The reason we want to live forever...

The Red Bull Air Race is coming to Fort Worth in November and tickets are now on sale.

"Knowledge is the new money." Why you should read for 5 hours per week.

Listening to Possibilities Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 by Tobias Reber and trying to decide whether to buy.

I am fairly certain I should buy Sonar's entire discography.

I have already bought Change in the Air by the Cuong Vu 4Tet.

Proving that any tool can make art, Addie Wagenknecht used a Roomba to paint the floor. The color is a hint to one of the influences but when you learn that the artist reclined nude on the floor while the Roomba painted you'd draw the obvious cmoparison to Yves Klein.

Why 355/113 is an excellent approximation of pi.

Art exhibits that would've nice to see:

• The Beyond: Georgia O'Keefe and Contemporary Art
• 3D: Double Vision, a look at three-dimensional art at LACMA
• Ellsworth Kelly in the Hamptons
• The Science Behind Pixar

What does music look like? Synesthesiatic artist Melissa McCracken shows us.

Another True Facts video from Ze Frank: the Bobbit Worm.

Everyone close to Toledo should secure tickets now for a class, a lecture, and a performance by Harold Budd at the Toledo Museum of Art.

Edvard Munch, The Scream 1893. The lesson here is that sometimes what looks like abstraction is actually representation. Scientists believe Munch's depiction of the sky is a real meteorological phenomenon called nacreous clouds. 

"Volume is begotten of flatness, not of volumetric rotundities." So we read in 10 perspectives on drawing in abstract painting.

Is $4.5 million the most ever paid for a nickel? Don't know but that's how much a 1913 Liberty Head Nickel (only 5 are known to exist) recently sold for.

NASA's moon video set to Clair de Lune.

NASA's astronomy picture of the day reveals the observable universe.

Long article about nuclear weapon nerds.

Preview the finalists for the 2018 student Academy Awards.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯  (Copied and pasted from https://www.copyshrug.com/.)


Interrobang!?

...is because we live in an impoverished present. ~Alan Watts (paraphrased)

Only through art can we emerge from ourselves...

A long (pardon the pun) article about Brian Eno's musical and artistic accomplishments, from ambient to generative music to his work on chimes for the Clock of the Long Now.

Of the 40 things every Fort Worther must do, I've done 2 and a half.

10 reasons why you should visit Fort Worth.

Debussy played Debussy in 1913.

This may be a trick question. How do you know when to leave a baseball game? When it's over is apparently not the right answer. See the data that leads to the result that when the leading team is up by 5 runs it's safe to leave in the 3rd or 4th inning.

Some newer music to explore:

• Between the Silence - a 3 CD album by Robert Fripp (guitar) and Leo Travis (sax, flute) of "Evocative Soundscapes and inventive improvs." Listen here, buy here.
• Flood Expeditions - more "improvised excursions between piano and guitar" by Robert Rich and Markus Reuter. Listen and buy here.
• Possibilities Vol. 1 by Tobias Reber - guitar and synth. Buy and listen here.
• Don't forget 12k's summer sale - 40% off.
• A 1-hour mix of Harold Budd and Robin Guthrie. 

I still have several of those large, fold-out maps from National Geographic. Now you can see 100 year's worth of fold-out maps on their website.

There's just something about this that appeals to me. Pablo Picasso, Still Life on a Square Table, 1922. source

I love Godzilla as much as the next guy but the trailer for King of the Monsters gives me a strong Pandora vibe which isn't necessarily a good thing.

Here's a PDF chock full of vintage NSA security posters.

David Sylvian and Holger Czukay's Plight and Premonition in 1988.

Gaudi on The Orb podcast (Soundcloud).

You can read about music as when Innerviews talked to the Security Project.

A self-proclaimed "extremely detailed" map of U.S. 2016 election results.

Funny people have higher IQs than their less funny peers.

How about 10 hours of ocean scenes?

Pull gasoline out of thin air.

How many diamonds did they find? One quadrillion (10**15) tons.

Speaking of numbers, learn their secrets at Number Gossip. 27 is the only number that is the sum of its digits times 3.

