An irregular hodgepodge of links gathered together … Omnium Gatherum for February 8, 2019

If you’d like to participate, head over to Omnium Gatherum on the BBS, or suggest something.

• “We look at the ‘witchcraft’ behind why dowsers usually find water. Our video explains why understanding geology beats medieval superstition.” — Scott Johnson and John Timmer, Ars Technica

  “… it’s like hiring someone to tell you which window to open to find some air.”

• “Netflix buys into Goop hooey with deal to make a wellness docuseries. Netflix mum on details of Goop deal as top Goop critic teases her own series.” — Beth Mole, Ars Technica
  

  “… Netflix declined to answer Ars’ questions regarding how it would handle Goop’s health claims, including if it would require substantiation or fact-checking.”

• “The invigorating strangeness of Friedrich Nietzsche. A new biography reveals Nietzsche to be a perfect gentleman—shy, attentive, and a little whimsical.” — Jonathan Rée, Prospect Magazine; about I Am Dynamite!: A Life of Nietzsche by Sue Prideaux [HT Arts & Letters Daily]

  

  “You don’t have to be a philosophical genius to notice that something strange is going on. Nietzsche’s grand theory of world culture can hardly be exempted from his own strictures on know-it-all theorists who deliver commentaries from the safety of the river bank.

  But that, it seems to me, is where the fascination of Nietzsche lies. He constantly plays tricks on his readers, dangling solutions in front of us and then snatching them away. His books are like games of musical chairs, in which the reader always ends up with nowhere to sit down. Other philosophers may hope to console us, but Nietzsche offers nothing but bewilderment, embarrassment and discombobulation.

  Nietzsche did all he could to prevent us from bringing his works together to form a stable theoretical edifice, and those seeking to unlock his philosophical secrets have always had to look to his life as much as his writings. It has become customary to regard him as not just an iconoclast but an auto-iconoclast: a philosophical superhero who shattered the idols of his age and destroyed himself in the process. This is the approach taken by Sue Prideaux in her handsome, well-paced and readable new biography.”

• “Watch a single cell become a complete organism in six pulsing minutes of timelapse” — Jan van IJken, Aeon Magazine; from the ⊕ dept.

  “This timelapse video from the Dutch director Jan van IJken tracks the development of a single-celled zygote into the hatched larva of an alpine newt. Captured in stunning detail at microscopic scales, Becoming is a remarkable look at the process of cell division and differentiation, whence all animals – from newts to humans – come.”

• Blood And Rockets: Movement I, Saga Of Jack Parsons by The Claypool Lennon Delirium, video by Rich Ragsdale [HT AV Club]

  “So Jack became a loyal follower of Mr. Aleister Crowley
  He took an oath to be a Magister Templi
  His pretty house in Pasadena was notorious for the orgies
  Every night were Eleusinian Mysteries
  When his company became the famous JP laboratories
  his reputation made it difficult to proceed
  And after one of his alchemical magical ceremonies
  They found his body in a pile of blood and debris

  How high does your rocket fly
  You better be careful boys you just might, set the world on fire
  You better be careful boys, you’ll set the world on fire

  …

  Do what thou wilt
  Love is the law
  Do what thou wilt
  Fly me to the moon”