be interested in this.

crystals of influenza virus neuraminidase isolated from terns

35 years of the world’s best microscope photography.

cheers, wired science.

be interested in this.

geeks like me.

the escapist forum topic: nerdiest fact, question or answer you can think of.

oh and bb had a nice little list of nerdy ‘yo mamma‘ jokes.

i liked:

“yo momma so fat, she took geometry in high school just cause she heard there was gonna be some pi”

“yo mamma so fat, china uses her to block the internet”

check the comments too.

“yo mama so fat she got her belt from gerard kuiper”

“you mama’s so fat she needs 3 different logins for her sims character”

be interested in this.

i heart infographics

and

it's not really red.

two excellent graphics about exploration.

cheers, bb.

be interested in this.

i first learnt of alan watts by way of the animated short m.stone and t.parker made (yes, correct, of s-park notoriety), where they underscored a particularly pithy recording of the man via the medium of their ‘crappy’ moving comic strip, and in doing so, arguably cast it out into an audience that may not have acknowledged it otherwise.

i know very little of the man himself, save what i have learnt about him on the world-wide-wikipedia. he has had his critics; eminent buddhists dismissed his opinions on zen practice citing an alleged misinterpretation of it’s key concepts and fundamentals. i am not rebutting this; of the cold hard facts of this specific disagreement i am far too ill-informed. although i will say that religion often carries with it a potential for hypersensitivity, in that it is interpreted in so great a number of ways by so wide a delegation of peoples. it doesn’t really matter what you choose to say about it, there will always be somebody somewhere who discredits your interpretation. 

each time i listen to this, the more i grow to appreciate it. his insouciant ’so, what’s the problem?’ remark is almost arresting in it’s simplicity. in the grand scheme of things it could prove to be little more than philosophic light show (addressing students at u.c santa cruz in 1970 he characterised himself as more entertainer than academic), however both this extract and the stone/parker short seem to appeal confidently to my sense of reasoning. that said, the naivete of existence is inherent and inescapable, in that at every age i always assume to know the most that i will ever know regarding my own personal beliefs. maybe if i were to become better educated in such matters, my opinion of alan watts’ teachings would differ.

until then; like the old adage states, i may not know art, but i know what i like. and i like this.

additionally, a hat-tip to whoever it was who first thought to layer the lecture over the first four and a half minutes of ’storm’ by gloomy canadian nine-piece instrumentalists godspeed you! black emperor. inspired.    

cheers, wiki

be interested in this.

da bomb

Some cool visualisations of stuff i hadn’t thought about in a while, nice data on nuclear proliferation and time travel in popular film & tv

cheers, information is beautiful

be interested in this.

too many secrets

“officers raced to the house, ready for an armed standoff with a homicidal suspect. but when they arrived, they found no gunman, no hostages, no blood. danielle and her father were safe and sound at home — alone. they had never heard of john defanno, for good reason: he didn’t exist.”

(as always, click the print button next to share to get the 7 short pages on a single)

cheers, rollingstone.

be interested in this.

'les contes du vieux japon' from japanese crepe paper fairytales

bibliodyssey is on it’s 1000th post:

“this selection of entries – in no particular order – covers the gamut: they’ve either been popular, have particularly stunning visuals, come from a good idea, give me a sense of curatorial pride, were randomly pleasurable, or else are representative of themes that have been pursued on bibliodyssey over the years.”

be interested in this

even has fingers

“photos of thousands of soldiers creating giant, patriotic pixelart images of patriotic scenes”

cheers, bb.

be interested in this.

is google killing general knowledge?

“this invention will induce forgetfulness in the souls of those who have learned it, because they will not need to exercise their memories, being able to rely on what is written…rather than, from within, their own unaided powers to call things to mind. so it’s not a remedy for memory, but for reminding, that you have discovered. and as for wisdom, you are equipping your pupils with only a semblance of it, not with truth.”

cheers, the economist.

be interested in this.

cheers, bb.

be interested in this.

dubai

good article about the problems faced in the city.

it’s six short pages so instead of flicking through adverts, click ‘print’ (just underneath and to the left of page 1 of 6) and it’ll come up on a single.

cheers, bb/wiki

be interested in this.