Here's one way to divide the USA into four equally populated regions. source

Great. Fort Worth is one hot spot where parents exempt their kids from immunizations.

They found a "lake" on Mars, but it's 12 miles across, 3 feet deep, and really salty.

Ray Bradbury's 12 tips for authors. #8 Write with joy, "writing is not a serious business."

I like Yes, but I find that I need to be in a special mood before listening to it. So maybe you're in the mood for Episode 36 of What Makes This Song Great with Roundabout.

Rather than reinforce boundaries between disciplines and the value-laden hierarchies that keep them in place, we need to accept that studies in "imagination" and "humanity" are no less vital to work and citizenship than those of "facts" and "machines." I was first introduced to C.P. Snow's book The Two Cultures in 1980 and here we are 38 years later reading The 'Two Cultures' Fallacy. Long article.

A webpage full of infographics and maps of the 1800s.

Seven basic design principles. #3 The UI is opinionated.

The editor at Cartoon Research is, like me, fascinated by the WWII Disney (mostly) animated film Victory Through Airpower. In this article he shows some of the film's promotional materials.

And while I'm wearing my Disney fanboi hat, here's one of my favorite bits of Disney film, the 15-minute  documentary 4 Artists Paint 1 Tree.

How we use our land. source

Physicists found (maybe) the odderon.

Do you want to know the 2018 roster of NFL officials?

I guess it makes sense that architects would be interesting in knowing how logs can be cut differently to create wood with different grains.

Benito's helps you understand Mexican menus.

...and know what another person sees.  ~Marcel Proust

Small minds are concerned with the extraordinary...

J. Peter Schwalm's latest album, How We Fall, has been released. You can stream a few tracks from Rare Noise Records.

While you're at it, give a listen to a preview of the upcoming album Blue Dream from the Jamie Saft Quartet.

Mark Bradford, Pickett's Charge, installation view at the Hirshhorn. Might be time for a visit.

A really long review of spy fiction that I can't decipher.

If you ever stood in a hi-fi showroom "testing" speakers by playing Deacon Blues, this article and its videos are for you.

Surface Work is a current exhibition (London) featuring female abstract painters.

Highly recommend that everyone - especially young people (hint, hint) - read The Psychology of Money. I loved #7 "the seduction of pessimism in a world where optimism is the most reasonable stance."

I've started keeping track of Mickey Mouse in fine art.

Damien Hirst, 

KAWS

Andy Warhol

Keith Haring

Vernon Fisher

Roy Lichtenstein

Pondering the nature of silence will be seen by some as similar to gazing at all-white or all-black paintings. Yet I contend silence is becoming a luxury item and even more rare. And despite "the ceaseless beep of phones" the dilemma of silence is not risk of sensory deprivation but simply the ability to find it.

"I would like to write about the bullshitization of academic life."

All Over the Map is a National Geographic blog about maps and map making.

VOA brings us the Chuck Jones interview in their What It Takes series.

How about a 1923 film explaining Einstein's theory of relativity.

As if three types of neutrinos wasn't enough, there may be a fourth - the sterile neutrino - which may upend the Standard Model of physics.

Refik Anadol, Melting Memories. Click thru and watch the video.

Chili's Boss Burger (burger, rib meat, brisket, sausage, bacon) might be next on my list.

I have no idea how the game MousePoint works but that doesn't mean I didn't spend hours playing.

...great minds with the ordinary. ~Blaise Pascal

Real knowledge is to know...

Here's a video of a live performance by Sonar and David Torn. I'm loving their album Vortex.

You can stream 144 hours of Blue Note recordings including Miles Davis and John Coltrane.

Decorate your house with wallpaper inspired by Brian Eno.

The Kimono Project aims to create 196 unique kimonos representing all the participating countries in the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo.

Morris Louis, Blue Veil, 1958. Image from morrislouis.org, his online catalogue raisonne. 

Sam Francis' catalogue raisonne is now online too.

Constellations is a game where you change the shape of a line. A big part of the game is figuring out the rules.

White paintings are more than just a white canvas. Need art be an imitation of reality or can it exist on its own merits?

The city of Fort Worth recommends that families maintain an emergency kit with 72-hours worth of supplies. Yet one of those supplies is 7-days worth of medicine.

