…I’d like to think the motivation was that of a young Liz Lemon.

Posts were going to be sporadic for this week as I’m currently down with the flu, but then I realised that most of my ‘time off’ is being spent online anyhow; so really, not much of a difference.

Did manage to spend almost all of yesterday cleaning and organising through my computer’s 8TBs of data/documents/files/images/videos/DIY pagan rituals… and you know what? I think I’ve finally found a practical application for all those hours spent playing RPG games and micromanaging the shit out of my backpack slots.

All that’s left is to sort through the one folder that I’ve been dumping image files into for the last year or so.

What’s that? Over 5,000 unordered, unlabeled images?

Yeah, I’m going the hell back to bed.

Hooking up an ipod to a squid’s nervous system, scientists observed and recorded the microscopic effects of Cypress Hill’s Insane in the Membrane on the cephalopod’s pigmentation cells. The results are pretty damn funky.

More details can be found here: https://news.backyardbrains.com/2012/08/insane-in-the-chromatophores/ and an explanation of how it works can be found on our TED talk: https://on.ted.com/Gage

Amphipod: zoomed in from 1 milimeter to 500 nanometers

• New nuclear fuel source would power human race until 5000 AD
• Stanford biologist and computer scientist discover the ‘anternet’
• Semen: Nature’s antidepressant?
• Simple animations to explain complex principles
• A gallery visualizing the properties of turbulence
• Big Think: The Neuroscience of Creativity and Insight
• The most likely to order late night take out? Art students.
• English language ‘originated in Turkey’
• Millennials: The Cheapest Generation
• Fake Bus Stops For Alzheimer’s patients in Germany
• Surviving a Death Sentence: 27 Years With HIV
• A Different Justice: Why Anders Breivik Only Got 21 Years for Killing 77 People
• A couple I disagree with, but the accusations I can’t deny: The 20 Worst Hipster Bands
• Gangnam Style, Dissected: The Subversive Message Within South Korea’s Music Video Sensation

Lastly, another asshole cat…

Oh god, ignore it all I want, but they’re right…

Dave Grohl beers a fan during a show

• The acoustics of office productivity
• An anonymous Navy SEAL will release a tell-all book about killing Bin Laden
• The Dark Knight Rises is set to make a billion dollars, yet is projected to sell 10 million fewer tickets than the 1989 Batman.
• Big Think: Do We Need an Army of Hackers to Fight a Cyber War?
• How Your Social Network Shapes Your Decisions (And Your Friends’ Decisions)
• The Anti-Social Network: Re-Discovering The Art Of Sharing With Ourselves
• Smithsonian: Is Ai Weiwei China’s Most Dangerous Man?
• Mental Floss: Why aren’t there any B batteries?
• Men at Lunch: A documentary about one of the most iconic New York photos
• Infographic: Facts You (probably) Didn’t Know About Sex Toys

This awesome animation by Alex Parker (whose Kepler-11 Sonata video is also excellent) illustrates the 2299 fast-transiting planets discovered to so far by the Kepler mission and their orbits to-scale around a single star.

There’s a wealth of detail in this rendering like colour/temperature correlation and the white rings representing Mercury, Venus and Earth’s orbits and that’s all elaborated on on it’s vimeo page. But all you need to know is this part of the description:

Watching in full screen + HD is recommended, so you can see even the smallest planets!

Planets. 2299 of them. Up there. And all of them were found in a really short period of time, with still so many more out there yet to discovered.

Fuck yeah, you bet I love this science stuff.

Was going to post and comment on this write up’s ‘counter-arguement’ on Curiosity’s cultural investment/benefits, but then this high resolution footage of the rover’s decent phase from the rover’s point-of-view came out and the thinking is simply: Who care? It’s still goddamn amazing enough that we’ve got a friggin’ Tank of Science on another planetary body.

UPDATE: some reddit user has interpolated the original’s images, creating a ‘smoother’ 25 fps version of the original video. Nice.

• Rolling Stone has a Q&A with David Cross on ‘Arrested Development’
• This elaborates on the politics of The Dark Knight movies
• This’ll make you feel old: For incoming college freshmen, Kurt Cobain has always been dead
• And this, nostalgically older: The need to upgrade computers is coming to a halt
• On business/hiring: The Bozo Event Horizon
• The Googler whose job was to Browse the worst of the internet
• How one NASA scientist’s family Switched over to Martian Time
• Photos from August 22, 1969: The Beatles’ final photo shoot
• And a time capsule was opened and the 25 year-old predictions by some sci-fi writers about ‘what life would be like in 2012’ are read. Some points are fairly on-the-mark, but a few are also depressingly way off.

Mashing up Finding Nemo and Taken. Genius.