c-harm:

..Psychology, ack.

(Source: awkwardsituationist)

theworldofchinese:

Making tea,Like a sir

Having been lost for hundreds of years, a brand new tea culture has been rejuvenated by tea expert Zhang Zhifeng (章志峰) in Fujian Province. It’s not just tea; it’s a canvas. When you think of beverage art, a hot latte comes to mind, but Zhang argues that his techniques are more complicate because there is only one liquid involved—tea soup (茶汤 chátāng), a mixture of grinded tea leaves and hot water. With a bamboo scoop, he is able to draw and write on the surface of the tea soup, and these patterns hold up for two to four hours.

Zhang got his inspiration in college when he was puzzled by a term found in historical records to describe a special tea ceremony, fencha (分茶, tea separation) or chabaixi (茶百戏, a hundred tricks with tea). None of his professors were able to explain it clearly except that it is only found in Japanese tea ceremonies nowadays. After digging through more ancient texts, Zhang pieced together the details of the practice which was once popular in the Song Dynasty (960-1279). Emperor Huizong of Song (宋徽宗, 1082-1135), a famous art’s patron, poet, painter, calligrapher and musician himself, performed fencha during a royal banquet for his guests. The emperor’s hobby soon became the hottest trend among aristocrats and artists alike. To perform calligraphy and painting on tea was also praised as a tasteful skill among the educated. Many poems written during that time could offer evidence to the trend. In one poem, poet Yang Wangli (杨万里) captured the patterns of wandering clouds high in the sky and changing reflections in a river at one fenchaceremony performed by a monk: 纷如擘絮行太空，影落寒江能万变 (fēn rú bāi xù xíng tàikōng, yǐng luò hán jiāng néng wàn biàn). Later, people even started to hold tea competitions, called doucha (斗茶), comparing the quality, taste, color and patterns of their tea.

Read More…

nevver:

Work

(via fastcompany)

Why are Young People Boring?

A 40 year old who has aged and taken the lessons of age and maturity doesn’t hang out with 20 year olds because they’re boring. This isn’t an insult, it’s just a recognition of the way the maturing process works. At 20, people are still figuring out how the world works. They like to talk about basic but highly abstract philosophical things. By the time you’re 40, you have hashed all that stuff out already and have moved on to applying all that basic stuff to the real world. Just like a college level mathematics student would find 4th graders talking about long division dull, so to do 40 year olds find 20-somethings talking about life boring.

Reposted from Reddit

“a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense…structured around the silliest quotations [by postmodernist academics] he could find about mathematics and physics”

(Source: judy-huang)

incidentalcomics:

Tie Chi