What is rooted is easy to nourish.
What is recent is easy to correct.
What is brittle is easy to break.
What is small is easy to scatter. 

Prevent trouble before it arises.
Put things in order before they exist.
The giant pine tree grows
from a tiny sprout.
The journey of a thousand miles
starts from beneath your feet.

Rushing into action, you fail.
Trying to grasp things, you lose them.
Forcing a project to completion,
you ruin what was almost ripe.

Therefore the master takes action
by letting things take their course.
He remains as calm
at the end as at the beginning.
He has nothing,
thus has nothing to lose.
What he desires is non-desire;
what he learns is to unlearn.
He simply reminds people
of who they always have been.
He cares about nothing but the Tao.
Thus he can care for all things.

From The Tao Te Ching—The Canon of the Path and the Power:

In Tao the only motion is returning;

The only useful quality, weakness.

For though all creatures under heaven are the products of Being,

Being itself is the product of Not-being.

Even here, in the simplest and final distillation of Zen thought, we find that it all leads back to a woman.
{click on read more}

Images (starting with upper-left):  Infrared readings of light from the First Stars; the Bubble Nebula;  a solar flare on our new sun; sunlight on the floor in Edward Hopper's "Summer Interior," putting sunlight in perspective.

Astronomy Picture of the Day is one of my favorite websites. Every brings a new amazing photograph or image of the seemingly limitless marvels of our universe.

When I think of the mysteries of the heavens, of light and time and space, my mind invariably drifts to the embodiment of all mystery hear on Earth. 

(explanations of the photos and some great links on the flip-fl0p) 

What Steve Jobs foisted on us:

And no Fortran, either.

 And now, the ignominy of the iPhone:

I mean, where's the steering wheel? 

Stop-action Super-fast Freeze-frame Bongo-beat Photography

A bullet piercing, penetrating, pulverizing an otherwise placid pear, from the IDF Tactical Logic website.

IDF Tactical Logic a bunch of cool bullet-going-through-things pictures, along with panoramic shots of destroyer fleets and ads for glock holsters. Definitely a Peace-Through-Superior-Firepower kinda site. 

Now let's use the same technology for art. Alva Bernadine 's Slap  
 

Not a bongo, but more fun to slap.

Which do you prefer? 

"A friend phoned me one lunchtime and asked what I was up to. I told her I was taking portraits of people bursting balloons, shooting bottles and smashing panes of glass using a sound activated switch. I could freeze the moment of impact rather like the famous Harold Edgerton picture of a bullet passing through an apple. In a dark room you attach the switch to the flash then open the shutter of the camera. The sound of impact fires the flash freezing the action at several thousandths of a second.
"She was a submissive and immediately offered her bottom for experimentation. She already had a video of arses wobbling in slow motion. She and her partner came round with a bag full of flagellation implements and we tried them all.
"Subsequently, I decided I wanted to try it on a variety of different shaped arses and asked female acquaintances and women I met at parties to aid me in my objective scientific experiments by having there arse spanked. To my surprise 50% agreed."— Alva Bernadine