watershedplus:

An innovative initiative is taking place in the Philippines to bring sustainable lighting to homes in impoverished communities. Empty plastic bottles are installed in the roof, filled with water and bleach they refract sunlight. These “solar light bulbs” provide light equivalent to a 55watt light bulb.

See how they’re made here. From Visual News

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

hidingheather:

I went to Youtube in search of a small documentary to occupy me until I relaxed enough to sleep and found the only surviving recording of Virginia Woolf’s voice.

It is part of a BBC radio broadcast from April 29th, 1937. The talk was called “Craftsmanship” and was part of a series entitled “Words Fail Me.”

I wish I could tell you how exciting it is to hear her voice!

(Source: slow-moving-trains)

thecrescenteye:

This remark was made, in these very words, by John
Gribbin, physics editor of New Scientist magazine, in a BBC-TV
debate with Malcolm Muggeridge, and it provoked incredulity
on the part of most viewers. It seems to be a hangover of the
medieval Catholic era that causes most people, even the
educated, to think that everybody must “believe” something or
other, that if one is not a theist, one must be a dogmatic atheist,
and if one does not think Capitalism is perfect, one must believe
fervently in Socialism, and if one does not have blind faith in X,
one must alternatively have blind faith in not-X or the reverse
of X.

My own opinion is that belief is the death of intelligence. As soon
as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one
stops thinking about that aspect of existence. The more
certitude one assumes, the less there is left to think about, and a
person sure of everything would never have any need to think
about anything and might be considered clinically dead under
current medical standards, where the absence of brain activity is
taken to mean that life has ended.

(Source: shirtsaresick)

bruceban-thescienceman:

But for us, it’s different. Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

-Carl Sagan

brokenhyoids:

Denbigh is another abandoned asylum in England. It was built in the mid to late 1840s and closed for good in 1995. The land owner has left the building to decay.

(Source: environmentalgraffiti.com)

(Source: forgottenness)

(Source: cuttlephilia)

bettafish-resistance:

abluegirl:

Blue waves produced by bioluminescent phytoplankton: Vaadhoo Island in the Maldives, Florida Everglades, and Lakshadweep Islands off India.

Gorgeous.

On Vashon Island, Washington there is a bike that has grown into a tree. As the story goes, a boy left his bike chained there when he went off to war in 1914. He never returned. The bike remained where he had left it, either forgotten by time or as a tribute to his memory.