Remove all the space within the atoms making up the human body, and every person that’s ever lived would fit inside a baseball.
NPR’s Robert Krulwich explains.
Robert Krulwich
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We live our lives at human speed, we experience and interact with the world on a human time scale. But this hour, we put ourselves through the paces, peek inside a microsecond, and master the fastest thing in the universe.
Fantastic new Radiolab episode about speed stretches the human scale to a breaking point. Complement with Bill Cosby’s strategies for speed-reading.
Radiolab has dome more for science storytelling than anyone since Carl Sagan and is supported by audience contributions – make yours here.
We wax, we wane. It’s the dance of life. Every living thing is a pulse. We quicken, then we fade. There is a deep beauty in this, but deeper down, inside every plant, every leaf, inside every living thing (us included) sits a secret. … Everything alive will eventually die, we know that, but now we can read the pattern and see death coming.
Nature Has A Formula That Tells Us When It’s Time To Die – Robert Krulwich + animated GIFs, what’s not to love? A fascinating scientific case for the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi, an awareness Henry Miller articulated beautifully more than half a century ago.
Or, as Leslie Paul wrote in 1944, “All life is no more than a match struck in the dark and blown out again.”
The most and the least important event I witnessed in 2012. I’m walking past a school. Two girls, maybe six years old, wearing parkas, carrying bookbags, come flying out the school door, step in front of me close enough for me to hear, and one of them leans toward the other says says, “What if you’re a serial killer? Who’s going to be your friend then?” I turn. The two girls are weighing this question. Having friends—this is a thing they know. Everybody needs one, even the nastiest among us, but this is a toughie. They stop to mull: Who might like a serial killer? “Maybe…” says the second girl, “other serial killers?” They look at each other, uncertain. (Not a big enough pool? Is that what they’re thinking?) Then the first girl says, “I know!” “What?” says the second. “How about just…killers?” More to choose from! They hug. Problem solved. They walk up the block holding hands. Friends are the solution to everything. This is their news. This is what they know.
Gold from NPR science correspondent and storyteller extraordinaire Robert Krulwich.
