SuperForest

Good morning, SuperForest!

After a day of turbulent winds and stormy weather, I awoke this morning to find the above view. And as all my senses were taking in this wonderful sight, an extreme moment of reflection and clarity ensued. Much similar to the weather, the past week was turbulent and stormy in that much of it was spent working nonstop on meeting some major project deadlines. Hours upon hours were spent staring at a screen, working mechanically to finish a research project that was six months in the making. Funny enough, for the past few months I’ve had this image of the sea serving as my desktop background; the calm ocean serving as both material for drifting in and out of day dreams and as a gentle reminder to relax and take things easy. This morning, as I was looking out my “real life window” I could do nothing but chuckle at my blindness. With all of the day to day activities, I had become blind to the beauty that surrounded me. So much so, that I felt I have taken it for granted.

Further reflection only showed me how this applies to all aspects of my life including SuperForest. It is true, often times I get so caught up in projects and daily activities and to-do-lists that I forget to take a step back and quite literally “take in the view”. For when I do, I feel nothing but extreme amounts of gratitude. Gratitude towards SuperForest readers worldwide whose enthusiasm and encouragement are a gift beyond anything we have to compare and, of course, gratitude toward Team SuperForest. I mean it from the bottom of my heart when I say I am humbled by your awesomeness. Each and every one of you. And though tons of acknowledgement and praise deserve to go out to each of you daily, today is extra special for we are celebrating the birthdays of not one but two SuperForesters today: SuperForester Heather and SuperForester Jackson! Yay!!!

SuperForester Heather is one of the newer members of Team SuperForest but her enthusiasm and her heartfelt posts really make it feel like she’s been here from the beginning. We are so proud and lucky to have her on the team. I see such a bright energy within her and can only take guesses at the incredible things she will continue to accomplish in her life. Thank you for being so fabulous and sharing some of that fabulousness with us. Happy Birthday, Heather!

And SuperForester Jackson…I always find myself at a bit of a loss when it comes to expressing my gratitude toward him. Perhaps its something like intimidation (how does one even begin to acknowledge someone whose had such a tremendous effect on your life?), or perhaps I feel like I’ve nearly exercised every possible way of giving thanks. But nevertheless, I feel like it can never be said enough. Jackson, the hard work and enthusiasm you put into the site is awe-inspiring. The connections you make with those around you, the leadership and wisdom you’ve demonstrated countless times, and the bravery and confidence with which you handle SuperForest simply leaves me stunned. Many thanks go out to you for your extreme kindness, generosity, and boundless love. I wish you a very happy birthday, dear friend. I speak on behalf of the entire team when I say we love you and you deserve nothing but the very best.

I hope everyone is having a wonderful day! As for me, another whirlwind of projects and papers is fast approaching, but a quick change of my desktop wallpaper leaves me feeling doubly prepared this time.

LOL! Just kidding, I know it defeats the purpose but the lesson learned remains the same. Be it wonderful scenery or awesome people, I’ll always try to take a step back, enjoy the big picture, and “take in that view”, so to speak. And as a result, I’ll continue to acknowledge and be grateful for those treasures that surround me. Because in the end, probably few things will contribute as much to my happiness as appreciating what is already there.

Love to all, especially to our friends Heather and Jackson!

-SuperForester Carla

Ever gone snowboarding or skiing and done something really cool and wish you had a picture of it? That happens to me all the time (except usually it’s someone else doing something cool and I wish I had a picture of it.

Well, my buddy Superforester Ben has figured out a way to do it!  It goes a little something like this…You know how you are on a roller coaster and your picture is taken at a certain spot? Then you can walk over to a place at the bottom of the coaster and check out your photos and buy them if you want?

That’s kind of what Snapsportz does, but on the slopes! Ben and his team have placed cameras in terrain parks and other spots all over Powder Mountain in Utah. When you buy a lift-ticket, you are given an Snapsportz RFID tag with a number on it.  As you ride by certain spots in the mountain (which are clearly marked), a reader on the camera “sees” your RFID tag and immediately takes 5-6 sequential photos of you doing your thing!