It's snowing on comet 67/P Chuyurmov-Gerasimenko according to the Rosetta spacecraft. Must see video.

Science discovered a new blue pigment - YInMn Blue.

I encourage my friends in NYC to see the exhibit on the Submarine Growler and the Cold War.

Never before published photos of the Mt. St. Helens eruption.

Science still doesn't know why time is the only one of the 4 basic dimensions in which we can't move backwards. Even the 2nd law of thermodynamics doesn't explain this.

Yes, I am OCD enough that this list of 37 house cleaning tips was interesting, especially the one about dryer sheets and baseboards.

Speaking of cleaning, here's a project that plans to clean up half of the great Pacific garbage patch in 5 years.

Can you tell the difference between Dante's Inferno and Disney World?

Funny t-shirt. Not certain I'd wear it to the airport though.

I leave you with this WebGL Lathe Workshop so you can whittle away the rest of the day.

...the extent of one's ignorance. ~Confucius

Anticipate the difficult...

Neill Blomkamp's Oats Studio is open for crowd funding. If you haven't watched any of their videos on YouTube you are missing some good stuff.

The new Dreamworks Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle for Amazon prime video doesn't disgust me as much as many modern reworkings of classic TV cartoons. It's the voices that I find most distracting, not the animation.

Google Maps now supports Street View for Disneyland and Walt Disney World parks. Let's visit Pandora.

New music that I'm currently flirting with. Riot by Kali on Ronin Rhythms Records.

Also there's Adam Holzman's new album Ectoplasm.

I'm well past flirting with Vortex by Sonar w. David Torn. Read about this collaboration on Innerviews. A sample of the track Waves and Particles.

And there's Gaudi's Psychedelic Future Dub Vol 2.

A beautiful illustration of the alphabet's evolution that reminds me of the phonetic reading charts we used in grade school. 

Anything can fit in a rectangle. This and other thoughts on the 1970s when painting was dead.

How audacious is the goal of electricity from nuclear fusion in 15 years?

I used to challenge students to develop an exoskeleton I can use late in life instead of a wheelchair. Seems that's already been done by suitX and others.

Fort Worth gets two nods in Eater's list of the 38 best restaurants in Texas. Fred's Texas Cafe and the Swiss Pastry Shop. Fortunately, I've been to both. Fred's for burgers and Swiss Pastry Shop for their heavenly delectable Swiss-style black forest cake.

Robert Rauschenberg, Untitled, 1951

What makes a monochrome painting good? It's a trick question. The same thing that makes any painting good; it changes the way you see the world.

Lots to argue about - every joke in Airplane! ranked.

Best think since sliced... ketchup.

No more signing credit card receipts?

A documentary of legendary designer Dieter Rams is coming out this year with a soundtrack by Brian Eno.

The Detroit Tigers are named after Michigan's oldest military unit. This and 29 other origin stories for baseball team names.

A fascinating, interactive visualization of all the collaborations in Miles Davis' career. Scaled in Miles.

Why does Mario music sound fun? Clarity and accessibility.

Funny people have higher IQs.

See the moon in beautiful 4k.

The fastest growing craft breweries of 2017.

I'd like to think this would end the debates on healthy eating. But it won't.

Fort Worth's Magnolia Ave. is now officially a great place.

More art museums should take themselves less seriously.

A nice bit of public art in Fort Worth. The artist? An F-2 tornado that tore down the billboard those posts used to support.

Scientists measure the color of antimatter!!!
It's the same color as matter :-(

Never forget that Led Zeppelin's drummer, John Bonham, was one of the best ever.

The numbers here are staggering: after being dormant for 37 years, the Voyager 1 spacecraft just communicated with Earth over a distance of 13 billion miles.

Sloths don't fart, but they also poop only every three weeks.

Is it more surprising that fake urine is being banned by law or that it exists in the first place?

Who says TED talks are all fancy? Here's an animated presentation on the evolution of animal genitalia. Which reminds me of Kliban's series of cartoons on genitalia of the universe, but that's a topic for another day.

What's your favorite kind of music? Cassette you say? Here's an online simulator of cassette music, complete with all the flaws.

