CULTURESHOCK – What a word. What a bombastic term. An utterance to strike fear in every exchange student’s heart. CULTURESHOCK! I experienced cultureshock the other day while buying some impressively large broccoli at Trader Joe’s. The cashier was enthusiastic. “Hey there. Would you like a bag?” “Yes please.” So far so good. The man pushes the broccoli across the scanner. […]
We spend much our lives chasing enough of something, to place into something else: words for our thesis, lines for our programs, lovers for our hearts and a long list of other trinkets for the pockets of our life which may or may not be representable as a finite number of Hilbert space products–but what about the spaces between our […]
Exit the smoke filled house you’re partying in tonight. Take off the cat ears. Put your shirt back on and lace up your shoes. The only fear your friends have tonight is having someone throw up on the Night Owl back up to campus. Run away from all of that and fall into a foggy moonlit eve in 1796. […]
A rose unfolds, unravels and blooms Days and nights waltz quickly, a shuffling one, two Past the artist child’s eyes They glow- In rivers of golds and bursts of green the eyes of the little one grow With fascination the rose unfolds to reveal everything- Everything that we are – in it beauty In it jealousy and greed The thoughts […]
Recently, TEDxSantaCruz took place. I didn’t get to go, but I loved the theme: Radical Collaboration. It made me think of those videos that feature unlikely friendships between, say, a tiger and a monkey. But really, it was about innovative approaches to problems and ideas across disciplines and boundaries. This Tea Talk featured the wonder that arises when music meets […]
Some of the greatest scientific discoveries in the past century have been due to drastic advancements in technology. Humans have developed microscopes, telescopes, particle colliders, submarines, spectrometers … all of these inventions have revolutionized our understanding of the world around us. Amidst this incredible technology it is easy to forget that, armed with our curiosity, we once only used our […]
When pondering the universe, we can think of it as an iceberg floating in the ocean. All that we can see – the planets, the stars, the galaxies – is within the tip. Roughly one-tenth of the volume of an iceberg is above the water. Similarly, what we can “see” of the universe makes up only around 15% of the […]
As I write my genetics lab report while listening to Imagine Dragon’s Radioactive for perhaps the 88th time on the radio, I contemplate whether people can really be radioactive. Wikipedia tells me yes– we earthlings indeed radiate some gamma rays thanks to a miniscule amount of naturally present Potassium-40 in our bodies. Some of this we get from bananas. But […]
context for this post: http://youtu.be/ZB39jT0qq3Y Science is ruining my life. I came to this conclusion the same way I rationale all my life philosophies: partially drunk and alone in my bed, unable to sleep at three in the morning. Three a.m. is a majestic time because I’m not as inebriated as the hours prior and the sheer exhaustion makes for […]
Existence is an empty subway car and my soul sits in a seat along for the ride. There are three dances that walked in and sat down next to me. They sat down as if this was where they always knew they would sit, as if us four crowded into one corner of an empty subway car was the most […]