• The ‘end of history’ illusion and why we can’t imagine getting old
• “The finite is nested within the infinite” (or my favourite parable: somewhere in infinity, an alternate universe exists where you are the Batman)
• Of last year’s bestselling sci-fi list, only one was published that year
• Does a techno utopia require physical books?
• Reshaping the brain: scientists reprogram neurons after birth
• The mysterious disappearance of the Russian Crown Jewels
• The courtroom sketches of Bill Robles
• Inside the prison journal of West Memphis Three’s Damien Echols
• Papers reveal extent of the British royals’ veto over bills
• The Guardian’s stats on the size of their commenting community
• The science of why comment trolls suck
• An interesting design proposal: I want the world to scroll this way
• Good god, someone’s patent application disturbingly mirrors the artificial second stomach sketch from Tim and Eric
• Parkinson’s treatment can trigger creativity
• Password security in Deus Ex
• What Games Are: the fun boson does not exist
• To look into: a best comedy books of 2012 list

Lastly, a super-cut of famous people playing themselves

• 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.

• Bryan Stevenson’s crusade with the US justice system and why mass incarceration defines us as a society
• While Europe debates it, decriminalising prostitution has been great for New Zealand
• Craig Thornton and the obsessive world of underground cuisine
• “It’s so pervasive. It’s a virus.” Tom Waits’ 2002 letter on the commercialisation of songs
• The 25-GPU cluster that’ll crack a password in under 6 hours
• A letter to the TEDx community on TEDx and bad science
• Statistician Howard Wainer on the most dangerous equation (pdf)
• Study shows Fox News viewers have a 20 point lower IQ than the national average
• A man wrestled a shark to get back his nephew’s severed arm
• Wickr – now you can send ‘self-destructing’ messages
• A new trailer released for that South Park video game. Still looks good.

Building the Big Apple

• A record 58 percent of Americans say legalize marijuana
• “Officers shall not take any enforcement action … for a violation of I-502”
• An insight to reporting on a movie press junket (for The Hobbit)
• The Zapruder Film: the saddest and most expensive 26 seconds of amateur film ever made
• The curious case of Clairvius Narcisse, and other instances of Hatian “zombies”
• Exploring the Paris Metro’s eerie ghost stations
• UC Berkeley Librarian to Daily Cal sex columnist: ‘Please don’t f*ck in the Library’
• Journey soundtrack nominated for a Grammy

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.

An X-Ray of a Heliotrygon Gomesi Stingray

• What your crutch word says about you
• Tracking LiveJournal: the demise of the social media platform
• Oddly (if not depressingly) plausible: The Onion gives up
• From The Atlantic: How Google builds it’s maps
• Amusingly, author Philip Roth needed a second source to correct his own book’s wiki page
• Amazon’s approach with it’s new Kindle is looking pretty good yo
• Declassified: footage from the “Starfish Prime” tests
• From Foreign Policy: Why environmentalists should reconsider nuclear energy
• May is still the operative word: Too much light at night may lead to depression
• John Cusack interviews law professor Jonathan Turley about Obama administration’s war on the Constitution
• Looking back at the year 1555 AD
• Four geeky laws that rule our world
• 7 Urban Wonders of the Modern World

Also, this automated bar-tending drinks machine. Wants it.

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…

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…

• Fucking hell… How a fatal accident victim’s insurance company ended up in court defending her killer
• And then the story of how United Airlines lost a 10 year-old and didn’t care
• But at least the leader of an Hungarian anti-Semitic party discovered he’s Jewish
• Further interesting ‘discrimination’ as fight attendants force single men to sit away from unattended children
• From the New Yorker: Why nobody in America cared about the Sikh temple shooting
• The circle is complete as growing Indian companies begin outsourcing jobs to the US
• Just cause: Teddy Roosevelt’s magnificent sideburns
• Online: The lastest 360 degrees panorama of Mars
• How science-y are the social sciences?
• Forbes: Beck ‘produces’ a genius innovation that appeals to the user-generated generation
• Awesome is: this comic book store designed to look like a comic book
• 11 pop culture references younger readers won’t get
• Wow: Bill Finger – the Batman origin story you’ve never heard before
• I’m so making all of these: Simple ways to make food taste awesome
• Visualised (awesomely): the imports and exports of small arms (1992 – 2010)
• An ‘everyone-is-lying-to-me’ thriller movie trailer parody: Ghost Tits
• Also, there’s this pretty prophetic PSA by 5th grade kids about the internet (made in 1995)
• Today’s distracting online game: http://thisissand.com/

