I used to think that Einstein's quote was just rhetorical frippery, but now I think of imagination as something like a mode of perception. And, in theatre, imagination is way, way more important than knowledge. Anybody can study a script and figure out what characters want and need and what's in their way. But knowing those things doesn't get you to an inspired performance. Only imagination can really get you there. Right now I'm getting into the Michael Chekhov technique of acting. He puts things quite differently than other teachers. He insists that you need to treat the imaginative world as a real objective world.

I love how the modern sense of liminality touches on the actual feeling, the exciting surrealism of liminal spaces. Like probably the closest thing that most Americans have experienced to a true liminal space would be a natural disaster like a city-wide blackout. In a blackout the familiar looks alien and the usual rules don't apply (such as don't talk to strangers on the train). That creepy, excited, limitless feeling is how liminality feels.

Alberg proceeds to conduct an "espionage into this secret branch of nature". He finds tropical plants reproduced on the frosted glass of a saloon serving punch made from coconut and sugarcane; pineapples in the windows of a Greek fruit dealer; cereals, vegetables, and even a shopgirl's lace apron on the panes of a Swedish restaurant; and, at a small grocery, celery stalks are again cast across the glass.

Language creates an altered state of consciousness. By "language" the article means words, and the idea is that the altered state of consciousness that you might get from advanced meditation or psychedelics is actually the normal consciousness of the whole wide universe, and that it's humans who have entered a strange mental state through words. "Ultimately, language is both an enhancement and a constraint, a double-edged sword that structures thought while simultaneously obscuring other modes of being."

I've been lurking on the Manifestation subreddit, and this is a good thread, I Tried Manifestation as a Joke... and Now I'm Freaking Out. It's often said that all you have to do is "believe". But that word points to different things. I totally have the propositional belief that reality is a dream, that the out-there physical world is a sort of gameboard that we're all reconstructing every moment, when it could be anything. But the kind of "belief" that actually does stuff is not propositional but practical, and very difficult to get the hang of.

The extreme requirements for autonomy, reliability, and automation I've outlined are old news to designers of deep-space probes.... But no one has ever tried attaching a box of large primates to a deep space probe with the goal of keeping them alive, happy, and not tweeting about how NASA sent them into the vast empty spaces to die.

Scientists issue dire warning: Microplastic accumulation in human brains escalating. No one is safe, but you can greatly reduce your own exposure by not drinking bottled water, and not heating stuff in plastic in the microwave.

How To Build A Thousand-Year-Old Tree is about the ecological role of old rotting trees, and how clever arborists are carefully damaging young trees to make them act like old trees. (If that link doesn't work try this one.)

Beavers are coming home, soon to be re-introduced to the UK to manage wetlands.

Why climate activists are turning to sabotage instead of protest. Because long prison sentences for public protests are making it a better idea to do stuff in secret. "The STS activist who spoke to the Guardian did not see the group's actions as more extreme than the kinds of things already carried out by other groups. 'The only difference is that they stayed around to be arrested.'"

They say real courage isn't being fearless, it's being afraid and doing it anyway. Whatever, I don't have real courage. But one thing I do, that I don't feel like doing, is helping other people. They sure need it! Supposedly we are all one. I can't see it, but I have to trust the experts, just like with germs.

I work with a ton of Gen Zers and am often struck by how they just do not give a shit about authority or traditional standards. They will happily call the CEO an asshole in an all-company meeting with a couple of thousand attendees, they'll tell you they can't make a meeting because they have to go to therapy, they'll go into a public Slack channel and post that they got literally no work done all week because of stress.

Fans Are Better Than Tech at Organizing Information. It's about the volunteer tagging system at Archive of Our Own, and I think volunteers are better than non-volunteers at almost anything. Human motivation is the most powerful force in the world, and right now it's being suffocated by the motivation of giant blocks of money to keep getting bigger. If we ever get a UBI, it will eventually make a day and night difference in how well society operates.

Hacker News thread, Blender-made movie Flow takes Oscar. Blender is a free and open-source graphics software tool. From one comment:

I did not find Flow to be a technically impressive movie. The animation was very imperfect. The rendering (especially shadows and textures) were off. The whole movie looked like a video game cut scene. But oh boy, what an amazing cutscene to watch. My 7 year old and his friends sat raptured through the entire movie without any slapstick, pop music numbers, or even dialogue!

Harvesting the sun twice, an article about agrovoltaics, in which crops partly under solar panels do better than crops in full sunlight. Related: Why Vermont farmers are using urine on their crops.

Scientists aiming to bring back woolly mammoth create woolly mice. I know we can't bring back woolly mammoths without also bringing back their habitat, but this is still really cool, and genetic tinkering has already done at least one great thing: Pink grapefruits were created by bombarding seeds with gamma rays.

And two positive political links. Right to Repair Laws Have Now Been Introduced in All 50 US States

And I can't remember the last time the Democrats did something this inspired, a Reddit thread about congressman Ro Khanna holding town hall meetings in Republican districts. The fact that Republicans are reluctant to meet voters in their own districts, suggests that they're already feeling the squeeze between serving their leader and serving the public.