This is a wonderfully captured video of a ‘murmuration’ of starlings in flight and it really captures the natural beauty of their movements, flying and turning in the air, almost like a single living entity.

Two solid write ups on the scientific properties of their flights if you’re interested, they can be found here and here (with video).

Mathematical analysis of flock dynamics show how each starling’s movement is influenced by every other starling, and vice versa. It doesn’t matter how large a flock is, or if two birds are on opposite sides. It’s as if every individual is connected to the same network.

Or like me, get all your information on life and eating baconnaise from The Daily Show, this is a good chuckle…

This is a really good talk on the need to preserve civilization’s history and how really groundbreaking 3D scanning technology will help in this endevour to do so.  Sweet demo of it at work at the end.

Arthur Recreates Scenes From Classic Movies

Typographer Ryan Gosling

Markus Reugels

Here is founder of spacehack.org, Ariel Walden, presents a rather interesting talk on the possibilities of a more open source space/science community, taking the exclusivity of the field from governments and placing it into the hands of everyday people, whilst still helping to advance science and exploration.

It’s all very inspiring stuff and I’ve only manage to have a brief poke around the website, but man, I do love the thinking behind all these crowd sourcing projects lately.

Awesome.

Over the years I’ve accumulated heroes; people I look up to and admire both for their work and their conviction to what they believed in and worked for.  Foremost of these for me w0uld be Carl Sagan whose visionary belief, not just in science, but in mankind itself, gave voice to the historical achievement of humans as a species and a beautiful, reconnecting position for all of us to take on this planet and amongst the stars.

Today (or rather, yesterday…  time zones and relativity and what not aside) marks what would have been his 77th birthday; and his wisdom, insight and love is still missed.

These peacocks borrow human mating plumage, anthropomorphically showcasing our adaptations and natural orders as their own. They are made of fake fingernails, barrettes, nail polish, false eyelashes, and jewelry to represent the choices involved in biological processes that are unique to humankind.

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Been well aware I haven’t blogged anything of late.  The internet has been somewhat disturbingly quiet lately and I’ve been occupied with all sorts of social and anti-social activity (damn you BF3!).  All of them not so interesting enough to post about until this…

Oh, have picked up a new camera and damn, it and I are getting along well.  Look forward to posted up some photos once I’m properly adapted to using it.