An interview on productivity and creativity with Jonah Lehrer, author of Imagine: How Creativity Works.
An article on James W. Hall’s book, Hit Lit: Cracking The Code Of The Twentieth Century’s Biggest Bestsellers.
Illustrated my favourite Neil Gaiman quote for writers. :-) (and thanks to Neil for his permission)
It’s as true now as when I first said it…
![ikenbot:
Planet X? New Evidence of an Unseen Planet at Solar System’s Edge
Image: This artist’s conception illustrates a giant planet floating freely without a parent star. Astronomers recently uncovered evidence for such lone worlds, thought to have been booted from developing star systems. The sun may have captured such a planet, which new work shows may reside at the edge of the solar system. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Warning: Approach Article With Skepticism
A planet four times the size of Earth may be skirting the edges of the solar system beyond Pluto, according to new research. Too distant to be easily spotted by Earth-based telescopes, the unseen planet could be gravitationally tugging on small icy objects past Neptune, helping explain the mystery of those objects’ peculiar orbits.
The claim comes from Rodney Gomes, a noted astronomer at the National Observatory of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro. Gomes presented his recently completed computer models suggesting the existence of the distant planet at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Timberline Lodge, Ore., earlier this month.
Astronomers who attended the talk find Gomes’ arguments compelling, but they say much more evidence is needed before the hypothetical planet can be crowned as real.
For several years, astronomers have observed that a handful of the small icy bodies that lie in the so-called “scattered disc” beyond the orbit of the planet Neptune, including the dwarf planet Sedna, deviate from the paths around the sun that would be expected based on the gravitational pulls of all the known objects in the solar system.
Sedna, for example, swings around the sun in an extremely elongated orbit — tracing out a very long oval. “Sedna’s orbit is truly peculiar,” said Mike Brown, an astronomer at Caltech who led the team that discovered Sedna in 2003.
However, when Gomes ran the same calculations with the addition of the gravitational pull of a massive planet at the outskirts of the solar system, Sedna and the other anomalous objects’ expected orbits fell in line with observations. The unseen planet would be too far away to perceptibly perturb the motions of Earth and the other inner planets, but close enough to the scattered disc objects to sway them.
Full Article
Similar Stories: [The True Stories of 5 Mystery Planets]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4hg1arf3e1qbn5m1o1_400.jpg)
Planet X? New Evidence of an Unseen Planet at Solar System’s Edge
Image: This artist’s conception illustrates a giant planet floating freely without a parent star. Astronomers recently uncovered evidence for such lone worlds, thought to have been booted from developing star systems. The sun may have captured such a planet, which new work shows may reside at the edge of the solar system. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Warning: Approach Article With Skepticism
A planet four times the size of Earth may be skirting the edges of the solar system beyond Pluto, according to new research. Too distant to be easily spotted by Earth-based telescopes, the unseen planet could be gravitationally tugging on small icy objects past Neptune, helping explain the mystery of those objects’ peculiar orbits.
The claim comes from Rodney Gomes, a noted astronomer at the National Observatory of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro. Gomes presented his recently completed computer models suggesting the existence of the distant planet at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Timberline Lodge, Ore., earlier this month.
Astronomers who attended the talk find Gomes’ arguments compelling, but they say much more evidence is needed before the hypothetical planet can be crowned as real.
For several years, astronomers have observed that a handful of the small icy bodies that lie in the so-called “scattered disc” beyond the orbit of the planet Neptune, including the dwarf planet Sedna, deviate from the paths around the sun that would be expected based on the gravitational pulls of all the known objects in the solar system.
Sedna, for example, swings around the sun in an extremely elongated orbit — tracing out a very long oval. “Sedna’s orbit is truly peculiar,” said Mike Brown, an astronomer at Caltech who led the team that discovered Sedna in 2003.
However, when Gomes ran the same calculations with the addition of the gravitational pull of a massive planet at the outskirts of the solar system, Sedna and the other anomalous objects’ expected orbits fell in line with observations. The unseen planet would be too far away to perceptibly perturb the motions of Earth and the other inner planets, but close enough to the scattered disc objects to sway them.
Similar Stories: [The True Stories of 5 Mystery Planets]
Women were “dramatically under-represented” in the United States’ 100 top-grossing films last year, accounting for 33 percent of all characters at a time when women made up nearly 51 percent of the U.S. population, according to a study released last week.
The 33 percent figure represented an increase over the findings of a similar study in 2002, when women comprised 28 percent of the movie characters, said the report from the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University.
The report mirrored a study of women’s behind-the-scenes participation that the center released in January, which found that women made up 18 percent of all directors, producers, writers, cinematographers and editors working on the 250 highest-grossing movies last year. That was only one percentage point higher than when the center began studying employment figures in 1998.
Lauzen’s latest report said that, on average, female characters in last year’s films were younger than the male characters, less likely to be portrayed as leaders and more likely to be identified by their marital status. It said 73 percent of the female characters were Caucasian, 8 percent African American, 5 percent Latina and 5 percent Asian (with the rest in smaller categories, including aliens and animals).
I think I found the last paragraph the most disturbing, really
(Source: feministcharacters)
Something old….something new (to Tumblr)
Here are a few masks I did for Elisa’s photography based on the Tarot. We haven’t finished yet-but we completed a few.
We are the people of the book. We love our books. We fill our houses with books. We treasure books we inherit from our parents, and we cherish the idea of passing those books on to our children. Indeed, how many of us started reading with a beloved book that belonged to one of our parents? We force worthy books on our friends, and we insist that they read them. We even feel a weird kinship for the people we see on buses or airplanes reading our books, the books that we claim. If anyone tries to take away our books—some oppressive government, some censor gone off the rails—we would defend them with everything that we have. We know our tribespeople when we visit their homes because every wall is lined with books. There are teetering piles of books beside the bed and on the floor; there are masses of swollen paperbacks in the bathroom. Our books are us. They are our outboard memory banks and they contain the moral, intellectual, and imaginative influences that make us the people we are today.
Cory Doctorow (via hassibinator)
(Source: slekes)
“Rebels in the Light” - Manicanparty
So avoid using the word ‘very’ because it’s lazy. A man is not very tired, he is exhausted. Don’t use very sad, use morose. Language was invented for one reason, boys - to woo women - and, in that endeavor, laziness will not do.
Dead Poets Society, 1989. (via fuckmedapperqueer)
(Source: wordofsomeone)
