There's no such thing as a jellyfish

By all accounts, jellyfish are creatures that kill people, eat microbes, grow to tens of meters, filter phytoplankton, take over ecosystems, and live forever. Because of the immense diversity of gelatinous plankton, jelly-like creatures can individually have each of these properties. However this way of looking at them both overstates and underestimates their true diversity. Taxonomically, they are far more varied than a handful of exemplars that are used to represent jellyfish or especially the so-called "true" jellyfish. Ecologically, they are even more adaptable than one would expect by looking only at the conspicuous bloom forming families and species that draw most of the attention. In reality, the most abundant and diverse gelatinous groups in the ocean are not the ones that anyone ever sees.

Surfers brave the "biggest day ever" at world's craziest wave: Tasmania's Shipstern Bluff

When skateboarding we might break an ankle or something mundane like that.... This is something completely different.

Albert van Veenendaal - The Spy & the Vampire

While we're on the subject of John Cage, here is a current artist named Albert van Veenendaal doing amazing things with a prepared piano.

A History of Silence

John Cage wrote the piece,  4'33" , in 1952, which consisted entirely of rests. The performers were expected to follow along the time signature diligently and turn the notation pages at the appropriate times yet not play a single note, the point of the piece was to showcase the ambient sound of the audience as music in and of itself.


Here is John Cage talking about the piece in an interview in 1982.

Apparently, the Beatles were very influenced by the book by John Cage titled Silence, published in 1961. His experimental  ideas on the blurring of the distinctions between sound and music were to have a big impact on the Beatles' later work. This piece, Two Minutes Silence is an obvious nod to John Cage's 4'33".

Ironically, Soundgarden included a song called One Minute of Silence on their album, Ultramega OK and credited John Lennon for "writing" it. The fact that John Cage is not credited , yet John Lennon could actually be credited for "writing" the piece speaks volumes for the broken copyright system we currently find ourselves in.

 And now it seems that the Hitler meme even has something to say about John Cage.


On a final note, did you notice that the elapsed time on each of these videos divided approximately in half as they went from one to the next? Does this say something about our attention span? Probably just coincidence...

RiP! A Remix Manifesto

This a full-length documentary spotlighting the abuse of copyright control. I am very interested in this topic and this is by far the most comprehensive thing I've seen on it.

After The Rapture

This video is a little bit snarky, but I found it funny.

The Rapture

A bit of advice for those concerned about the 21st of May.