One Year Later: Still Loving FreshPaper

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FreshPaper at WholeFoodsEver since finding out about Fenugreen’s FreshPaper from its inventor Kavita Shukla at the 2012 Harvard Social Enterprise Conference, I’ve been using FreshPaper in my refrigerator and on my kitchen counter because it works; veggies look great when I don’t have a chance to cook them as soon as I’d like, and fruits don’t get fuzzy as quickly as they did before. Even though I’ve always tried to keep my food waste due to spoilage as minimal as possible, I appreciate the help FreshPaper lends.

And what really makes this a fantastic product is that it can be useful for people almost anywhere, whether in developed or developing nations. For my friends and I, food spoilage often means disappointment, guilt and inconvenience, but of course, food spoilage means not being able to eat what could have been eaten, which can have terrible consequences.

Is It Time To Geoengineer? Find Out More At Harvard Tomorrow

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earth, temperature viewDoes geoengineering/climate engineering (in the form of altering our atmosphere on a global scale) hold the promise of successfully mitigating climate change?

When I first heard about geoengineering a few years ago via Technology Review, I dismissed it as outlandish and dangerous. After all, we have a bad track record of altering our world on large scales in detrimental ways. Then a few months ago, I attended a talk by David Keith that completely changed my mind. Given the current and future extent of climate change, putting sulfur compounds into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight may be viable and even desirable.

Tomorrow, Alan Robock of Rutgers University shares some views on taking on climate change with climate change during his talk at Harvard entitled “Smoke and Mirrors:  Is Geoengineering a Solution to Global Warming?” Whether geoengineering ends up providing a solution that we implement or not, it’s great that we’re exploring and discussing the possibilities it offers.

Diabolically Simple, Fiendishly Unforgiving: Super Hexagon

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super hexagon

I’ve spent a sizable chunk of time over the past few days fatiguing my neurons with the iPad/iPhone game Super Hexagon. After finding it in the Impossible Games section of the iTunes Store with a high rating, I decided to spend the $2.99 and go go for it. Impossible indeed. For the first several attempts, I didn’t last more than 3 seconds; the little triangle I was trying struggling to keep from colliding into the lines closing in, that small shape near the center of the screen quickly crashed into the converging stripes as I dizzily fumbled with the controls. Since then, I’ve managed to make it through about 30 seconds of the game.

I love how the game’s concept is so simple, yet the gameplay is unrelentingly challenging. That along with the high-energy, retro-video-game soundtrack keep me coming back for more—and pleasantly getting a little more each time. I didn’t think I’d be able to make it to 30 seconds so soon. Just hope that progress keeps up.

The video below shows what successful gameplay looks like. I can’t believe someone can do that. Then again, it’s pretty amazing what we can train our brains to do.

Entailments of Space-Time Topology

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He carried the sorrow hideous and odious, heavy and jagged through the depths of space, towards the edge of the universe. There he would discard it because he knew that as long as they occupied the same universe, the sorrow would gravitate back to him, or more accurately, they would gravitate towards one another, drawn together by the invisible, fundamental forces governing the matter composing each of them. Continue reading →

When We Were Not Alone

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Centuries later, after their sudden, enigmatic departure, I read an obscure xenologist’s brief, in- formal account of “Superlove” – what she and her contemporaries called the crucial core of the Xunirics’ emotional constitution.

 

To make our relations more comfortable, the Xunirics have taken human form, a relatively facile transformation in appearance for them to undertake, a triffling inconvenience to remedy all the attention we’d ineluctably lavish upon them in their natural form. But of course, this change in outward presentation doesn’t distract us from the fact that the Xunirics have an emotional force intensely outshining any of our own. It’s like love but all the more so. Someone began calling it Superlove, and the name stuck. Continue reading →

With Regard to the Presupposed Ubiquity of Happy Endings

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In childhood, we are weaned on a particular happy ending archetype, and through regular feedings, we become accustomed to the taste of this sweet, succulent abstraction. We come to later feast and gorge upon more sophisticated renditions of the archetype rich in savory and zesty motifs. This leads us to not only crave actual, specific happy endings but also believe that these instantiations of the delectable paradigm are plentiful, made and obtained straightforwardly without consequence, something to which we are entitled, deserving, even guaranteed.

In reality, happy endings as we know them are manufactured products synthesized from a combination of various natural resources – some scarce, others fairly abundant – all embedded deep within the Earth, mixed with other substances known collectively to us as impurities. Continue reading →

Currently Looking At: An Incomplete Dictionary of Show Birds

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A couple evenings ago, I sat down with a recently received copy of An Incomplete Dictionary of Show Birds, a photo book of colorful little birds. The images and paper are of excellent quality, and the subjects of these avian portraits range from cute to comical to curious. Though it might only take handful of minutes to go straight through the book, it’s easy to linger for a good while on certain photographs and easy to want to take another look at some of the subjects later.

Visually very enjoyable if you at all like birds. Here are some of my favorites.

Love, with a little help from Google

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It’s been a while since I saw this TV ad in a showcase of award-winning commercials, but I still find it amazing how it tells a story with just Google searches, music and background sounds in under a minute. An interesting take on how our relationship with technology can be (and often is) interwoven with our relationships with each other. Starting the commercial with a blank search bar reminds me of just how much information and how many possibilities we can now come into contact with.

Other stories in this SearchStories channel are quite good too. “Graduation” is nicely done.