Finally, here’s a short video of the aptly named Teddy, the asshole cat…

• Pareidolia: A Bizarre Bug of the Human Mind Emerges in Computers 
• How text messaging became a humanitarian technology
• The internet as a hive mind
• How Mat Honan had his digital life dissolved by hackers and multiple security flaws
• France has backed away from it’s three strikes downloading law
• John Birmingham on the real cost of Curiosity
• From a NASA contractor: a conceptual video of the Dream Chaser space vehicle
• The ‘spray on’ skin that heals wounds
• The perfectly legal ‘heist’ of $95,000 from a bank
• House cats kill more critters than thought
• Returned to Family: Outlaw Ned Kelly’s Remains, 132 Years After His Death
• Trojan’s PR stunt: hands out 10,000 dildos today from hot dog carts
• From NPR: Dean Norris On Playing Good In ‘Breaking Bad’
• Prometheus (2012) – Calvinball Mythology and the Void of Meaning
• 21 links between unexpectedly shared TV universes
• Tumblr: People Dying Like Marion Cotillard

This also looks interesting: aupcoming HBO documentary called About Face that speaks with former supermodels and talks about plastic surgery and the business of beauty.

Vintage Photos of Soldiers Kissing Loved Ones Good-bye

• Oh hell no… Rush Hour 4 Confirmed
• Oh hell yes… Unbaby.me replaces baby photos on Facebook ‘with awesome stuff’
• “Terminated”: Pepper-Spraying UC Davis Cop
• Editorial: Are the Boomers screwing the Millennials?
• White people with dreadlocks: Fearless fashion choice or co-optation by the privileged and clueless?
• The Story of Steve Jobs: An Inspiration or a Cautionary Tale?
• Looks to be interesting: Apple v Samsung case
• Interesting: Failing at Geek Feminism
• The speeding up of SETI’s hunt for aliens
• Is exploring Mars worth the financial investment?
• Crown Prosecution Service will attempt to persuade a jury that images of fisting should be classified as “extreme pornography”
• At the Olympics: 8 Badminton Stars Booted for Playing to Lose
• Recounted: The Time They Used a Cigarette Lighter to Light the Olympic Torch
• 35 Modern Words Recently Added to the Dictionary
• Today’s web-based game: Organ Trail

• What Do The Authors Of Serialized Works Owe To Their Fans?
• Thank you for killing my novel
• Girl Accidentally Emails Prospective Employer Pic Of Nic Cage instead of CV
• Batman could fly, but he’d die horribly on landing, science students conclude
• The Mountain Goats announce new album: Transcendental Youth
• The Black Punk, the Black Geek, and Other Black People You Don’t Meet on TV
• Every Single Media Outlet Is Misreporting Obama’s Tax Proposal
• Supreme Court flip-flops: Health care wasn’t the first. It won’t be the last.
• Google Decides To Step Into The Gay Rights Arena
• The 20 Most Beautiful Museums in the World
• Video: 16-bit Game of Thrones, Season 2
• Video: this self taught 6 year old drummer is really good and depresses me
• Infographic: The best and worst places in the world to be a woman
• Comic: Learn Korean in 15 minutes

And then there’s this awesome report on some late-night BBQ chips bandits.

Merging Oceans photo

• Quantum Computing Research Breakthrough: no cooling required, as diamond stored quantum bits last for nearly two seconds
• First animation reveals how a face forms in the womb
• Browse the Artifacts of Geek History in Jay Walker’s Library
• 572 – The Phantom Island of Brazil
• Hidden Doggerland underworld uncovered in North Sea
• Will the boomers trust anyone under 30?
• What Is Intelligence? Beyond the Flynn Effect
• Shoe pants??
• Musicians missing royalties over copy-cat chart songs
• Charles Carreon drops lawsuit against The Oatmeal
• EU rules that downloaded games can be resold
• How Steven Spielberg’s Malfunctioning Sharks Transformed the Movie Business

Also, a trailer for Jerry Seinfeld’s new show called ‘Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee’. You’re guess is as good as mine.