...by managing the easy. ~Lao Tzu

Benefit comes from what is there...

BEST THING I SAW ALL WEEK:

The Northern Lights as seen from the cockpit of a U-2. source. Take a look and then share this.

Things to listen to.

• A preview of the new album from Sonar w David Torn and here too.
• David Kollar's Improvisations Under the Roof.
• Harold Budd's The Oak of The Golden Dreams (1971) is on YouTube. 
• King Crimson performs Larks Tongues in Aspic Part IV.
• Daniel Lanois has a new album with Venetian Snares due for release 04 May.
• Eno's Bloom: Open Space is an immersive, 3-D, musical, visual experience.
• Video of a live performance of J. Peter Schwalm's Beauty of Disaster.
• Steve Roden's night ring
• Solitary Universe by Eraldo Bernocchi and Chihei Hatakeyama
• Riot by Kali

Piet Mondrian, Composition 9, 1914. source. stunning, absolutely stunning.

Things to look at.

• Key paintings of the 20th century: Part 1, Part 2. The latter really got my juices flowing.
• Mark Bradford talks about Clyfford Still.

Claude Monet, Water Lilies. source. In Part of the "key paintings" article linked to above, this is the painting that made me stop my scroll.

News from DFW and Texas:

• Colleyville is the safest city in Texas.
• Colleyville is also the 81st richest city in the country.
• They've started building the Clock of the Long Now in Texas. This clock is designed to operate for 10,000 years.
• An introduction to a "cool district" in Fort Worth - the Near Southside.

Ships and Planes:

• The USS Lexington was discovered at the bottom of the Coral Sea. This is a good use of a billionaire's money.

A Boeing design from the design competition that led to North American winning with the XB-70. 

Legal:

• According to the EFF, a recent court ruling makes embedding a tweet on a webpage a copyright violation and may extend to any act of linking to other content (as you see here in this blog all the time).

Things I didn't know science could still discover:

• a new form of light involving the interaction of individual photons
• new/best photos of Pluto
• the sound a glacier makes (wait for the ping)
• a new kind of ice not otherwise found on this planet (found inside a diamond of all things)

Poop:

• Some can hold it in: man doesn't poop for 40+ days.
• Others cannot: A farting passenger forced a plane to make an emergency landing.

Play:

• Despite what this Powerball simulator says, I'm buying a ticket today.
• And now you may play a toy piano.

...usefulness comes from what is not. ~Lao Tzu

To understand the limitation of things...

Listen to the new album from Laurie Anderson and Kronos Quartet: Landfall.

Read how streaming services fail both artists and listeners and what we can do to reverse that.

The last McDonald's burger sold in Iceland 8 years ago can be watched on webcam.

Jack Whitten, April's Shark, 1974. Whitten passed away recently and, sadly, I'm only now discovering his work.

Discover Fort Worth's Near Southside.

How to win a prize for science photography. Step 1: photograph a single atom. Step 2: win prize.

Upon turning 45 this lady listed 12 rules of life. #6 Save 25% of your income.

Here's a list of 25 principles of adult behavior from a Silicon Valley guy. #10 Never forget that you might be wrong.

The SEDAC population estimator lets you draw a circle or polygon on a map and get an estimate of how many people live in that region.

Programmers, let's bash. Take the command line challenge.

A peak inside Ellsworth Kelly's Austin, on the UT campus.

The periodic table, with which I am fascinated, came to Mendeleev in a dream.

Eyvind Earle, Yosemite, 1994. Earle is one of my favorite Disney artists. This image comes from a brief bio that includes more of his work.

A thought-provoking look at why health insurance (note: not healthcare) costs so much.

Jose Parla, Amistad America, 2018. My Longhorn friends have easy access to this 4,000 square foot mural in the atrium of the new business school building.

How often should you wash bath towels? The answer may surprise you, but not as much as the fact that the article indicates that some bath towels are shared between family members. Eeewww.

I leave you with Moodica, videos for de-stressing.

...desire them. ~Lao Tzu

If you do not change direction...

How about Stick Men and Terry Bozzio performing King Crimson's Larks Tongues in Aspic?