Then, when you get on the lift, you just whip out your phone, or iPod touch or any PDA and go to Snapsportz.com, type in your tag number and check out your photos!  You can even buy them right there from your phone.  Right now, it’s just offered in Powder Mountain, Utah…but soon it will be all over the country!  Go Superforester Ben!!  Go Snapsportz!

An entertaining and cheeky music video for “70 Million”, hit song by Franco-American band, Hold Your Horses!, offers a wink at art history as band members playfully reconstruct famous paintings in an off the wall lyrical interpretation all their own.

I absolutely adore this video. Imagine every famous painting you’ve ever seen, singing a song to you.
The concept is brilliant and the tunes are oh-so-catchy.

Live it up,
iman.

I’m loving this great infographic by the always wonderful “Information Is Beautiful“! The image above features some of the most popular health supplements arranged by the scientific evidence that proves their effectiveness. The higher the bubble, the more effective it is and the size correlates to its popularity. Fabulous!

You can click here for the fun interactive version!

So I met a really cute guy today … His name is Gerry.

We suit each other, no?

Love animals? Check out Cute Animals Saying Nice Things every Monday here on SF.

I went for a kayak ride in the harbor today. Just me, the wind, the birds, the water and a dead raccoon I found floating aways off shore.  Thinking about the water creatures that eat big dead things put the power of fear into my paddling arms, and I sped away to explore further. If only I had some cowry shell jewelry, I’d have given it a shake to let the sharkies know where lunch could be had.

I was so grateful for that fear, and for the experience it was a facet of. And then I came inside and read SuperForest and all was well with the world.

Love,

Jackayakson

A few months ago, designers from Blu Dot designed and assembled 25 modern, brightly colored “good chairs” and with the concept of “curb-mining” in mind, decided to conduct a clever social experiment by leaving them unattended (with the exception of a few GPS tracking devices and surveillance cameras, of course) around the streets of NYC…all to answer the simple questions: “What would happen?” and “Where will they go?”

As if the experiment concept wasn’t thought-provoking enough, I was surprised to find the results of the experiment and the stories behind where they ended up to be extremely adorable! Yes! A captivating story about chairs! Finally!

Check it out, those PUNCOS (“potential unidentified new chair owners”) are a wild bunch:

So, the experiment results?

(from. via.)

My thanks to SuperForester Dog for the heads up on this find!

“For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.” –Carl Sagan

I am a collector of stories.  As a writer it’s part of my profession.  But it’s also a lifelong obsession, a hobby that consumes as much as it inspires me.  As a result I have heard a lot of love stories in my life.  But the one that follows is by far the most romantic, mythic story I have ever heard.

In the Summer of 1977, nearly a decade after Neil Armstrong first walked on the moon and the Race for Space swept through American conscious like a meteor storm… Nasa launched a special mission of a very personal nature.  It was called the Voyager Interstellar Mission, and it’s goal was to send two spacecraft into the greater expanses of the universe, carrying an ultimate mix tape of the human experience — recorded onto a golden record designed to survive for a billion years.

Sound like the plot to a James Cameron movie?  Hold on to your skeptical sense of awe.   It only gets better in the details…

Here is the message President Jimmy Carter inscribed on the spacecraft:

We cast this message into the cosmos… Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some — perhaps many — may have inhabited planets and space faring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message: We are trying to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope some day, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of Galactic Civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination and our goodwill in a vast and awesome universe.

Now then, the question remains how do you condense the core essence of humanity into a series of sounds and images, recorded on a single album?  What message do we as a race wish to express in this galactic timecapsule —  this cosmic message -in-a-bottle cast out into the vast ocean of space?

