Tag Archives: rock

20-Glue

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Swimming

Smile!

It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem.

For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much – the wheel, New York, wars, and so on – whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time.

But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man – for precisely the same reasons.

So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish by Douglas Adams (1999)

Flow

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Mars – Desert Planet – Void of Life

Love? I will tell thee what it is to love! It is to build with human thoughts a shrine, where hope sits brooding like a beauteous dove; where time seems young, and life a thing divine. All tastes, all pleasures, all desires combine to consecrate this sanctuary of bliss. Above, the stars in cloudless beauty shine; around, the streams their flowery margins kiss; and if there’s heaven on earth, that heaven is surely this.

Charles Swain (1801 – 1874)

scalar.usc.edu/works/lucas-collection-poetry-scrapbook/explication-of-love-by-charles-swain

27-Shor

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Adrian du Buisson for Quanta Magazine – March 12, 2019

Cells in embryos make their way across a steep “developmental landscape” to their eventual fate.

Embryonic cells continuously monitor their changing surroundings and make small corrective adjustments, optimizing as development proceeds, locking in on their planned identity relatively late.

Processing positional information makes genes variously switch on and off throughout the embryo, giving cells distinct identities based on their location. (Some cells unfortunately take the wrong paths and are unable to get back on track.)

All the information is there in the landscape and processing that information effectively may be the phenomenon that makes a bunch of loosely stuck-together atoms behave like the thing we call life.

Had I been like a man living in a wood from which he knows there is no exit, I could have lived; but I was like one lost in a wood who, horrified at having lost his way, rushes about wishing to find the road.”

-Leo Tolstoy

22-Narl

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Up & Over the Sidewalk by GGarchar (2022)
Upon the Solid Sand

A man walks upright. For him it is strenuous to climb a steep hill, because he has to keep pushing his own vertical mass upward and cannot gain any momentum.

The rabbit is better off. His forelegs support his horizontal body and the great back legs do the work. They are more than equal to thrusting uphill the light mass in front of them.

Rabbits can go fast uphill. In fact, they have so much power behind that they find going downhill awkward, and sometimes, in flight down a steep place, they may actually go head over heels.

WATERSHIP DOWN (1972) by Richard George Adams

11-Xpan

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Wilderness

Out here by myself in 2016 at a place almost totally inaccessible to normal people. Motorcycle stuck on that hill for several hours. There’s no water! Nowadays I stay home, look at the picture.
Trinity College Library, Dublin (abundant resources and signs of humanity)

He turned to Stephen and said:

—Seriously, Dedalus. I’m stony. Hurry out to your school kip and bring us back some money.

—That reminds me, Haines said, rising, that I have to visit your national library today.

—Our swim first, Buck Mulligan said.”

Ulysses by James Joyce