"...Elasticity, Distinctness, Circumcision (see God)..."

Volume I: Angel, Animal, Aristocracy, Art, Astronomy, Beauty, Being, Cause, Chance, Change, Citizen, Constitution, Courage, Custom and Convention, Definition, Democracy, Desire, Dialectic, Duty, Education, Element, Emotion, Eternity, Evolution, Experience, Family, Fate, Form, God, Good and Evil, Government, Habit, Happiness, History, Honor, Hypothesis, Idea, Immortality, Induction, Infinity, Judgment, Justice, Knowledge, Labor, Language, Law, Liberty, Life and Death, Logic, and Love
Volume II: Man, Mathematics, Matter, Mechanics, Medicine, Memory and Imagination, Metaphysics, Mind, Monarchy, Nature, Necessity and Contingency, Oligarchy, One and Many, Opinion, Opposition, Philosophy, Physics, Pleasure and Pain, Poetry, Principle, Progress, Prophecy, Prudence, Punishment, Quality, Quantity, Reasoning, Relation, Religion, Revolution, Rhetoric, Same and Other, Science, Sense, Sign and Symbol, Sin, Slavery, Soul, Space, State, Temperance, Theology, Time, Truth, Tyranny, Universal and Particular, Virtue and Vice, War and Peace, Wealth, Will, Wisdom, and World

The 102 "Great Ideas" of Mortimer Adler's Syntopicon, index to the Great Books of the Western World set. This index, along with the whole Great Books project, received a fierce critique from Dwight MacDonald in The New Yorker:

[Footnote:] Inevitably, the choice was more than a little arbitrary: to the naked eye, such rejected ideas as Fact, Faith, Sex, Thought, Value, and Woman seem as "great" as some of those included. However, the Doctor has appended to his Syntopicon those sixteen hundred small ideas, running from A Priori to Zoology via such way stations as Gluttony (see Sin), Elasticity, Distinctness, Circumcision (see God), and Daydreaming (see Desire). This inventory relates each of these small ideas to the Great Ideas (or Great Idea) under which references pertinent to the small ideas can be found, and all one needs to find one's way around in the Syntopicon is some sort of idea, Great or small (plus, naturally, plenty of time and determination).
...we have a fantastically elaborate index whose fatal defect is just what Dr. Adler thinks is its chief virtue: its systematic all-inclusive- ness.... This approach is wrong theoretically because the only one of the authors who wrote with Dr. Adler's 2,987 topics in mind was Dr. Adler. And it is wrong practically because the reader's mental compartmentation doesn't correspond to Dr. Adler's, either.

Al-Jazari's automata

In the early 13th century, the Muslim engineer Al-Jazari designed complex clockwork devices such as the peacock fountain depicted above, which was both ornamental and functional:

Al-Jazari's peacock fountain was a more sophisticated hand washing device, featuring humanoid automata as servants which offer soap and towels. Pulling a plug on the peacock's tail releases water out of the beak, and as the dirty water from the basin fills the hollow base a float rises and actuates a linkage, which makes a servant figure appear from behind a door under the peacock and offer soap. When more water is used, a second float at a higher level trips and causes the appearance of a second servant figure, this time with a towel!

His other designs include robotic musicians and the elephant clock, of which a modern replica exists in Dubai. 

Paper crane

I bought this crane from a fundraiser at my college for the Japanese relief effort. The backdrop is my Syntax classwork-- those trees seemed like an appropriate habitat for a geometric paper bird.

Kale

Looks rather like a real live Mandelbulb.

Saturnian "speech"

These spooky sounds do vaguely resemble distorted speech, even in their unmodified form. But this reveals nothing about any life-forms on Saturn (an unlikely notion); rather, it reveals a lot about the way humans perceive sounds. Our pattern-seeking instincts cause us to hear "speech"-- even if we can't comprehend its "message"-- in random natural noises such as wind.

Update: Saturn's radio signals are asymmetrical:

Recent data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft show that the variation in radio waves controlled by the planet's rotation is different in the northern and southern hemispheres. Moreover, the northern and southern rotational variations also appear to change with the Saturnian seasons, and the hemispheres have actually swapped rates.