Raf Simons Last Show @ Jil Sander / Raf Simons Last Show @ Dior

it’s easy to sit from your balcony of privilege & look down upon the masses, ignorant of why they’re angry.

it’s easy to sit under a shelter because you’re protected by privilege & wonder why the masses complain that they’re fed up with the rain.

it’s easy to sit in your warm house with state of the art equipment & wonder why people constantly complain that they’re left out in the cold

it’s easy to celebrate because your crops have yielded a high amount & question why other people complain, unaware that they weren’t given enough seeds. unaware that it barely ever rains here… the sun doesn’t even shine here…

it’s easy to be blinded by privilege. to remain neutral in situations of oppression simply because you are unaffected. but to remain neutral, is to strengthen the power of the oppressor.

— @beeyroyce

Epimetheus Above the Rings of Saturn

via reddit

Masterpieces in Agar. These are some of the most beautiful Agar Art pics from (and inspired by) the annual competition hosted by the American Society for Microbiology. Read more about the contest, the artists, and their work here.

Modern math is like a pyramid, and the broad fundament is often not fun. It is at the higher and apical levels of geometry, topology, analysis, number theory, and mathematical logic that the fun and profundity start, when the calculators and contextless formulae fall away and all that’s left are pencil & paper and what gets called “genius,” viz. the particular blend of reason and ecstatic creativity that characterizes what is best about the human mind. Those who’ve been privileged (or forced) to study it understand that the practice of higher mathematics is, in fact, an “art” and that it depends no less than other arts on inspiration, courage, toil, etc….but with the added stricture that the “truths” the art of math tries to express are deductive, necessary, a priori truths, capable of both derivation and demonstration by logical proof.

David Foster Wallace, Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama (via mindfuckmath)

“If people sat outside and looked at the stars each night, I bet they’d live a lot differently. When you look into infinity, you realize there are more important things.”

(via itcuddles)

This dreamy animation shows a massive black hole tearing apart a passing star

During this process — known as “tidal disruption” — some of the stellar debris is flung out into space, while most of it falls around the black hole and forms a huge gaseous disk.

A group of researchers have trained pigeons to identify malignant breast tissue in exchange for pigeon pellets. Here’s the real, not made up study.

This doesn’t mean hospitals will start employing pigeons. But it does suggest that studying pigeons could help us teach doctors how to process medical images. From the study:

Pigeons (Columba livia)—which share many visual system properties with humans—can serve as promising surrogate observers of medical images, a capability not previously documented. 

… The birds’ successes and difficulties suggest that pigeons are well-suited to help us better understand human medical image perception, and may also prove useful in performance assessment and development of medical imaging hardware, image processing, and image analysis tools.

Image credit: Levenson et. al.