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How Hunting Owls Use Sound to “See” Under the Snow

The great grey owl basically has a sound cone for a face, which helps it hunt down voles burrowing through snow in the winter. The owl’s large facial ruff, formed of dense feathers, helps amplify sound and funnel it towards his ears. Through half a meter of snow, the sound of

How many shots are in the average movie? How does it...

How many shots are in the average movie? How does it compare to the past? “You might expect the editor to be the most important factor in the number of shots, but in fact, knowing who directed a film accounts for 70% of the variation in its cutting pace.”

Purple Space problem solving

On the 19th of October, I’m doing an open Zoom call for members of purple.space and those that might be curious about how cohorts and mutual support open the door to possibility. You can reserve a spot here. It’s free, but there are limited spots.

Where You Should Live: Five Factors to Keep in Mind

I ran across this post on Instagram by Bobby in Space (who posts about design and the psychology of place) and wanted to pull it onto the actual internet. Here are some snippets of his “5 hills I will die on as someone who studies the psychology of place”. I don’t think these

The ladder of knowledge

What we claim as ‘true’ is not a ceiling we are forever failing to reach but something that changes as we climb toward it - by Alexander V Gheorghiu Read on Aeon

Seeing Like John Berger

Megan O’Grady reviews a new Berger biography, Deana Lawson appropriates surveillance photographs, and Paddy Johnson answers the question: Do I need an agent?

Addressing fear

Don’t bring a spreadsheet to a fear fight. Change causes fear. And change is all around us. The fear of the unknown. The fear of failure. The fear of uncertainty. Mostly, we’d like safety. And when the world changes, safety feels like it’s in short supply. One reason we have

How Not to Waste Your Life

“Let me not seem to have lived in vain,” the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe whispered on his deathbed, not realizing that the astronomical tables he was leaving behind would become the portal through which Kepler arrives at the laws of planetary motion; not realizing that the

The Muffled Thud of Fire in the Hole

From a 2014 article on The Dark Power of Fraternities by Caitlin Flanagan, this is one hell of an opening paragraph: One warm spring night in 2011, a young man named Travis Hughes stood on the back deck of the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house at Marshall University, in West

Why Pageant Is Suddenly All the Rage

In a world skewed toward artifice, the East Williamsburg performance space’s commitment to confronting, rather than escaping, one’s conditions in art feels like a renaissance.