Is sad music actually sad?

 
 

Be it Elliott Smith or Queen, classical or dub step, there’s usually a clear understanding that some songs are sad, and some songs are happy. But what is it about the music that makes us feel these feelings we’re feeling? You might think it has something to do with the notes or how our brain’s natural response to these sounds, but you’re wrong. Or at the very least incomplete in your thinking. We’ve just been culturally trained to respond to music in certain ways because if you ignore the lyrics, music itself doesn’t actually contain any emotion at all.

 

 

 

Brilliant photo manipulations by Erik Johansson (20 pictures)

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Erik Johannson is a self-taught photograher who learned how to retouch photos to make impossible and extraordinary images. Growing up with a grandmother who painted and a penchant for escaping into the other worlds of video games, he naturally blended the two into a technique using computers to generate images that couldn’t be captured by a camera.

 

Sherlock Holmes could have invented Google

 
 

In this video, Maria Konnikova, author of Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes, explains how you can think of Google as “this vastly expanded Holmesian filing system.” Ask yourself: What are the things that you want to remember? Then focus on remembering how to access them.

 

 

 

Galaxy Collisions: Simulation vs Observations

 
 

What happens when two galaxies collide? Although it may take over a billion years, such titanic clashes are quite common. Since galaxies are mostly empty space, no internal stars are likely to themselves collide. Rather the gravitation of each galaxy will distort or destroy the other galaxy, and the galaxies may eventually merge to form a single larger galaxy. Expansive gas and dust clouds collide and trigger waves of star formation that complete even during the interaction process. Pictured above is a computer simulation of two large spiral galaxies colliding, interspersed with real still images taken by theHubble Space Telescope. Our own Milky Way Galaxy has absorbed several smaller galaxies during its existence and is even projected to merge with the larger neighboring Andromeda galaxy in a few billion years.