oneironaut

Always on the weekends, I have the more vivid, detailed dream sequences. I do not know if there's particularly brilliant or inspired in them as they always slip away too quickly no matter what kind of discipline I try—or fail to implement—and it seems I usually recall the plotlines in a general sense only during the next time I am dreaming.

It's not a continuation of one story but I get the hazy sense of there being something epic and on-going that I cannot piece together. Whatever therapeutic properties dreams have I think never come through directly, and surely no one's psyche is wired in the same ways, but it is an interesting suggestion that every character in the dream is the dreamer, sort of like in Being John Malcovich, when the actor learned in the real world about the production-planning for such a film rather shocked the director by asking to be a part of it, instead of suing for libel and in the scene when Malcovich crawled through the portal into his own mind and was awake to see what never should be seen.

a stitch in time save nine

Mental Floss has an interesting collection of obscure units of time. For instance, did you realise that a moment, begging a moment's pardon bought one precisely ninety seconds (a minute-and-a-half's) leave? Be sure to check out the other nine non-conventional measures.

Incidentally, the next generation of atomic clocks being deployed really place the convention of timekeeping outside of human bounds and make the question of what is time wholly academic. These strontium-based clocks will not lose a fraction of a second over the course of several billion years but are so sensitive to the way gravity affects not the clockworks but distorts time itself, no two clocks could ever be exactly synchronised. This level of accuracy seems to have no direct, significant bearing on a human scale, yet the clocks and associated technologies would be able to register these corrections and aberrations. What do you think? Does close enough get out of our hands? By the way, the saying a stitch in time is a warning for would be proscrastinators—idiomatically directed at those weary of mending those little rips and snags in clothing, which if addressed early could prevent more darning to do later.

ultramarine

Via the Presurfer comes a thought provoking little piece with an abundance of other lessons and primers to explore from National Public Radio on sight and colour in Nature's kingdoms.

Of course, prior to the advent of vision as anything more acute than able to distinguish light from shadow, there was not any emphasis on what colour something was. Once, however, this feature evolved, it became terribly important and hues and shades developed at a galloping rate, in stride with mobility and strength of sight. The article goes on to tell how animals and plants synthesize pigments and what displays might convey to those who share their habitats. The fact that no higher animals can create true blue pigmentation, think blue eyes and feathers, and use tricks of refraction to give a blue appearance made me think about the Noble laureates who created a spectrally blue, and previously ellusive LED (light emitting diode) to combine with red and green to produce efficient white illumination.

bread, butter and green cheese

Aside from the better-known Anglo-Saxons that were displacing the Celtic-speaking and Romano-Briton populations of parts of the Isle of Britain, honourable-mentions ought to go to the cadet tribes of the Jutes and Frisians who joined them. Frisian is still spoken on the fringes of Denmark, the Netherlands and Germany along the North Sea and along with Scots is the closest living relation that modern English has among languages. “Bread, butter and green cheese is good English and good Fries,” is often cited as an example of the relation between the two languages but it is not a statement of mutual intelligibility. Rather, it demonstrates that each language departed from continental German and Scandinavian languages is some of the same ways. Bûter, brea, en griene tsiis, wa’t dat net sizze kin is gjin oprjochte Fries.

hyperbolic or cupid and comet

Although there seems to be some of potential engineering cliffhanger playing out with the Rossetta mission's lander having touched-down in the shadow of a crater, putting energy supply at a higher premium, scientists are nonetheless thrilled to perhaps have the chance to discover whether life on Earth might not be a thing whose basic chemicals were disseminated from somewhere far beyond—and for any other surprise for that matter.
While surely none of the astrophysicists at the European Space Agency feels anything less than great privilege to be keeping their eyes peeled, pouring over the imagery the excellent BLDGBlog did pick up on an interesting aside of not leaving the scanning up to a machine, as there's no precedence for this sort of topography and geometry, lumpy, weird gravity with the potential to create some curious features. Admitting that some new and novel encounters are beyond the biases programmed into the algorithms of computers, blindspots, evasion tactics that yield machines focusing on input that not the sought after output makes for an engrossing dialogue about those limitations of performance. The proofers, however prone to missing something or pareidolia, I am sure are excited to be doing it the old-fashioned way.