January 2008
19 posts
“how appropriate that the master of the 64 squares should die at 64”
—Death of a madman driven sane by chess
“An ambitious mission by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) to make a new, high resolution map of the universe has just successfully returned its first pictures, and UK team members are delighted with the success.”
—The Open University
“The essence of anthropomorphic maps is that they convey geographic information (location, direction) without the need for any physical image. The availability of portable image media, papyrus for example, eliminated the need for this type of map.”
—You Are Here, Hon
“The word ‘philavery’ was invented to describe this book — a collection of words chosen simply on the grounds of their aesthetic appeal.”
—Foyle’s Philavery by Christopher Foyle
“One of the mysteries of cinema history is the sudden eclipse of western in the mid-1950s; part of the answer is the fact that, at the same moment, space opera rise as a genre – so one can venture the hypothesis that space opera took the place of Western in the late 1950s. The dialectical point here is that western and space opera are not two subspecies of the genre “adventure”; one should shift the perspective and start ONLY with western. In its development, western then encounters a deadlock and, in order to survive, has to “reinvent” itself as space opera – space opera is thus structurally the sub-species of western, in the same way that, for Kieslowski, fiction nis a sub-species of documentary.”
—Slavoj Zizek - Ideology III
“We can’t say for certain that insects are the smoking gun, but we believe they were an extremely significant force in the decline of the dinosaurs.”
—The Guardian
“The idea is that regular old air is compressed in ultra-strong tanks in the car. Then, that air is released through a couple of pistons in the engine, which drives the wheels.”
—Air-Powered Hybrid Cars?
“Though Wallace shot his Bird of Paradise knowing it would be of value to science and worth money back in England as a stuffed specimen we do not take this action as a hypocrisy; a bird in hand can be worth two in the bush when it comes to preserving species. And so today Wallace is acknowledged as a pioneer of environmental awareness.”
—1mag3
