Realizing Our Place in the Universe
“This image, captured with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, is the largest and sharpest image ever taken of the Andromeda galaxy — otherwise known as M31.This is a cropped version of the full image and has 1.5 billion pixels. You would need more than 600 HD television screens to display the whole image.”
via Sharpest ever view of the Andromeda Galaxy | ESA/Hubble.
I had to download the 4.3 GB file. For science.
Let’s Play Two
“He was Mr. Cub and no other player in franchise history — or in the club’s future — will ever be adored in the same way.”
via Cubs Hall of Famer Ernie Banks dead at 83
R.I.P. Mr Cub
Sad day for us Cubs fans and baseball fans in general. What a great man. We should all earn from his example
Nonprofits and Affordable Marketing
Interesting thread here from a non-profit group looking for good, but cheap, marketing. We hear this every day (multiple times) as Harrelson Agency mainly focuses on helping non-profits, religious groups, community organizations, and startups get marketing right.
My solution? Realize that marketing is an investment, and one that you should budget for wisely but not try to push off to someone on your internal team who doesn’t have the time or skills to do more than update your Facebook page.
How does my startup hire an affordable marketing expert?
We’re a non-profit niche social networking company serving a minority group. We are have a volunteer working on marketing our pending web social network app, however as CEO, I’m looking forward to hire an expert in web marketing tactics mainly to help make our launch a successful one.
The main role of the person is with helping us plan with our marketing strategies as well as helping us implement them. We are very hard pressed with resources, what’s the best way to hire one which we can afford, at say a rate of $10/hr or even less. I really do not have trust in freelance websites because of the poor quality I’ve received from them so far.
via How does my startup hire an affordable marketing expert? — Clarity.
Sweet Carolina
“I bought a borrowed suit and learned to dance
I was spending money like the way it likes to rain
Man I ended up with pockets full of cane
Oh my sweet Carolina
What compels me to go
Oh my sweet disposition…”
via Ryan Adams – Oh My Sweet Carolina – Live On Letterman – YouTube.
State of the Union… in emoji
If digital archaeologists ever “dig this up” 2,000 years from now, they’ll surely be puzzled by our lapse back into character driven hieroglyphics (complete with the ability to hover over emoji’s if you can’t figure it out):
Barack Obama said his address to Congress this year was all about “finding areas where we agree, so we can deliver for the American people”. And if there’s one thing we can all agree upon, it’s emojis. Hover over an emoji to see the president’s actual words.
Economic Virtue
We’ve been taught to think that the only economic virtue is competitiveness. This is a faith: I’ll get into it for all I’m worth, seeking the maximum advantage for myself.
Do Vegetarians Eat Eggs?
A few days ago, Merianna asked me if I was still eating eggs. It’s a good question, after all. Part of my 2015 package of resolutions (trying to make it sound congressional) was to not eat meat or animals unless I killed them (which is unlikely, but had to make that allowance).
When I moved to Connecticut for graduate school, I became vegetarian for a while. It didn’t hurt that there was an abundance of vegetarian shops around me, as well as a falafel stand right outside of the house where I had an apartment. I even dabbled with being a vegan for a short time but couldn’t stomach that much tofu cheese.
As a matter of theology, I decided 2015 would be the year I’d stop eating meat altogether. So Merianna’s question this week was a valid one.
I said “no” to eggs (again, out of a theological choice based on how eggs arrive in our grocery stores). If we had chickens or got the eggs from my parents’ collection of chickens, I’d have no problem eating them.
On her podcast with Elisabeth this week, Merianna starts with her take on the discussion. It’s a fun listen.
Are Eggs Vegetarian?
Keeping the Canon
The older I get, the more I want to share the joys of “the canon” and liberal arts in general. Every generation feels that its world is slipping into the morass of public, but our Amazon reviews and Buzzfeed listicles don’t make me feel any more assured that we’re not…
Although serious writers continue to work in the hope that time will forgive them for writing well, the prevailing mood welcomes fiction and poetry of every stripe, as long as the reading public champions it. And this I think is a huge mistake. Literature has never just been about the public (even when the public has embraced such canonical authors as Hugo, Dickens, and Tolstoy). Literature has always been a conversation among writers who borrow, build upon, and deviate from each other’s words. Forgetting this, we forget that aesthetics is not a social invention, that democracy is not an aesthetic category; and that the dismantling of hierarchies is tantamount to an erasure of history.
via What We Lose if We Lose the Canon – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education.