The Learned Olive 2.0

“We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and there is no learning. There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt. People search for certainty. But there is no certainty. People are terrified — how can you live and not know? It is not odd at all. You only think you know, as a matter of fact. And most of your actions are based on incomplete knowledge and you really don’t know what it is all about, or what the purpose of the world is, or know a great deal of other things. It is possible to live and not know.”

—

Richard Feynman, born on May 11, 1918, on the role of scientific culture in modern society – timeless, remarkably timely read.

Pair with how ignorance drives science.

(via explore-blog)

Wisdom.

(via visualturn)

(Source: , via visualturn)

wildcat2030:

Read of the day:

I do not identify with my body. I have a body but I am a mind. My body and I have an intimate but awkward relationship, like foreign roommates who share a bedroom but not a language. As the thinker of the pair, I contemplate my body with curiosity, as a scientist might observe a primitive species. My mind is a solitary wanderer in this universe of bodies.

Though I identify with mind, the mind itself is matter. I remember dissecting a fetal pig’s brain in high school. As I sliced layers of cerebellum and cerebrum, I imagined someone likewise cutting my own brain from my skull and examining the weird intersection of my mind and body. There I would lie in the petri dish, the whole mystery of my being made visible, the unutterable complexities of consciousness, thought and personality reduced to a three-pound mass of squiggly pink tissue. Hello, self. Where is the vaporous soul I am said to be, the exiled child of God from another world? This looks, rather, like some Martian’s bizarre pet.

go read this..

(via I Am Not This Body - NYTimes.com)

physicsphysics:

Physics Doesn’t Bohr Me

Available today only on shirt.woot!

Rainbow Pudding - Because who needs drugs when you have imagination?

Who is it that knows everything,
but knows nothing not?
He who fishes for the sea
but finds instead the bait for the worm?
Incomprehensible blabber combined with passion,
fluid like water and intense like the titans, who are
up on the hills and the trees and beneath the earth, the earth
on which we are all fools and cynics trying to make a scrap
of our everyday livings in which we should try to be
balanced and pure, but what is pure?

What a cliche.
What a cliche.
What a cliche.

Spitfire and wooden sticks on pirates’ thighs.
Parrots and parents that talk but do not understand,
that spew and cackle but do not listen, they only respond.
But each and every one of us can be a parent, and each parent an ‘us’,
because that’s what a marriage is all about.

Stop and listen and wander and see.
With your eyes and your bees and trees on seas:
Colors all around with cherries on top of the layer of cake that is life
with all it’s wonders and flavors one piled on top of the other
but in the end all inseparably mixed together in one
gratifying, mortifying, fascinating and breathtaking
pulp of a pudding. Rainbow pudding.

Double rainbow all the way.
I listen to the fray.
and am a 1337 cray
motherfucker. I say.

u wh0t?

wildcat2030:

Try to explain any philosophical “ism” to your friend or colleague. Unless you’re both scholars, you probably can’t do so easily. London-based graphic designer Genís Carreras wants to make it easier for us to talk philosophy, so he’s removing words all together and replacing them with pictures in his postcard and book project Philographics.

Carreras takes larger-than-life ideas and visualizes them, reducing the coursework of collegiate studies into basic colors and shapes. What’s left are minimal yet clever illustrations, like two overlapping circles (dualism), two different colored heart shapes on a yellow background (existentialism), and layered blue circles with a white dot in the middle (deductionism), that help your brain fill in the rest of the concept after reading the short description.

Philographics started out with 26 posters and has since grown to 95 designs and a highly funded Kickstarter campaign that still has two weeks until its end. His first illustration was for determinism, done when he had the idea to show the theory using cascading dominoes. That sparked the idea to make the project into a journal to explain philosophy to a younger, more visually literate audience. While Carreras is a philosophy buff, he realizes many people now see the theories as archaic ideas only uttered in lecture halls.

“I wanted to make philosophy look better, to feel more contemporary and relevant,” Carreras says. “For me shapes and colors are a way to communicate, a way that can break through language and age barriers. As a graphic designer, this is the only way I knew.” (via Explaining Complicated Philosophies With Gorgeously Simple Postcards | Wired Design | Wired.com)

“The most complete, objective point of view is not one that is abstracted from the subjective: it is one that incorporates as many subjective points of view as are relevant and needed.”

—

Julian Baggini — I still love Kierkegaard (via wildcat2030)

(via wildcat2030)

What Is Up With “Thou,” “Thee,” “Thy,” and “Thine”?

theyuniversity:

(Source: theyuniversity, via theyuniversity)

“See what is. Acknowledge it without judging it as right or wrong. See it clearly without judgment and let it go. Come back to the present moment. From now until the moment of your death, you could do this. As a way of becoming more compassionate, as way of becoming less dogmatic, prejudiced, determined to have your own way, absolutely sure that you’re right and the other person is wrong, as a way to develop a sense of humor, to lighten it up, open it up, you could do this.”

— Pema Chodron

(Source: trentgilliss, via beingblog)

tumblrbot asked: WHAT MAKES YOU FEEL BETTER WHEN YOU ARE IN A BAD MOOD?

TALKING TO ROBOTS IN CAPITAL LETTERS.