, and so if there is one thing we were designed to do it is to elevate ourselves to greater heights.

hofstadter, miyazaki, osamu, einstein, godel, parents, friends, sibling, etc. the list goes on...

If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of Giants. - Newton

"As long as man desires and seeks something, he remains unhappy."

Agree or Disagree? First answer the question, and then google who the quote came from, and then reevaluate the question.

The beautiful stories of 火の鳥 mesmerized me even when I first read this Tezuka Osamu masterpiece, but truthfully the themes blew past my head and I couldn't really grasp what his magnum opus was trying to convey. Now I'm starting to see the grand picture that he was trying to abstract. I'm not quite sure where I begin and everything else ends either.

Highly recommended.

So impressed with all you do
Tried so hard to be like you
Flew too high and burnt the wing
Lost my faith in everything

One of the necessities to create powerful art that transcends time seems to be an equally powerful inspiration. Not surprisingly, Trent Reznor rented the house where the infamous Manson Family murdered actress Sharon Tate to record his 1994 smash hit The Downward Spiral.

Unfortunately, since that album Trent struggled with depression and abuse of drug and alcohol. He stated in a magazine,
"...it was during that tour (The Downward Spiral) that problems started to arise. Prior to that I would have considered myself pretty normal. With the Downward Spiral, I can remember where I was in my head, what I was thinking, and I can remember writing that record, and the mindset. This record that was about an extension of me, became the truth fulfilling itself."

I suppose that's what inspired him because The Fragile is 23 tracks of raw anger, hatred, confusion, and desperation. But the true genius of The Fragile is it's ability to beautifully cloak it all with catchy hooks disguised under machine noise and heavy metal riffs. If you find yourself nodding your head to "The Day the World Went Away" even without any interest in Industrial music, it's because Trent can rival heavyweights like T-Pain in the art of writing catchy and memorable music. Yet for those seeking escape from "radio pop", NIN provides what you can call "angry pop"; everything from destitute whimpers to loud angry screaming. Ultimately although The Fragile may seem like a juvenile exploration of disillusioned emotions, if you close your eyes and raise up the volume I'm sure you will see as well as feel the universe Trent paints, rich with color and chaotic complexity.

I won't let you fall apart

from Physics 240....

"...interference of light waves is also the reason why thin films, such as soap bubbles, show colorful patterns"

When light refracts in the soap bubble, the wavelength and the color changes. The angle at which the soap bubble is viewed determines the color of the bubble. So what color is the bubble?

Politicians and citizens often choose a party that they believe agrees most with their own vision of a better government. They rally behind the color that represents their party and argue that the government of tomorrow should be a certain color. So what color is the ideal government?

OK it's a decently entertaining lecture but for those that are too impatient the bottom line is that this guy thinks that soon we're going to be able to modify our own brains and enter a new stage of evolution. Since the driving force behind this evolution won't be natural selection, we will evolve at an unnaturally fast rate. Is this possible?

The brain is a lot like a computer(to me at least). At the lowest level of a computer software we have machine language, simple 1 and 0s that conduct how the computer is operated. No one can look at machine language and understand what function it has. Thus people created assembly language, to "translate" machine language into something more recognizable by humans. By today's standards, it is still a very very simple low level language which can only manipulate symbols and signals. Thus people continue to create more and more complex computer languages in order to allow us to write more complex programs. Yet in the end, the most complex programs can be translated back to machine language, simple 1s and 0s.

In that sense, although to us the difference between a computer and human seems obvious (flexibility, predictability, self consciousness) and impossible to simulate perfectly, it is only because the technology we see is too simple. When machines get more and more complex and the amount of inputs and outputs becomes too large, even the creator of the machine can not fully predict how it will act. Kind of like how I'm pretty certain that this computer will not fail me while I'm writing this blog but every once in a while it's going to poop out and shut down on me.

If we are able to understand our brain at certain levels of complexity, it may be possible to manipulate them in predictable (and unpredictable) ways. Even more interesting, I think, is the possibility of separating the brain's functions from the physical brain, and thus having the ability to transfer our "software" to a hard drive. When the ghost is allowed to escape the shell, is this what we call immortality?