Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact;

Today's soundtrack is Morton Feldman's Rothko Chapel.

My friends in the UK may want to attend Art of Noise's "live reboot" of their album In Visible Silence.

Mixed signals are being heard about Alien 5, the Neill Blomkampf Aliens follow-up. The odds of completion were recently said to be "slim" due to the requirement to wait for Ridley Scott to finish and release Prometheus 2. Being a fan of Blomkampf's District 9, I have been looking forward to his take on Alien.

This is truly amazing. A 4-planet system that's 129 light years away from earth has been directly imaged from ground-based observatories and those images compiled into an animation revealing their orbits. See HR 8799.

Sales of e-books fell 16% from 2015 to 2016. A contributing factor may be that users of dedicated e-book readers buy more e-books than readers who use phones and tablets. And young buyers fall into that latter category.

Triumph attended Trump's inauguration and the results, as expected, are hilarious.

Sadly, the Red Bull Air Race won't be returning to Fort Worth again this year. Its two U.S. stops are Indianapolis and San Diego. Maybe 2018. If you live in either of those two areas I highly recommend attending.

Did Pollock create fractals 25 years before their mathematical discovery? If he did, so what?

Mark Rothko, Untitled (Rust, Blacks on Plum), 1962. From a review of the recent showing of Rothko's paintings at Pace in New York.

You can browse online every MoMA exhibition since 1929 with their new exhibition spelunker. (Is that really the best name they could come up with?)

An interactive map of NYC's skyscrapers.

Award season is coming, including those for animated films.

• Oscar nominations for best animated feature include favorites Zootopia and Kubo and the Two Strings. And what might seem like common sense: voters should actually have to view the films before voting. But, we've seen recent examples where voting seems to lack common sense.
• The Annie Awards have been made and Zootopia took best animated film and Piper took best animated short (sound track by Adrian Belew).
• More coverage of the Annies.
• Kubo took top honors at the VES awards.

You may recall a while back I reported here that you can now rent Disney's Magic Kingdom for your wedding with fees starting at $150,000. Well for a mere tenth of that you and 11 of you best friends can enjoy a new dining experience at 21 Royal including dinner with all the trimmings and private viewing of some of the nighttime events.

Or you could just visit Disney's Animation Research Library, which is on my bucket list.

You have no more excuses. This is how you do it. Do not hurry. source

The DFW metroplex was ranked 15th best metro area to live in the U.S.

More science: 3-D graphene is 10x stronger than steel and much lighter.

The torch is being passed for TV coverage of the Olympics from one Syracuse alum to another: Bob Costas to Mike Tirico.

While we're on the topic of The Orange, Syracuse University has a new typeface called Sherman.

A periodic table with the cells sized by the element's relative abundance.

Just in case you ever needed some, this website generates progress bars from Unicode symbols.

I only know one person who might be interested in having their ashes pressed into a vinyl record.

How about 10 hours of ambient sounds from an Arctic icebreaker? Wind, snow, and crunching ice.

I couldn't use this on my work blog because it's NSFW but photographer Dani Olivier's Dressed in Light series might as well be called dressed in meshes.

Tears in the Rain, an unofficial Blade Runner short film.

Here's an online painting app that comes close to looking like the real thing.

Composing your own whale song with WhaleSynth seems like a cool idea but I can't get it to make a single sound.

Or you could just play around with this interactive Julia set fractal.

...Everything we see is a perspective, not a truth. ~Marcus Aurelius