I can barely remember yesterday.

By Andreas Dober (via designsquish).

W. B. Yeats, When you are old:

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes once had, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face among a crowd of stars.

Hungarian director Béla Tarr’s film Sátántangó has a running time of over seven hours. Thankfully that’s not the only remarkable thing about it.

Marcus Aurelius

Seneca the Younger

“That which Fortune has not given, she cannot take away.”

“Let Nature deal with matter, which is her own, as she pleases; let us be cheerful and brave in the face of everything, reflecting that it is nothing of our own that perishes.”

The wikipedia page for Stoicism has some nice quotes to illustrate the philosophy. Those above are just a selection of ones I like most.

Addendum: Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations is online.

The person who dredged up this old BBC documentary and took the trouble of uploading it to youtube in 6 parts is presumably an example of someone upon whose life Proust made an impression. Proustian sentence unintended.

The volume of the videos is pretty low, so this article on how to boost youtube video volume beyond the maximum may come in handy.

Multi-projection film Berlin Horse (1970) was based entirely on a novel but simple idea of a repeating, subtly changing film loop. The soundtrack created by Brian Eno was also implemented using a tape loop

Youtube link.

Above is an interview with the filmmaker Malcoln Le Grice from 2008. Youtube link.

Here’s a video I made almost a month ago but didn’t reveal because I wasn’t sure whether I liked it or not. Looking at it again, I like it enough.

Shakespeare’s Sonnet CXXIII

No, Time, thou shalt not boast that I do change:
Thy pyramids built up with newer might
To me are nothing novel, nothing strange;
They are but dressings of a former sight.
Our dates are brief, and therefore we admire
What thou dost foist upon us that is old,
And rather make them born to our desire
Than think that we before have heard them told.
Thy registers and thee I both defy,
Not wondering at the present nor the past,
For thy records and what we see doth lie,
Made more or less by thy continual haste.
This I do vow and this shall ever be;
I will be true, despite thy scythe and thee.

Ten years ago, while experimenting with rats, [Joseph] Ledoux made a discovery that changed the way neuroscientists view memory [...].

In that experiment, Ledoux conditioned rats to fear a bell by ringing it in time with an electric shock until the rats froze in fear at the mere sound of the bell. Then, at the moment when the fear memory was being recalled, he injected the rats with anisomycin, a drug that stops the construction of new neural connections. Remarkably, the next time he rang the bell the rats no longer froze in fear. The memory, it seemed, had vanished. Poof!

Ledoux concluded that the neural connections in which memories are stored have to be rebuilt each time a memory is recalled. And during rebuilding—or reconsolidation, as he termed it—memories can be altered or even erased. Neuroscientists now believe that reconsolidation functions to update memories with new information—something of an unsettling idea, suggesting that our memories are only as accurate as the last time they were remembered.

!!!

Check out more images of this Father Time doll and how I made it, by viewing the full entry below. I’m particularly proud of the solution I found for his skull.

What’s this snail shell got to do with anything?

Here is pictured me gluing the shell to a golf tee and a plastic golf ball.

This whole thing sprang out of my first attempt to knit something. I knitted a length of grey cloth that was full of dropped stitches and irregularities. I justified dressing Time in such shabby attire on the basis that he probably doesn’t have many friends, let alone a tailor.

The scythe is made from a twig, some black ribbon, and a blade-shaped piece of aluminium that I cut out of a needle threader.

No, Time, thou shalt not boast that I do change:
Thy pyramids built up with newer might
To me are nothing novel, nothing strange;
They are but dressings of a former sight.
Our dates are brief, and therefore we admire
What thou dost foist upon us that is old,
And rather make them born to our desire
Than think that we before have heard them told.
Thy registers and thee I both defy,
Not wondering at the present nor the past,
For thy records and what we see doth lie,
Made more or less by thy continual haste.
This I do vow and this shall ever be;
I will be true, despite thy scythe and thee.

Widely regarded as the world’s most influential living psychologist, Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel in Economics for his pioneering work in behavioral economics.

Using examples from vacations to colonoscopies, Nobel laureate and founder of behavioral economics Daniel Kahneman reveals how our “experiencing selves” and our “remembering selves” perceive happiness differently. This new insight has profound implications for economics, public policy — and our own self-awareness.

From TED Talks 2010

Fun diagram from Wikipedia:

Biological clock affects the daily rhythm of many physiological processes. This diagram depicts the circadian patterns typical of someone who rises early in morning, eats lunch around noon, and sleeps at night (10 p.m.). Although circadian rhythms tend to be synchronized with cycles of light and dark, other factors – such as ambient temperature, meal times, stress and exercise – can influence the timing as well.