“you know how bad a terrible sunburn can feel. the atomic bomb flash can burn you worse than a terrible sunburn.”

armscontrolwonk has a nice list: “the best one-liners about the bomb”.

read the comments for more.

be interested in this.

before the eruption

check out the aftermath.

go vegetation.

cheers, wiredscience.

be interested in this

i’ve got a bunch of things bookmarked that i didn’t get around to posting about. this is one of them.

cheers, kottke.

be interested in this.

there's a fly in my group.

spy cams rule.

funnily enough, in an unfinished story i wrote the protagonist has a personal assistant called ‘pinna’ (part of the ear), a fly that acts as remote vision, communications etc.

cheers, io9.

be interested in this.

we're getting closer

“if you’re skeptical of wolframalpha (as i was), you should watch this introduction by stephen wolfram.”

couldn’t have put it better myself.

watching that intro gave me dropped jaw a couple of times. its like watching larry/sergey introduce the prototype google 10 years ago.

its still broken, but its going to be fun watching it being fixed.

cheers, kottke.

be interested in this.

“and then there’s the other stuff. storage is basically so cheap it’s nearly free. why not record a constant compressed video stream of everything you look at with those glasses? tag it by location and vocalization — do speech-to-text on your conversation — and by proximity to other people. let your smartphone remember things and jog your memory: you’ll be able to query it with things like, “who was that person sitting at the other side of the table from me in the pike brewery last tuesday evening with the fancy jacket i commented on?” or maybe “what did professor jones say fifteen minutes into their data structures lecture on friday while i was asleep?” i don’t know about you, but I could really do with a prosthetic memory like that — and as our populations age, as more people have to live with dementia, there’ll be huge demand for it. in japan today, the life expectancy of a girl baby is 102 years. which sounds great, until you learn that in japan today, 20% of over-85s have alzheimers.”

charlie’s login 2009 keynote gaming in the world of 2030 speech.

there’s a lot of halting state in there but very interesting read. stick with it.

be interested in this

cheers, bb.

be interested in this.

the rape of lucretia by titian

i was trying to find the quote for twat so looked up rape on wikipedia, thinking it might be in the ‘history of’.

i skimmed through it and then started back from the beginning. it’s an interesting article.

did you know that “in ancient history rape was viewed less as a type of assault on the female, than a serious property crime against the man to whom she belonged“? or that in fourteenth century england the “victim of rape might be expected to gouge out the eyes and/or sever the offender’s testicles herself“? or that in the us, a woman is more likely to be raped by the man she is dating, and a man is more likely to be raped by his ex-girlfriend?

anyway, the reason for this post was that i got to the bit about ‘rape in war’ and came across two words i’ve never seen together: “enforced sterilisation“.

read it.

[edit - and make sure you look at the full size version of the 'bulgarian martyresses' on the rape article.]

cheers, wiki.

be interested in this

stop the press. ha.

i missed this from charlie’s diary, but i’d recommend reading it.

“there is no general model for newspapers to replace the one the internet just broke.

with the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. it makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.“

cheers, antipope/wiki.

be interested in this.

‘halting state‘ uses something similar and it just makes sense.

about time.

cheers, reghardware.

be interested in this.

cheers, newscientist.

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september 26, 2001: god angrily clarifies ‘don’t kill’ rule.
september 26, 2001: hugging up 76,000 percent.

the onion’s bush headlines.

one of my all time favourites, feb 26th 2003:

iraqi homeowner to wait a while before re-shingling roof.

cheers, bb.

be interested in this.

drc

boston.com’s year in photographs 2008.

part one.

part two.

part three.

be interested in this.

best wildlife photography 2008.

cheers, national geographic.