Developing story here.
In our terrestrial view of things, the speed of light seems incredibly fast. But as soon as you view it against the vast distances of the universe, it’s unfortunately very slow. This animation illustrates, in realtime, the journey of a photon of light emitted from the sun and traveling across a portion of the solar system.
I’ve taken liberties with certain things like the alignment of planets and asteroids, but overall I’ve kept the size and distances of all the objects as accurate as possible. I also decided to end the animation just past Jupiter as I wanted to keep the running length below an hour.
Design & Animation: Alphonse Swinehart / aswinehart.com
Music: Steve Reich “Music for 18 Musicians”
Performed by: Eighth Blackbird / eighthblackbird.org
The language of lying, by Noah Zandan.
1. Liars reference themselves less when making deceptive statements. They write or talk more about others, often using the third person to distance and disassociate themselves from their life.
2. Liars tend to be more negative because, on a subconscious level, they feel guilty about lying.
3. Liars typically explain events in simple terms, since our brains struggle to build a complex lie. Judgment and evaluation are complex things for our brains to compute.
4. Even though liars keep descriptions simple, they tend to use longer and more convoluted sentence structure, inserting unnecessary words and irrelevant but factual-sounding details in order to pad the lie.
(via Brain Pickings and TED)
His explanation seems directed at a contextual misinterpretation of the term “dark”, insinuating that the Dark Ages are called so solely because of their grimness and absence of creative inspiration.
My understanding is that the Dark Ages are called so because there were very few written records, leaving much of their history to speculation. It was the invention of the printing press in the 15th century that put an end to the Dark Ages, turning the figurative light on. Esolen doesn’t mention this.