Adam Holzman's (keyboardist for Steven Wilson) new solo album, Truth Decay, is due out at the end of March.

It is said that Paul Klee's writing on modern painting are akin to Newton's writing on physics in terms of their significance. So having 3,900 pages of Klee's personal notebooks online is a big deal.

Paul Klee, Castle and Sun, 1928. I can't help but compare this to Mary Blair's concept paintings for one particular Disney attraction.

Tony Banks (keyboardist of Genesis fame) has a new album called Five coming out in late February. It's classical music with the Czech National Symphony Orchestra and you can watch a preview video of one track on YouTube.

How about a 3-D printed, cylindrical periodic table?

I haven't had time (yet) to read Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States of America so I leave that to you.

How do figure skaters keep their costumes in place? This question and others equally insightful are answered in advance of the winter olympics.

B-2 flyover of the 2018 Rose Bowl via The Aviationist.

How about a video of the F-35 flyover of the Fiesta Bowl? Shot from a helicopter above the flight path.

Artist Jack Whitten has passed away. Hear him on the Modern Art Notes podcast.

Jack Whitten, April's Shark, 1974

Penske Truck Rental says DFW is the 3rd most popular moving destination in the country.

Star Wars geekery:

• Fan film of what construction of the Death Star might have looked like. (I don't know what it might have looked like but I guarantee it was finished late. What's the rule of thumb? Take the contractor's estimate and double the number and go to the next higher unit. For example, 2 hours becomes 4 days.
• What if Wookies sounded like Pee Wee Herman.
• What if Kylo Ren sounded like Pee Wee Herman.

Take a look at this video compilation of the best animated films of 2017.

Today's time-waster: a Javascript Nintendo NES simulator. Mario anyone?

The 7 benefits of farting. #4 promotes colon health.

...you may end up where you are heading. ~Lao Tzu

Autumn arrives in early morning...

I resolve to clean out my bookmarks list.

Unabashed plug for RareNoise Record's "Leap of Faith,"  a deal by which you prepay for all their releases in the coming year and don't pay shipping. But besides the deal, you get great music. Here's their Leap of Faith 2018 sampler on Soundcloud.

Moodles is a 3-D computer animation of human forms drawn using noodle-like lines. But that's not the best part, which is watching them disolve, decay, and disassemble.

Outside the Transcend is an instrumental EP from Markus Reuter and Dutch Rall.

Killing two birds with one stone. Princess Rashid, Periodic Table-2. source

Filament is "extraordinary music to fall asleep to" by Gareth Davis.

Video explanation of the math behind the McKnelly Megalith.

Lowlands, inspired by calving glaciers and meltince ice, by Taylor Deupree and Marcus Fischer.

Watch Markus Reuter perform The Crimson ProjeKCt's show opening in Krakow.

Wayne Shorter on the future of fusion.

Fruit, 2-D, (mostly) black and white animation - "rise into being, mature, perish."

J. Peter Schwalm performs live Endknall, from the album The Beauty of Disaster.

Live, unedited performance 217 I by centrozoon.

Five disruptions to marketing 2018.

1. Digital Transformation
1. Marketing is a key component of the lifetime customer experience.
2. Microservices and APIs
1. Cloud-based APIs allow anyone to build anything.
3. Vertical Competition
1. The digital path between marketer and consumer is getting narrower.
4. Digital Everything
5. Artificial Intelligence

Blog metrics in review.

1. Basics
2. Value
3. Action

Fast Company's social media predictions for 2018 includes "a sleeping social giant awakens." I'll let you guess who that refers to before you click through.

Over 60 recently declassified nuclear weapons test films have been released.

An insightful interview with musician Jamie Saft. 

There's a name for it: thalassophobia.

How to create the perfect software business. (Or does he truly mean SaaS?)

1. Product is core to operation of the business.
2. Cost/value proposition is straightforward.
3. Finances its own growth.
4. Efficient sales model
5. Market leadership

Here's how we translate words into probabilities. source

A topical gel for male birth control is about to begin testing.

The Aviationist's top stories of 2017.

A webcam for DFW airport courtesy of CAE.

...but spring at the close of a winter day. ~Elizabeth Bowen