There's been a firestorm brewing recently surrounding Yelp's credibility, fueled mostly my confused business owners. As an engineer at Yelp it's really difficult to sit back and listen to people lambast your product or business practices as unethical, especially when they claim that we take actions requiring capabilities that I, as en engineer, know do not exist. At any rate, via one of my colleagues, here's a reasonably balanced article that stands out amidst the absurdity.
Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars - mere globs of gas atoms. Nothing is 'mere'. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination - stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern - of which I am a part... What is the pattern or the meaning or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little more about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent.
motion pictures re-imagined as novel covers.
"In a blast from the past, NASA reports that Spirit's solar panels have received a much-needed cleaning courtesy of the Red Planet. The report states, 'The cleaning boosts Spirit's daily energy supply by about 30 watt-hours, to about 240 watt-hours from 210 watt-hours. The rover uses about 180 watt-hours per day for basic survival and communications, so this increase roughly doubles the amount of discretionary power for activities such as driving and using instruments."
via marc
via nema
they are a hundred thousand reasons,
these raindrops that claw their way through the sky, rushing just to
smash apart against this cement patio like the thunder claps
that detonate against these village walls.
a hundred thousand tiny, insignificant
fractions
of some colossal memory,
fragments
of a life we left behind in the crumpled sheets,
the lights dimmed, sweat and tears -
we slept damp and alone, pressed up against each other.
once a dove, cleaved from its flock,
flew in through my bedroom window,
lost and scared...
so i locked the door behind me and
hoped it would find its
way
awesome. via audrey.
despite the fact that it's in USA Today, this is supposedly not a joke.