Nothing brings me greater joy than reading beautiful thoughts in structured, even more beautiful sentences, especially when these words come from the mouths of brilliant people like Ray Bradbury.

These are beautiful words.

How did you predict all of this stuff, Ray, how did you predict all of these technologies?

RB: The secret of life is being in love, and by being in love, you predict yourself. Whatever you want is whatever you get. You don’t predict things, you make them. You gotta be a Zen Buddhist, like me: Don’t think about things, just do them; don’t predict them, just make them.

If you could time-travel to a moment in your life, what moment would you go back to?

RB: Every. Single. Moment. Every single moment of my life has been incredible, I’ve loved it, I’ve savored it, it’s been beautiful — because I’ve remained a boy. The man you see here tonight is not a man, he’s a 12-year-old boy, and this boy is still having fun. And I remain a boy forever.
You remain invested in your inner child by exploding every day. You don’t worry about the future, you don’t worry about the past — you just explode. So, if you are dynamic, you don’t have to worry about what age you are. So I’ve remained a boy, because boys run everywhere — they never stop running, they never look back, they never look back, they just keep running, running, and running. That’s me — the running boy.

[Via Brain Pickings]

A very joyful picture to take you though Wednesday.

This is writing advice from Jack Kerouac’s ”Belief & Technique For Modern Prose: List of Essentials”, written in 1958. But screw writing advice. This shit is so good it should be applied to life. My favorites in bold.

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
29. You’re a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven

This is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever come across. A man called Neil Harbisson, who was born with a rare condition that causes complete colour blindness, developed a technology that translates colors into sounds for him.

This also makes him a cyborg (short for “cybernetic organism”, is a being with both organic and cybernetic parts), and even his passport photo now includes his device.

“One day I started hearing colors in my dreams. Then I understood what being a cyborg meant. It’s not the union between the eyeborg and my head, what converts me into a cyborg, but the union between the software and my brain. My body and the technology have united. It’s very very human to modify one’s body with human creations.”

CYBORG FOUNDATION | Rafel Duran Torrent from Focus Forward Films on Vimeo.

Of course, the video gave me butterflies. If I had a change to electronically modify parts of my body to enhance my abilities, I’d do it in a heartbeat. I also have the natural tendency to “see” sound, being a very strongly visual person averse to lots of noises.

The beauty of all this though is that in 2010, Neil Harbisson and Moon Ribas created the Cyborg Foundation, an international organization to help humans become cyborgs. The foundation has also experimented with other sensory devices, including an “earborg,” which translates sound into color, and a “speedborg,” which allows people to detect movement through electronic earrings that vibrate. You know what that means? We might actually have the chance to become cyborgs.

Would you, if you could?

[Via Kottke]

[Retronaut]

The intellectual thing I should want to say is this: When you are studying any matter, or considering any philosophy, ask yourself only what are the facts and what is the truth that the facts bear out. Never let yourself be diverted either by what you wish to believe, or by what you think would have beneficent social effects if it were believed. But look only, and solely, at what are the facts. That is the intellectual thing that I should wish to say.

Via Brain Pickings

Beautiful. It is always so hard to strip away feelings, culture, society, and surroundings to only look at facts.