Whoops. This was meant to be posted weeks ago…

The Unsettling Beauty of Lethal Viruses

• If you can’t manage comments well, don’t offer comments at all
• Love of Musical Harmony Is Not Nature but Nurture
• How to turn living cells into computers
• Small-molecule drug drives cancer cells to suicide
• Declassified: America’s Secret Flying Saucer
• The village with a 9,000 year old history
• A cleaner form of demolition – Japan’s incredible shrinking building
• What it’s like to leave Westboro Babtist Church (for Megan Phelps-Roper no less)
• Stop pretending cyberspace exists as a mythical country
• Damnit science… Germans developing weed-controlling laser armed drones
• Techno Viking and the curse of internet celebrity
• Top 11 Biggest Lies of Mainstream Nutrition
• Unable to afford life insurance, Apollo 11’s crew got creative in providing for their family
• How to win arguments by pretending to be a simpleton
• Cinema Tarantino: The Making of Pulp Fiction
• Link: a 404 page where you save Lemmings
• The search for the genetics of intelligence
• The giant camera resolution tests scattered across America
• Inside China’s genome factory
• Three Plus One Geometries of the Universe
• Kubrick’s rejection letter to Anthony Burgess on their Napoleon collaboration
• “Ok, Glass, record a video”: Google provides another glimpse of Glass

• Being ‘it’: these guys have played a game of tag for 23 years now and it’s awesome
• Last Saturday, over 2800 spaceships clashed in a battle costing thousands of dollars
• Self-immolators in Tibet near 100 as pressure grows from China
• Smithsonian on the story behind Banksy
• Amazingly, this Russian family was cut off from civilisation for 40 years
• Strange Geographies: the beautiful and alien Iceland
• On Barnes & Noble and the end of the mega-bookstore
• Computer programming languages aren’t copyrightable, says a High Court judge
• Surgeon Simulator 2013 is the new medical QWOP
• Letter of Note: The Alien father is HR Giger
• A great list of 36 supervillain musical numbers
  (I have a huge hankering to re-watch Gremlins 2 right now)

Also, it’s pretty mean, but this edit of Lance Armstrong’s confession interview with Oprah recut to the lyrics of Radiohead’s Creep is very well done.

Mexico’s Haunting Underwater Sculptures

• There’s currently a cheese fire in a Norway tunnel causing traffic issues
• “It might not get weirder than this” an account of being in a North Korean-visiting delegation
• How one man escaped from a North Korean prison camp
• CurbTXT service: contacting drivers through their license plate
• Very interesting study into the growing dichotomy of our online and offline identity
• Sleep problems could jeopardise future missions to Mars
• Using pulsars as a form of interstellar GPS
• What would hyperspace travel really look like?
• How a quarter of the cow genome came from snakes
• How Leprosy reprograms the body
• Wired’s best of CES 2013
• It’ll certainly be interesting to see how Oculus Rift will effect gaming
• The ridiculously charming world of ‘Ni No Kuni,’ Studio Ghibli’s gaming masterpiece
• This device supposedly trains you to become a human compass
• A great send up on attending a tech press release conference (and subtly, tech ‘journalism’)
• Answered: How valid is the implied legal advice in Jay-Z’s “99 Problems”?
• The producer of ‘2 girls 1 cup’ has been sentenced to 4 years for obscenity
• Drew Struzan may return for the new Star Wars trilogy posters
• A great observational piece that goes behind the scenes of Paul Schrader’s The Canyons and what happens when you cast Lindsay Lohan in your movie
• Some anniversaries you can expect to see covered this year
• 7 Strategies to outsmart writer’s block
• Bad writing advice from famous authors
• The Serif Readability Myth
• Clay Shirky: Remembering Aaron by taking care of each other
• A gallery of 30 insane cloud formations from around the world
• Another gallery of 18 Funny Restaurant Signs
• This website interestingly maps and tracks every current flight: https://www.flightradar24.com/
• And then there’s this video of this dog strutting around on two legs. TWO!

• 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

• Firefighter assembles terrifying/awesome supercut of helmet footage
• NYC iPhone owner tricks thief using dating App
• ‘Oompa-Loompas’ sought over city assault
• That’s Dedication: California couple visited Disneyland every day in 2012
• Top secret tombs: the classified stealth aircraft burial grounds
• The science behind 9 big diets
• Still smarting from SOPA, Congress to shy away from copyright in 2013
• NASA mulls plan to drag asteroid into moon’s orbit
• Binary star systems make for unstable planets
• The Helical Model – animations of a vortex solar system
• PlayStation 2 manufacture ends after 12 years
• Stats show the eBook craze is slowing
• My Father’s “Eviscerated” Work – Christopher Tolkien’s first interview in ever
• Ten things on Vince Gilligan’s mind as he writes the final Breaking Bad episodes
• Quentin’s World: NYT interview with Tarantino
• From kottke: Another great Bill Murray story

• Ars Technica’s craziest Craigslist posts of 2012
• Buzzfeed’s 27 science fictions that became science facts in 2012
• io9’s Most futuristic predictions that came true in 2012
• NYP asks designers for their favorite book cover designs of 2012
• Computer Weekly editor on digital publishing, growing revenue and life after print
• SMBC on Economics and the study of scarce resources
• The strange case of Grant Morrison and Alan Moore, as old by Grant Morrison
• A martian dream: What the Red Planet would look like with Earth-like oceans and life
• Profile on Jerry Seinfeld: intends to die standing up
• I now want to play Singularity Chess
• Scientific paper on The Effects of Peanut Butter on the Rotation of the Earth
• What does randomness look like?
• This guy’s assessment of the multiple visual qualities of The Hobbit‘s format is pretty damn good
• And this one at least illuminates some of the science how human perceive high frame rates
• Right on: Love Actually is rubbish
• Website: Essay Typer
• Website: Wi-fi joiner QR Code Generator

This looks good. Fingers crossed it’s less heavy handed than The Cove which, while excellent, was pretty self-indulgent in the filmmakers portraying themselves as the ‘framing subject’. The same thing looks to be going on here, but much more justified considering it’s just ice. And holy crap, that is some amazing footage of a lot of ice.

• 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?

More amazing splash photography by Markus Reugels via This is Colossal

• Hrmm… 2012 was the best year yet?
• How the internet is accelerating the evolution of language
• 12 Letters that didn’t make it into the alphabet
• Recreating the Mona Lisa using polygon rendering genetic algorithms
• Testing audiophile claims and myths
• An eBay for Professors to sell college courses directly to students
• Why are (almost all) economists unaware of Milton Friedman’s thermostat?
• Unexpected behind-the-scenes horror film photos 
• Authors’ responses to the film adaptations of their work (Ellroy’s praise for The Black Dahlia is somewhat inaccurate)
• The oldest living species of the modern house cat: Palla’s Cat

• The ‘Mad Men’ Economic Miracle: the new business model that’s brought on a wave of great TV
• From the Criterion Collection: Christopher Nolan, self-made filmmaker
• Facebook scans private messages for brand page mentions, admits a bug is boosting Likes
• GravityLight: lighting for developing countries
• Quantum networks may be more realistic than we thought
• Largest glacier break-up yet caught on video
• Video: These guys get two hookers to re-enact a scene from Braveheart
• Video: Kids songs with Cat Power