Hooray! More stuff from Bird Box studios and this funny animated short of two wildebeests contemplating crossing a river is really great stuff.

• Military Strategy: What are the optimal siege tactics for taking Magic Kingdom’s Cinderella Castle?
• John McCain Comes to Huma Abedin’s Defense
• The real reason Marissa Mayer left Google: She had to
• Also: Marissa Mayer on the day she ‘broke’ the Internet
• Green streets can cut pollution, says study
• Study: Users more satisfied with Google+ over Facebook
• Texting overtakes talking in UK, says Ofcom study
• What Central Europe thinks of Britain and why
• Broken down: How an executable file works
• 90′s Nostalgia: A Windows 3.1 interface with a working command prompt too!
• The intensity of auditioning for the Boston Symphony Orchestra
• Twitter account: Bane Capital
• 10 Famous Roles Almost Played by Bill Murray
• 10 Bizarre Crimes in Walmart Parking Lots

Also, using a high speed camera, the good folks at MIT have recorded the properties of a drop of water at 10,000 frames/second, revealing a ‘behaviour’ that’s normally invisible to the human eye.

Here’s a simple and fascinating short video by NPR that visually explains how the human population has exponentially reached 7 billion people by using a collection of glassware and coloured water. The visual execution of this is really well done and to see the growth of the different continents over time makes for good brain juice.

This also reminds me of another video I’d meant to post ages ago, but could never figure out when/how to post it (that or I was just being a lazy sonnofabitch); but following on one of the last points in the above video: why is the world population expected peak at 10 billion? Given that we’ve gone from 1 billion to 7 billion in only two centuries, how can they come to this conclusion?

At TEDxSummit 2012, science polymath Hans Rosling gave a talk on the subject of this 10 billion threshold, framing it in the context of ‘Religion and Babies’ and trying to find the correlation between the two, which he concludes: it is non-existent. Instead, his research reasons that it’s actually the economic climate of a country that effects birthrates and via his fun humor and totally awesome data software, provides a very entertaining and informative talk on just where we’re heading.

Recommended.