PETER MARTIN

n-a-s-a:

M74: The Perfect Spiral

Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage (STScI / AURA)- ESA / Hubble Collaboration Acknowledgment: R. Chandar (Univ. Toledo) and J. Miller (Univ. Michigan)

vimeo:

Today is a big day - one of the biggest in the short-ish history of our small-ish company. For the past year (37 years in Internet time), we’ve been working nonstop on a project that we’ve desperately wanted to tell you about. Because, frankly, it’s all about you. Our willpower muscles are pretty much at the breaking point right now, and so we are doubly ecstatic to finally let the tiger out of the satchel and make this officially official announcement: We built you a new Vimeo.

To learn more about these new big things in more detail, head over to vimeo.com/new. It’s also the place where members can sign up to try the new Vimeo as we roll it out over the next few weeks. Go ahead - you know you want to check it out!

New Vimeo layout looks pretty amazing. Given how much I love the “old” Vimeo and how many innovative sketches and mockups I’ve seen from Sox over the years, I’m looking forward to my invite.

curiositycounts:

Christoph Niemann charts the elements of happiness and creativity at work.

PROTEIGON stop motion short film (by BURAYAN)

THIS.

robertreich:

An Offer to the President

Mr. President, we heard what you said last week in Kansas – about the dangers to our economy and democracy of the increasing concentration of income and wealth at the top.

We agree. And many of us are prepared to work our hearts to get you reelected –…

jayparkinsonmd:

Here’s a snippet from a wonderfully written piece, called How Doctors Die. Please read all of it.

But doctors still don’t over-treat themselves. They see the consequences of this constantly. Almost anyone can find a way to die in peace at home, and pain can be managed better than ever. Hospice care, which focuses on providing terminally ill patients with comfort and dignity rather than on futile cures, provides most people with much better final days. Amazingly, studies have found that people placed in hospice care often live longer than people with the same disease who are seeking active cures. I was struck to hear on the radio recently that the famous reporter Tom Wicker had “died peacefully at home, surrounded by his family.” Such stories are, thankfully, increasingly common.

Several years ago, my older cousin Torch (born at home by the light of a flashlight—or torch) had a seizure that turned out to be the result of lung cancer that had gone to his brain. I arranged for him to see various specialists, and we learned that with aggressive treatment of his condition, including three to five hospital visits a week for chemotherapy, he would live perhaps four months. Ultimately, Torch decided against any treatment and simply took pills for brain swelling. He moved in with me.

We spent the next eight months doing a bunch of things that he enjoyed, having fun together like we hadn’t had in decades. We went to Disneyland, his first time. We’d hang out at home. Torch was a sports nut, and he was very happy to watch sports and eat my cooking. He even gained a bit of weight, eating his favorite foods rather than hospital foods. He had no serious pain, and he remained high-spirited. One day, he didn’t wake up. He spent the next three days in a coma-like sleep and then died. The cost of his medical care for those eight months, for the one drug he was taking, was about $20.

Torch was no doctor, but he knew he wanted a life of quality, not just quantity. Don’t most of us? If there is a state of the art of end-of-life care, it is this: death with dignity. As for me, my physician has my choices. They were easy to make, as they are for most physicians. There will be no heroics, and I will go gentle into that good night. Like my mentor Charlie. Like my cousin Torch. Like my fellow doctors.

The first photo is how many people die nowadays— in a hospital surrounded by nurses and doctors and beeping machines. The second is a self-portrait I took the day my grandmother died peacefully in her own home in July 2009. It’s really up to you to choose.

robertreich:

Newt Gingrich has done it again. With his new tax plan he has raised the bar from what is simply irresponsible to wildly reckless.

Every dollar estimate I’m about to share with you comes from the independent, non-partisan Tax Policy Center – a group whose estimates are used by almost everyone on…

Make sure you click through to read the whole post. These are the stakes.

darcibastiaan:

My name is Patrick Meighan, and I’m a husband, a father, a writer on the Fox animated sitcom “Family Guy”, and a member of the Unitarian Universalist Community Church of Santa Monica.

I was arrested at about 1 a.m. Wednesday morning with 291 other people at Occupy LA. I was sitting in City Hall Park with a pillow, a blanket, and a copy of Thich Nhat Hanh’s “Being Peace” when 1,400 heavily-armed LAPD officers in paramilitary SWAT gear streamed in. I was in a group of about 50 peaceful protestors who sat Indian-style, arms interlocked, around a tent (the symbolic image of the Occupy movement). The LAPD officers encircled us, weapons drawn, while we chanted “We Are Peaceful” and “We Are Nonviolent” and “Join Us.”

As we sat there, encircled, a separate team of LAPD officers used knives to slice open every personal tent in the park. They forcibly removed anyone sleeping inside, and then yanked out and destroyed any personal property inside those tents, scattering the contents across the park. They then did the same with the communal property of the Occupy LA movement. For example, I watched as the LAPD destroyed a pop-up canopy tent that, until that moment, had been serving as Occupy LA’s First Aid and Wellness tent, in which volunteer health professionals gave free medical care to absolutely anyone who requested it. As it happens, my family had personally contributed that exact canopy tent to Occupy LA, at a cost of several hundred of my family’s dollars. As I watched, the LAPD sliced that canopy tent to shreds, broke the telescoping poles into pieces and scattered the detritus across the park. Note that these were the objects described in subsequent mainstream press reports as “30 tons of garbage” that was “abandoned” by Occupy LA: personal property forcibly stolen from us, destroyed in front of our eyes and then left for maintenance workers to dispose of while we were sent to prison.

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9-bits:

If you’re still using Quicksilver or even (gasp) Google Quick Search Box for your trigger-happy computing, take note: It’s time to move to Alfred.

It’s also worth noting that Quicksilver development has, once again, started back up. I’m still sold on the switch to Alfred, though, and happy with the current momentum.

I’m curious but incredibly conflicted. Quicksilver is OSX in my mind…though this looks pretty spectacular at first glance.

dvdp:

Complete time-lapse video of the Sun, spanning the entire months of September, October and November 2011 as seen through the SWAP ultraviolet instrument onboard the European Space Agency spacecraft Proba-2.

Roy Orbison - Crying

Speaks for itself, methinks.

theniftyfifties:

Model wearing a winter coat and argyle socks, 1950s.

Nobody’s worried about the creep in the background who’s clearly planning to murder this poor woman?

Steve Jobs’ Vision of the World (by gocarlo)

“Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.”

There are too many good cops out there to let goons like this keep their jobs.

balltillifall:

Also, the offending officer in that pictures name is Lt. John Pike and his boss’s phone number is (530) 752-3113.

balltillifall:

motherjones:

UC Davis police officer pepper sprays sitting students because, well, just because.

Think that’s %$#ing horrible? The video’s worse.

Via John Aravosis at AmericaBlog:

I’m sorry, this has gone too far. This has happened in police department after police department, and it has gone too far. Our police look like the goons in Russia and China. Please watch this video and send it to everyone you know. This has gone too far.

Occupy Wall Street is a really important moment for our country if for no other reason than it serves as a litmus test for how we’re doing as an open, just, and democratic society. And I’m sad to say the test results are not great.