• Whoa, now the KKK are also fighting against Westboro Baptist
• “We still look at ourselves as survivors”: over 80 years later, remembering the deadliest school massacre in American history
• The rather interesting origin story of ‘Miranda Rights’
• Warren Ellis on The Social Web: end of the first cycle (stoked it’s close to what I’ve been mediating on throughout the year)
• UCL research paper on Why the Internet only just works (.pdf)
• What the world will look like in 2030 — as predicted by the Government
• Will we ever… have cyborg brains?
• A few Tolkien-rific facts about the book version of The Hobbit
• Try this interactive/zoomable four BILLION pixel image of Mt Everest
• Earthmoving: Ways of moving the Earth’s orbital path

Lastly, the latest TEDEd on ‘What is colour’ gives a very concise and simple explanation on the how with some very nice animation too.

• Cinematic Faith: an interview with Christopher Nolan on the Batman trilogy
• James Bond: 50 years of main title design
• Nielsen will supplement its TV ratings system with Twitter
• Facebook to debut auto-play video ads in 2013
• How to end an argument on the internet
• Best Practices for Raising Kids? Look to Hunter-Gatherers
• Santa Math: How long would it him to deliver presents to every kid on Earth?

• Guns and the limits of shame
• Anonymous continues its hack offensive against Westboro Baptist Church
• I am Facebook friends with Ryan Lanza
• The Un-Wikileaks: new website spots And spreads info already censored
• Canadian company claims to have perfect an invisibility cloak
• Chasing the Cicada: Exploring the darkest corridors of the Internet
• Here’s what happens when a piano is abandoned on the streets of Manhattan
• New photo craze? People being pretend attacked by statues
• A guide to disagreeing and coping with all these bloody end-of-year lists

• Even Rupert Murdoch wants tighter gun control
• Building a Better Truth Machine: Could algorithms help debunk online rumors before they spread?
• Secretaries of Safe: will Obama’s new cabinet be ‘too safe’?
• 9 signs the War on Drugs is almost over
• Monotremes (Platypus/Echidnas) are still fucking weird
• Bioethics, should we live to 1000?
• Hrm… Basketballer Yao Ming came from a special genetic breeding program to produce super-atheletes
• Why afternoon may be the best time to exercise
• Website: Google60 (punch card interface)
• Website: Moodstream (streams depending on set mood)
• Website: Mathrun (brain-juicing)

Replacing guns in movie stills with Nintendo Zappers

• The Flores Hobbit’s face revealed according to a forensic facial approximation
• Op-ed: “Cyborg is a state of psychology” and the line between cure and enhancement
• Googling the Apocalypse: the Web as Epistemological Vortex
• Twitter Tombstones: Why I’m Kind of Obsessed With Tragic Final Tweets
• The end of pasta (and of the climate change debate. Seriously, who the fuck wants to lose pasta?)
• Louis CK answers a magazine questionnaire
• The unidentified man who fell out of the London sky
• A proposal for The Nine Muses of the Internet
• The Thermosaurus radiator (I so fucking want one)

Banksy gifs

• Get a bad review? Sue them… How to Piss Off a Theatre Critic
• The two-year editors battle over Sir Mix-a-Lot’s Baby Got Back page
• The Political Awakening of a Republican: ‘I Had Viewed Whole Swaths of the Country and the World as Second-Class People’
• Why wood pulp is world’s new wonder material
• A week on after the Department of Justice’s ruling and E-books are already getting cheaper
• On that here are 375 Free eBooks to download to Kindle, iPad/iPhone & Nook
• Google VP says Apple v Samsung verdict was a “wake-up call”
• From Foreign Policy: How America’s biggest corporations became cyber vigilantes
• The childhood gamer in me is pretty excited over Chris Roberts returns to space sims

And here’s a super cut of memes over the years. It’s titled ‘A Mess of Memes’, but the jury is still out on that pluralisation.

London Underground guerrilla signs

• Okay, so a very promising virus that eats cancer has been sitting in a researcher’s fridge for years undeveloped due to – wait for it… lack of funding for its £1 million price-tag
• At least biomedical researchers have made a computational model of another anti-cancer drug that works on the quantum level
• But then, Ars Technica on how press releases are creating a confused history of biology
• Research now shows that monotony breeds creativity
• and that green tea boosts brain cell production to aid memory
• Telegraph has an article on how the distraction of the internet can really stunts creativity
• That, and an Atlantic article on why we all have an internet-addiction gene
• New York Times profiled Valve and their awesome vision for future gaming
• Plus, an interview series with game developers, this one: the folks behind Portal and Portal 2
• Also, holy shit… Black Mesa:Source is finally coming out, this Friday!
• Here’s an excellent infographic of Breaking Bad’s death count
• Lastly, a video of a lot of Cos-players dancing Gangnam Style at Dragoncon

