On this week’s episode, Nathan, Mike, and Mahler talk about the Drunken Monkey, Darwin’s notebooks, laying eggs, Monkey Queen redux, the BirdBot, a river’s liver, marine snow, houses out-earning humans, child marriages, wired baseball, the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement Act, meatballs, and so on.
In 2017 — the 50th anniversary of the modestly named Summer of Love — Researchers from the Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics at Zurich University determined that LSD can turn a common event into a game-changing sacred experience. This heightened transformation in meaning takes place due to the stimulation of certain serotonin receptors not only during an acid trip, but after — in-other-words, with LSD, personal change could be…
I like crows not because of James O’Barr, Brendon Lee, Carlos Castaneda or Irish cock and bull mythology. It’s not because of the crow’s “nevermore” reputation, their association with a staged dark underworld, either — a spooky crow profile unfairly earned during the plague, when crows plucked the eyes from the dead. As well they should. It was good eating — food on the run. Eyes of corpses are hassle-free…
The German philosopher Theodor Adorno once said, “It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident.” We’re at a point in time when nearly everyone has access to producing artistic things. But when replication, sampling, mashups and mixdowns are thought of as art — what becomes of process? The making of art? Does it vanish into a programmed format or does it flourish?
The 2010 Applied Brilliance Conference in Ojai, California featured talks on Resilience and Revolution. Among the presenters were Adam Gazzaley, director of the Neuroscience Imaging Center at the University of California; E.C. Krupp, Director of Griffith Observatory; Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, electronic artist; Mark Kingwell, author of the national bestseller Nearest Thing to Heaven; Saul Griffith the Chief Scientist at Other Lab; and Nathan Callahan, who spoke on The Open Air Museum,…
A sleepy-eyed early-morning riser retrieving the morning paper in her bathrobe stands bow-legged, slack-mouth stunned. A driver of a Toyota van brakes abruptly to a stop — blocking an intersection. Ignoring my 7 a.m. walk through central Irvine, the group lopes down the middle of the street (one with a sideways glance). In close formation, their tongues dangling, they pass the community clubhouse, the pool, the tennis courts and the…
