If you haven’t seen the deluge of “Roger Ebert is awesome and moving” posts on the internet about his Oprah interview, here is all the good stuff from Gawker.
Often we ask, “Why does it take tragedy for us to notice these great people?” The reason is that it is not tragedy but crisis, that beautiful fusion of danger and opportunity wherein the choice to persist or to succumb highlights and underlines the qualities latent in a human being. It’s why our favorite stories all involve a crisis, and our favorite heroes are forged in the hottest crucibles. Ebert was always a great man in the making, but cancer was his kiln and fired him into a work of heroic art.
Transhumanists, like nearly everyone else on the planet, are obsessed with human nature. Unlike others, we are obsessed with it because some believe we are in constant danger of undermining or ruining it with the technologies and ideas transhumanists support. I believe human nature is orders of magnitude more resilient than proposed by the Fukuyamas and Kasses of the world. Each of us constructs a self-identity based on what we’ve been given. For Ebert, his voice was not his self because it just was, but because the man talked and talked and talked. He tells stories about how no one could shut him up and the very fact that there was enough pre-recorded audio for his artificial voice to be made is proof of that. Alternatively, a man like Stephen Hawking has done guest appearances on The Simpsons and Futurama with his “artificial” voice, because it is the voice he has had for the bulk of his life.
Ebert has been, in effect, reborn through his disease, rediscovered by the media and public at large, in no small part to the Esquire article chronicling his life. I am very, very excited to see what he does next.
Apropos of the last post, why I am a design buff is stuff like this body map from Sam Lomen:
[via Gizmodo via Behance via StreetAnatomy via TheDailyWhat]
Awesome posters from Travis Pitts:
via io9
Warning, NSFW. Click to embiggen:
Done in 23 panes (as in the # of chromosomes). The artist takes to the Three Fs school of history: fighting, fashion, and fucking. Ladies are there to be ogled and make babies, non-Western cultures are static, and science and tech are there to enable the three Fs. via reddit.
What Wikipedia taught me about today: Borromean Rings. Pictured is the Discordian Mandala.
Yikes:
I always wonder if art like Clark’s makes people more apt to oppose hybridization research or if it desensitizes them to the fear.
[Kate Clark, via The Dish]
Richard Eskow makes the counter-intuitive argument over at Boing Boing. My two favorite points:
Elvis was not willing to accept traditional gender boundaries. Even as a teenager in Tupelo, Mississippi, Elvis dyed his hair and enhanced the beauty of his eyes with eyeliner. He wore a pink sport coat, in violation of gender norms, complemented by black peg leg slacks. Yet he contrasted the seeming feminity of these gestures with hypermasculine body movements and abnormally large sideburns (facial hair being an evolutionary cue for male dominance.)
…
Elvis transcended racial boundaries, too, adopting a singing style so African-American that when he was interviewed on Memphis radio for the first time the DJ asked him which high school he attended. Why? Because Elvis went to an all-white school in those segregated days, and the answer (Humes High, for trivia buffs) told surprised listeners he had slipped from bonds that his white peers assumed were genetically sealed.
Love it.
A friend pointed me to Luke Jerram’s “Glass Microbiology” project, from which is the above photo of an e. coli bacterium. His work, plus the Vanity Fair article on the LHC which referred to the super-collider as a “cathedral to science” and listed its sublime statistics, got me thinking about a common refrain among Christian apologists.
The old adage is that one of religion’s big advantages over science is that it inspires Art, like the Sistine Chapel and The Last Supper and the Hallelujah Chorus. What is funny about this assertion is that it is often ignored that Da Vinci’s technical diagrams and anatomical sketches are also Art and that Raphael painted The School of Athens. But those aren’t winning arguments, they’re just exceptions that prove the rule.
The first decade of the 21st century, however, is perhaps finally living up to the possibility of a Sistine Chapel of science. I don’t know if this will ultimately be seen as the historical function of postmodernism, but it seems that our ability to “read anything as a text” has finally let us start seeing the beauty in our scientific engineering and the most basic forms of life.
Pop Transhumanism | Kyle Munkittrick | 
March 3, 2010 9:30 am | 
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