And here is where our story picks up momentum.  Enter Carl Sagan — preeminent astronomer and astrophysicist.  Author of the paradigm shifting novels Cosmos, Contact, and Pale Blue Dot.  Carl was hired to spearhead this bizarre mission with the overwhelming responsibility of conveying all the hopes, dreams and wonders of an entire planet.  To handpick the very best our culture and society has to offer, all that is universal, elemental and (fingers-crossed Carl!)… eternal.   No small task to say the least.

Fortunately Carl had help.  Enter Ann Druyan, creative director of the project.  Long time professional acquaintances, Carl and Ann worked closely together to compile the 115 images, the 90 minute selection of world music, the sounds of nature, man and animal that would form the ultimate mix tape.

Ann describes the mission in her own words below:

“Two Spacecraft lifted off from the planet earth. moving at an average speed of 35,000 miles per hour for the next thousand million years. And on it would be a kiss, a mother’s first words to her new born baby, mozart, bach, beethoven, greetings in the worlds 59 most populous languages, as well as one non-human language — the greetings of the humpback whales.  And it was a sacred undertaken because it was saying ‘we want to be citizens of the cosmos.  We want you to know about us.’”

There is something deeply poetic about the human psyche in undertaking such an improbable missive.  The desire to reach out and make contact, the belief that we can know and be known by beings and worlds beyond ourselves is more revealing to me of the core Human capacity  for curiosity and hope and love, than anything that could be encoded into the thin grooves of a vinyl track.

Which is why the real story for me, the one that touches the base resonance of my storyteller heart, is not that of the Voyager Interstellar Mission at all, but rather of Carl and Ann sending out their personal timecapsules into the unknown void of love and finding each other.

And so it happened that two working friends, who had barely flirted andnever kissed… called each other late one night to share in the excitement of a 2500 year old chinese song that would be included on the mixtape.  And over the course of that random conversation, in the context of developing this huge, odd, beautiful project… something profound and completely unexpected happened.  Carl and Ann fell in love.  Just like that.  Like a rocket bursting through the atmosphere into the clarity of space, Carl and Ann knew… they were meant for each other.

Carl said, “I’ve been waiting for this call for 10 years.”  By the time they hung up, they were engaged to be married.  A month later, on august 20th, the voyager spacecrafts lifted off.   On august 22, Carl and Ann announced their engagement.  They were together every day after until Carl’s death in 1996.

Two days after that fateful phone call, Ann checked into the neurological department at Bellevue, New York for the final element of the golden mix-tape.  It was Ann’s grand idea to measure the electrical impulses of the human brain and nervous system, convert that into a sound and then put that onto the record.  Perhaps alien civilizations in the distant future might find a way to decode the sounds back into human thought.

So for an hour, Ann meditated on the wonders of love and being in love while electrical nodes recorded her brainwaves into harmonic vibrations.  And right now, somewhere 17 billion km from earth, all the newness and joy of Ann and Carl’s love is hurtling still toward some other pale planet, where perhaps another sentient being will find it washed up on the shore, will pull the golden message from its bottle and read what the human experience is really all about.

Thank you NPR for the incredible story.  I highly recommend checking out their link and hearing Ann Druyan tell the story in her own words.

Always merry.  Always Love.

-Aaron

Ah, the beautiful mysteries of outer space. I saw this image a few days ago and was stunned; the sheer bewilderment it produced was unreal as I thought to myself…

“How, exactly, do astronauts keep their space suits so white?”

Floating just below the International Space Station, astronaut Nicholas Patrick put some finishing touches on the newly installed cupola space windows last week. Patrick hovers about 340 kilometers over the Earth’s surface, well in front of the blue sky, blue water, and white clouds pictured far in the background.

Amazingly white, no? Oh, and the whole “Patrick hovering 340 kilometers over the Earth’s surface” is cool, too, I guess. :)

For more stunning pics and awesome perspective of this universe we live in, you can check out NASA’s complete archive, here!

Have a great day, SuperForest.