The Pride

We have the privilege to be educated. Don’t waste that.

(via dontstop-study)

Shooting in Midtown, Manhattan, getting soaked in the pouring rain. This kind of mood is something I’ve been trying to capture for a long time now, I spent about an hour out in the water and shot frames until my camera died.

Photography by Dave Krugman, @dave.krugman on Instagram.

Once you start thinking of ‘poet’ as identity, once you start thinking that being a poet is just like being anything else that you are, as being something else that you were born, then you can go about doing the things that poets do, and you can go about that more comfortably. Or at least I think so. Or at least it gives you a rationale for why you’re doing what poets do. Like, ‘Why are you still in the dark, trying to read, at two o’clock in the morning?’ ‘Oh, because I’m a poet.’ ‘Why are you pulling your car over to write a line down and you’re already late to where you’re going?’ ‘Because I’m a poet.’

Jericho Brown, interviewed by Elisa Gonzalez for Washington Square Review (via bostonpoetryslam)

Still image from Mexican science fiction-noir film La Pantera Negra.

Schrodinger’s Bears

A group of researchers have trained pigeons to identify malignant breast tissue in exchange for pigeon pellets. Here’s the real, not made up study.

This doesn’t mean hospitals will start employing pigeons. But it does suggest that studying pigeons could help us teach doctors how to process medical images. From the study:

Pigeons (Columba livia)—which share many visual system properties with humans—can serve as promising surrogate observers of medical images, a capability not previously documented. 

… The birds’ successes and difficulties suggest that pigeons are well-suited to help us better understand human medical image perception, and may also prove useful in performance assessment and development of medical imaging hardware, image processing, and image analysis tools.

Image credit: Levenson et. al.

“I like to sit alone and think about the world. I wanted to be a philosophy major, but there is no philosophy class at our universities. The only class offered is ‘Religion and Philosophy.’ We aren’t exactly encouraged to decide things for ourselves. Any philosophy we have must be built on the existence of God. So I switched my major to physics. It still allows me to think about the world. And if someone wants me to say that a thing is true, they need to prove it with a formula.“ (Tehran, Iran)

Class in session as Planet X starts it off with our favorite dense objects: 

Neutron Stars!

http://www.space.com/22180-neutron-stars.html