Nature

Flowers:

Flowers Slideshow:

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  A painting by Telmo Leon was the basis for the crucible in this painting.

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  The technological shift in electronics from analog to digital was paralleled by a paradigm shift in mathematics, with discrete and combinatorial maths replacing traditional continuous analytical maths. Continuous objects are now converted to discrete representations for processing on digital computers.

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  A heliotrope must face the sun regardless of its increasingly harmful rays.

Landscapes:

Landscape Slideshow:

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  This Bolivian road is said to be the most dangerous in south America due to its sheer drop and frequently muddy conditions. For many it’s the most beautiful road they’ve ever seen.

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  A view from the Skyway between Chico and Paradise, California.

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  Some people will play chess for hours.

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  We knew where this was going.

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  Life may have arisen from naturally occuring mineral crystals that replicated by spontaneous mineralogical processes, eventually providing the framework for, and stimulating the production of organic molecules which form the basis for modern organisms. (Also see ‘Terrestrial Matrix’)

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  Throughout evolutionary history, an astounding variety of life forms have been chanced upon. Given our narrow existential perspective, most of them would look alien and bizarre to us now. During the Cambrian explosion over 500 million years ago, many animals with very strange body plans and weird appendages (as strange and weird as ours might seem to them, were they here to observe) evolved. Each of the life kingdoms that we know today — the protists (single-celled eukaryotes), monera (prokaryotes), archaea, fungi, plants, and animals — began with a unique distant ancestor.

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  Some of the most precious things in science – and in life – are the ability to learn for yourself, to tap into your own unique perspective and interests, and to do it with a sense of adventure.

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  We’re sentient beings; to nurture our sentience is an important part of life.

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Trees:

Trees Slideshow:

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  During a thunderstorm, rain fell so hard onto touchably close banana leaves outside the open window, that large raindrops bounced into the room almost horizontally.

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  In a lucid dream this tree fern was modeling for me, changing poses with its fronds by my telepathic cue, while I memorized the poses to paint later. I cued the treefern to change its fronds into feathers. It began to do so, but just then some people entered the scene and the tree fern, protective of its magical powers, ceased its frond-to-feather mutation.

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  Self-assembly is a ubiquitous process at the molecular scale (crystals, viruses, cytoskeletons) and macroscopic scale (dust bunnies, sand dunes, stars). Tree forms are also ubiquitous in nature and culture, and are self-organizing at many scales (rivers,carbohydrates, traffic patterns). These universal forms can be seen seemingly everywhere.

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  This Bolivian road is said to be the most dangerous in south America due to its sheer drop and frequently muddy conditions. For many it’s the most beautiful road they’ve ever seen.

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  When people are stressed and depressed about their jobs, home lives and general lack of freedom and leisure, they can sometimes seem to be living partial deaths. Future beings could evolve into more humane societies that foster joy, meaningful contribution, arts, and personal development.

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  Computer chip technology is basically artificial geology. Lithography, the technique used to carve wires and transistors into a silicon chip, can build many layers of structures on a slab of silicon, but to truly master the art of turning inanimate rock into a thinking machine requires understanding the nature of the material. It will tell you what it can do; listen to the silicon.

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  Nature builds powerful computers, your brain being a prime example. Molecular self-assembly allows scientists to create electrical circuits by growing them.

Water:

A Watery Slideshow:

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  Echoes – Communion Mass consists of webs of vibrations, with smaller particles enveloped by larger particles, each layer providing an energetic substrate for the next larger layer. The wave nature of matter is perceived differently by observers of different scale and sensory apparatus.

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  An Inevitable Miracle When a seafaring molecule is suddenly ripped apart by a great force, such as that present in a bursting bubble, an opportunity arises for the newly exposed molecular fragments and ‘tails’ to rebuild and repair themselves. At such a moment of restructuring, a mutation may have occurred which led to more complex molecular units becoming life or providing a basis for life. Dr. Bernard Yurke theorizes that just such an occurrence may have beget life on Earth.

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  A Laotian river flows through caves and tunnels underneath a mountain to the other side.

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  Some people will play chess for hours.

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  “His thoughts churned like the amorphous thing that ancient sailors called the Sea Lung; a heaving sludge of ice under fog where air blurred into water, where liquid was solid, where solids dissolved, where the sky froze and light and dark muddled.” E. Annie Proulx,The Shipping News

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  Objects exchange molecules upon contact. Residue left by each can start a new growth pattern, such as crystallization, on its new host.

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  During sleep, neural activity becomes quite different from when you’re awake. Isolated from the outside world, the brain slips into a progression of rhythmic modes, and waves of activity sweep across brain structures, changing through each sleep and dream stage. As you wake, these rhythms reorganize to encounter your waking reality.

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  All material objects are made of just one thing: atoms. If you could separate the atoms in one object, and put them back together again with extreme precision, you could make another object.

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  Computer programmers can be quite imaginative. The term “bug” itself is a fanciful metaphor. Some programmers have bugs in their programs; others have cuttlefish.

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  In the brain, visual scenes are broken down into elementary pieces – edges, colors, corners, motion – from which more complex perceptions are derived – textures, shapes, actions – and eventually the important features of the scene are recognized. As with dreaming, a deeper look into the visual cortex reveals an even finer disintegration of each piece of a scene, pixelated and then reconstructed inside an observer’s head.

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  For everything that you see, there’s more that you don’t see.

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  At the core of each being is a self-contained informational unit awash in currents and forces, processing, deciphering, responding to its environment. Sentient immersion is more critical to wildlife than to industrialized beings.

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  “His thoughts churned like the amorphous thing that ancient sailors called the Sea Lung; a heaving sludge of ice under fog where air blurred into water, where liquid was solid, where solids dissolved, where the sky froze and light and dark muddled.” E. Annie Proulx,The Shipping News

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  Our aqueous bodies respond to exterior forces, such as the moon’s pull, and electrical currents. When we lead diverse lives, attending to different inputs and energies, we lose vibrational community. Though we share physical space, our humours diverge.

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  Here’s a vision I saw once inside my eyelids.