Stunning archival photos of vintage NASA (and NASA predecessor NACA) facilities.
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America’s management of its wild animals has evolved, or maybe devolved, into a surreal kind of performance art.
Making of the incredible A Boy and His Atom, the world’s smallest movie made by moving actual atoms frame by frame.
Meanwhile, Disney chief scientist Heinz Haber, born 100 years ago today, explains the atom in a 1957 Tomorrowland broadcast and a wonderful related illustrated book titled Our Friend the Atom.
Scientists have another name for failure: data. Expecting that your first stab at a big project will succeed is not only unrealistic, but a bit lazy. We should consider ourselves “tinkering scientists” on our quest to create, with each failure just another data point.
At the 2013 99U Conference, Stanford Technology Ventures director Tina Seelig, author of inGenius: A Crash Course on Creativity, echoes Neil Gaiman’s timeless advice on failure and the creative life.
A wise woman once said it even better.
Also see Steve Jobs on the fear of failure.
Part modern art, part science – mesmerizing gallery of Saturn GIFs captured by the Cassini spacecraft. Pair with these stunning technicolor images of Saturn.
We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and there is no learning. There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt. People search for certainty. But there is no certainty. People are terrified — how can you live and not know? It is not odd at all. You only think you know, as a matter of fact. And most of your actions are based on incomplete knowledge and you really don’t know what it is all about, or what the purpose of the world is, or know a great deal of other things. It is possible to live and not know.
Richard Feynman, born on May 11, 1918, on the role of scientific culture in modern society – timeless, remarkably timely read.
Pair with how ignorance drives science.
At 10:30 Darwin returned to his study and did more work until noon or a quarter after. He considered this the end of his workday, and would often remark in a satisfied voice, “I’ve done a good day’s work.
The best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table: Pay people enough so that they’re not thinking about money and they’re thinking about the work. Once you do that, it turns out there are three factors that the science shows lead to better performance, not to mention personal satisfaction: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.
When the profit motive gets unmoored from the purpose motive, bad things happen.
Dan Pink on the surprising science of what motivates us.
Joe Hanson examines the sciences of what it is about music that makes us feel all those feelings. Pair with 7 essential books about music, emotion, and the brain.
