E T H E R E A L & P Y R R H I C

The Last Bookstore in Los Angeles, California.

I need to spend like 3 days in here.

Thought I’d post a better picture of the gold leafed cicada. Still deciding if I should add this as an option on my store! Also for everyone who ordered a cicada at the end of last month, be checking your doors! #tylerthrasher #cicada #crystallized #goldleaf #wings #chemistry #curio #art #artist #tulsa #oklahoma #insect #instaart #sculpture #geology

amazing

Beautiful Chemistry: Amazing Chemical Reactions Filmed with a 4K UltraHD Camera [VIDEO]

The nice thing about our journey through this world being the way that it is, is that it doesn’t require you to have learned everything in advance. The opportunities for learning continually happen as the journey goes along; all we have to do is to keep making the decision to engage with those opportunities. And every moment presents us with a new chance to learn, so it’s never too late to start.

‘Use Simple English’ Tip of the Day – 

Complex fields of study will almost certainly have a technical vocabulary used by professionals within that field. If the training that one receives in that field does not allow them to understand the technical language of that field, then one is missing an important part of one’s education.

The beauty of jargon is that it provides specialists with a more precise and often more concise way of communicating with one another. And while some people use big words to obfuscate meaning and cover up shallow understandings, the nice thing about learning the jargon in a field you’re exploring is that it lets you spot frauds much more easily.

Now this doesn’t mean that one should use all of this jargon when communicating with the general public; that’s when using simple language to convey the point is not only warranted, but essential.

All systems involve cycles which include an entire spectrum of states, and this includes every system in which you participate and also includes the system that *is* you.

If you’ve chosen any specific state as being the only one that will satisfy you, you predestined yourself to being dissatisfied most of the time, as we are not static entities and we do not live in a static environment — therefore we can never remain in a single static state.

Just under eight months in and I still get a little overwhelmed by the kindness and openness of the Tumblr community, as well as the willingness of some truly amazing users who share their lives with us each and everyday. So to celebrate this post, I’ve decided to include a personal story of mine...

Lasting love is an ongoing shared commitment that creates an environment that helps us create feelings, not the reverse. Love stops not when feelings stop, but when commitment ends.

Getting that idea out there when we are flooded with suggestions that the reverse is true is not easy; but when people really take it on board, it is powerful.

One of my regrets in life is that I have not always renewed this understanding each and every day. A good reason to recommit to this every day going forward.

Amethyst Hotel by NL Architects is "a proposal for a chain of luxury hotels based on the positive powers of this type crystalline geode”.

Not sure what “positive powers” amethyst has (though the Greeks thought it helped fight drunkenness, which is where it got its name from, as amethyst means “not drunk”. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t help.), but this is a rad looking hotel.

Alan S. Inouye, PhD (via americanlibraryassoc)

Logical ≠ true

True things will always have a logic to them, even if all of the things that make those things logical aren’t things that you understand or even things you know at all yet. As we learn more, our understanding expands and our thinking changes.

And logical sequences can easily be based on false assumptions, and therefore be completely valid logic but completely wrong.

It’s funny, that sometimes, we’re not honest enough with ourselves to note things like momentary need, desperation or irrational fear that cloud our thinking, but we can always take the time to get our heads and hearts clear enough to connect with what we really want.

Neil deGrasse Tyson everyone

omg, is this real?! rofl

(photo via internethelpdesk)

I saw something similar in the Czech Republic once… wasn’t fast enough to get a photo. So, yeah, really glad this photo exists.

Stone Town, Zanzibar, by Franck Guiziou 

When liberties are being eroded, Hollywood begins to produce fantasies about the ‘special every-person’ who rebels against and defeats the oppressive system that will appease viewers who aren’t doing anything about it, and when they self-identify with the protagonist, their struggle and victory, they feel a shared sense of having done something that helps relieve them of the pressure to act – which in turn helps preserve the real systems of control.

Probably worth mentioning that I don’t think some cabal is rubbing their hands together, planning this out and crafting movies to this purpose. This is usually just an emergent property of humans interacting around systems like this.

There are folks people like Lakoff who are playing with this stuff in the political realm with willful and malicious intent, but folks like that outside the highest echelon of the political spin-doctors seem to be relatively few and far between (thankfully).

I continue to be amazed at how Freud’s bestiary of mythological mental creatures remain with us to this day.

Ubiquitous world travel and copious amounts of nature photography did away with all but the most diehard cryptozoologists; and, today, no one really expects to see unicorns and griffins outside of a Harry Potter movie.

And yet, a couple of decades of neuroimaging still haven’t seemed to dispel the notion that Ids and Egoes and Subconscious minds are still lurking hidden somewhere betwixt our ears, waiting to leave footprints or stool samples in our next set of behaviours. :)

You know all those things that suck right now? Yeah, they do suck and, at the same time, concentrating on how much you feel like they suck might help you to want to do something about it, but there’s also a pretty good chance that once you’re ready to take some action and make things better, you might want to focus on something other than what you feel about what sucks.

That might be the moment to start asking yourself, “As I do the things I need to do to begin to resolve this issue, I wonder how much more motivated and how much wiser I’m going to find myself becoming with each and every move I make for the better?”