• Maven of Meth: The real-life chemist behind Breaking Bad
• Going Viral: How Two Pakistani Brothers Created the First PC Virus
• Jimmy Wales threatens to encrypt Wikipedia if UK passes snooping bill
• Researchers discover: Birds Hold Funerals for Their Dead
• Embarrassing pothole caricatures of politicians spur action to fix the streets in Russia
• Girl Hid for 8 Hours Under Bodies in Alps Killing Spree
• Summarising the distinction between game AI and traditional AI
• From a 1992 New York Magazine issue: Bill Clinton: Who Is This Guy?
• Also, there’s a video of that “Where the hell is Matt?” guy getting shot with a 10,000V Tesla gun by Matt Inman from The Oatmeal; here.
• Website: http://www.pointerpointer.com/

Plus, over 600 Criterions in 2.5 minutes…

Tech/Science Stuff
• Harvard creates cyborg flesh that’s half man, half machine
• Heat-proof face paint to withstand bomb heat
• Researchers Believe They Have Found a Single Dose Cure for Malaria
• Researchers have also potentially deciphered the ‘manic gene’
• High quality Denisovan genome sheds light on human evolution
• Of course, the Antarctic may host large stores of methane
• Illuminating tales of modern mainframes
• A litigator’s love/hate relationship with Apple
• The History of the Floppy Disk
• From The Atlantic: How Can Bioscience Push the Limits of Lifespan?

Internet/Sociological Stuff
• Placing some context into the ‘odd’ Eastwood bit at the recent RNC: The Long History of Americans Debating Empty Chairs
• But then, #eastwooding twitter trend was pretty amusing
• The Samsung/Apple jury foreman’s explanation for verdict? Yeah, he doesn’t understand prior art
• Twitter Says It’s Going To Start Aiming Ads At Users Based On Content Of Tweets
• 4chan wants Taylor Swift to perform at a school for the deaf
• The Attention Economy is now the Location Economy
• A poll on polls shows they’re not very accurate
• From Ars Technica: How video copyright went insane

Culture/Media
• Another Willy Wonka letter of note: If ever an actor can do it – Gene can
• Inside Author Ray Bradbury’s FBI File: Was He a Communist Sympathizer? 
• Manga Artist Lets Anyone Use His Work, Royalty-Free
• This beer chase ad is pretty damn good
• Watch on this Youtube channel: every Troma film online
• This online tournament of movie sequels will be awesome!

Other Things
• Badass of the Week: Neil Armstrong
• An animation of the growth of Walmart in America
• What Happens to Stolen Bicycles?
• 12 Hotel Secrets by Hotel Staffs, From Minibar ‘Refills’ to Ritz-Carlton Largesse
• http://hackertyper.com/

And just because; here is some Maru…

• 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.

• Top 10 photos from the Guardian’s eyewitness app
• Surreal images of the Deepwater Horizon disaster
• The winners from National Geographic’s Traveler Photo Contest
• Infographic: comparing 10 years of the internet
• Harvard cracks DNA storage, crams 700 terabytes of data into a single gram
• On the horizon: A male birth-control pill
• Science confirms: The only workday we like is Friday
• The Mpemba Effect: how hot water freezes faster than cold
• Amelia Earhart: 75 Years of Mystery — and Now an Answer?
• Scientists discover genetic key to Elephant Man’s disfigurement
• The lost towns of Russia
• Whut: eBay Bans Sales of Spells, Curses, Advice and Other ‘Intangibles’
• How to back up your Gmail, Facebook, and Twitter accounts and why you should
• Iceland’s hard stance on bankers is working out pretty well
• Romney’s tax plan: mathematically impossible

Also, the Sarychev Volcano Eruption viewed from the International Space Station…

• Word: Don’t write articles like this
• Wisdom: Life lessons from Dave the barman
• From NPR: An Anthropologist Walks Into A Bar And Asks, ‘Why Is This Joke Funny?’
• The history of ‘business casual’
• Crime Doesn’t Pay (Well): The Economics of Bank Robberies
• Going three days without the internet
• Newest booze/creativity correlation: vodka and cranberry
• The AV Club: Creative processes we wish we’d witnessed
• Big Think: How to Form a Good Habit
• These days, you don’t even need to sell 10,000 albums to make it to No. 1
• Some music sales data that highlight consumers tendency for singles over albums
• A Tor of the Dark Web
• How measuring the shape of a photon could lead to new ways of encoding information
• Microbes maketh man: We’re not just people, we’re made of a lot of microbes too
• Profiled: concentrated solar power plants
• Study: Homeless people find equality, acceptance on social networking sites
• GetGlue: television’s future interactivity on our ‘second screens’
• Website: AirPano – 360 degree panoramas tours of the world

Vogue 120 shoot

• Games of Hoez: Police Seize Pimping Rules During Raid
• Holy crap… A real life Walter White wanted for manufacturing meth
• From Politico: Mission Impossible: Managing Joe Biden
• The ultimate Mitt Romney flip-flop compilation
• Woo! Millennials Buy More Books Than Everybody Else
• Some really fascinating societal trends
• Cool: The Marshmallow Test pays off, 40 years later
• How WikiLeaks Blew It: The sad downfall of Julian Assange and his empire of secrets
• The limit on how tall a building can be

Lastly, this video explaining how computers privately communicate with each other is really good.