A billion years in the blink of an eye

Via kottke.org

Architecture of Immanence

Mega church images by German photographer, Christoph Morlinghaus – like something from David Lynch's Dune:



Best viewed whilst listening to Brian Eno's "Prophecy Theme"...

The Spirit of Enquiry

Remarkable images of the Large Hadron Collider by photographer Simon Norfolk, commissioned for the New York Times Magazine:



"Seeing the Large Hadron Collider at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland, and I was amazed that it resembled the view one has bending one's neck back and looking up into the cupola of an English cathedral, or the domes of the mosques I once photographed in Isfahan. In vast, columned chambers, the blades of the LHC were being assembled in an atmosphere of methodical, industrial piety. But when I made the final prints, they seemed to resemble crop circles or Tibetan mandalas. One of the disks is even fronted by a massive, stonehenge-like monolith."

The Exploration of Space

Vintage NASA photographs from the collection of Victor Martin-Malburet were recently sold at London's Bloomsbury Auctions. Wish I had a spare couple-of-hundred quid!...

This is astronaut David Scott from Apollo 15, August 1971. Scott is on the slope of Hadley Delta, some 10.5 miles from the base of the Apennine Mountains seen in the background.

Copernicus crater and its mountainous landscape, Lunar Orbiter 2, November 1966. The remarkable clarity is attributable to the absence of atmosphere.

The CSM in lunar orbit, seen from the LM, Apollo 15, August 1971

The Agena Target Vehicle illuminated by the Sun in Earth orbit, Gemini 10, July 1966. Mission pilot Michael Collins earned the dubious honour of becoming the first person to lose a camera in space during his spacewalk.

Gift of Apollo

This almost made me weep... almost...

Semantic Satiation

The thing that happens when you say a word over and over and then it doesn't sound like that word anymore...

From Wikipedia:
The explanation for the phenomenon was that verbal repetition repeatedly aroused a specific neural pattern in the cortex which corresponds to the meaning of the word. Rapid repetition causes both the peripheral sensorimotor activity and the central neural activation to fire repeatedly, which is known to cause reactive inhibition, hence a reduction in the intensity of the activity with each repetition.

Semiconductor: 20Hz

A Semiconductor piece by Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt.

Audio Data courtesy of CARISMA, operated by the University of Alberta, funded by the Canadian Space Agency.

"20 Hz observes a geo-magnetic storm occurring in the Earth's upper atmosphere. Working with data collected from the CARISMA radio array and interpreted as audio, we hear tweeting and rumbles caused by incoming solar wind, captured at the frequency of 20 Hertz. Generated directly by the sound, tangible and sculptural forms emerge suggestive of scientific visualisations. As different frequencies interact both visually and aurally, complex patterns emerge to create interference phenomena that probe the limits of our perception."

Via It's Nice That (and Ruth)