The Best Astronomy Images of 2012

• Should society be able to tell you how to augment your reality?
• The mind-uploading solution for interstellar missions
• Does Twitter kill TV comedy? Writers from “Daily Show,” “SNL,” “Fallon” and others sound off
• Game of Thrones gets a mind-blowing Minecraft makeover
• Mark Cuban, Minecraft creator donates big to help EFF “fix” software patents
• World’s biggest patent troll saves Kodak from bankruptcy
• Scapegoating at its finest: Proposed US Senate bill to further study violent game effects
• Reformed hitman who inspired ‘The Wire’s’ Omar dies at 58

Also, the chemistry of how snowflakes form their unique shapes.

• 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

• 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

• Taken over: Mountain Dew ‘Dub the Dew’ Campaign, by 4chan
• Colour printing reaches its ultimate resolution
• The surprising truth about heroin and addiction
• Is Mitt Romney too boring to make funny?
• Charlie Murphy is angry at the pussification of the world
• The time has come for America’s flight attendants to shut up
• What Did Dinosaur Meat Taste Like?
• Wind tunnel acrobatics is pretty sweet
• Flowcharted: The best and worst countries in the Olympic medal count
• How India’s favourite TV show uses data to change the world
• 14 great films that inspired regrettable trends
• 100 Wonderful and Terrible Movies That Never Existed

Also, ceiling cat is real and something straight out of an Aliens movie.

• Wheels Down on Mars. Now It’s Time to Reinvent America, Says Neil deGrasse Tyson
• Why NASA should abandon a manned mission to Mars
• How mobile phones will pioneer future space technology
• The implications of overpopulation are terrifying. But will we listen to them?
• Woo hoo! First pictures from the new set of Arrested Development
• US Olympian aren’t too thrilled about Fox news either
• Take a Cue from the Olympics to be the Best Business Athlete
• Why the Sikh temple shooting got less coverage than the Aurora massacre
• Why Do So Many Murderers Have Three Names?
• The Moral Significance of Sex Workers and People With Disabilities
• From Damn Interesting: Better Call Sol
• New type of chemical bond may form in extreme magnetic fields of stars
• How Big Is Infinity? An Animated Explanation from TED
• Probably should: Please turn on two-factor authentication
• The Science of “Breaking the Seal”
• 25 Behind-the-Scenes TV Photos That Will Mess With Your Mind
• Website: http://www.ilooklikebarackobama.com/
• Video: Animals Acting Like Sharks Week

Finally, a recording still for the ages: In 1996, just months before he died, Carl Sagan recorded this message to future colonists living on Mars.

• 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.

• What Radiohead Teaches Us About Musical Innovation
• How to reinforce learning while you sleep
• Scientists Harness Human Power for Electricity
• New Record for the Highest Man Made Temperature: 4 Trillion Degrees Celsius
• Planned TV retelling of Peter Pan based on the Lost Boys 10 years later
• Video: Mock Dora the Explorer Movie Trailer
• Finnish mathematician constructs “world hardest sudoku puzzle” (confirmed to be a goddamnmotherfuckingsonnofabitch)

Photos of The Statue of Liberty’s construction in Paris

• Dumbstrucking on so many levels: Under congressional questioning the DEA’s Administrator doesn’t know if meth and heroin is more harmful than marijuana
• Convict testifies: Solitary confinement ‘is driving men insane’
• Supreme Court awesomely rules: ‘Fuck it, swearing on TV fine by us’ (essentially)
• Game designer Kim Swift on why Portal is a toy and toys are awesome
• Gaming distraction of the day: Gare
• The American Swedish Institute offers it’s Twitter to Stephen Colbert
• Erdos-Bacon-Sabbath Numbers: The People at the Center of the Universe
• Scientists Block Excess Aggression in Mice (haven’t they seen Serenity?!)
• How to blow $6 billion on a tech project
• Warsaw museum digitally recreated the destroyed city during WWII
• Photos: Recovering from disaster
• Video: Game of Thrones political attack ads are odd (but funny)

Also, making Easter Island moai heads “walk”.

Shit, guess this is what happens when I don’t update regularly; all the left over tabs and bookmarks get to be so numerous, they have to be herded into a single, over-sized aggregated post. My bad. Good stuff to read and check out though. Honest.

• Boston teacher’s incredible speech to graduating class: ‘You are NOT special’ (brilliance)
  

  In a moment of pure untamed brilliance English teacher David McCullough went off on the graduating class of 2012 at Wellesley High, critiquing modern parenting techniques by saying that children are “pampered, cosseted, doted upon, helmeted, bubble wrapped… nudged, cajoled, wheedled .. feted and fawned over and called sweetie pie.”
  (transcript here and video here)

• Being the ‘good’ kind of narcissist
• P-p-p pick up a perverted penguin
  

  Newly discovered documents from Captain Scott’s ill-fated expedition to the Antarctic have revealed their shock at the “astonishing depravity” and sexual habits of the Adelie penguins they encountered around the South Pole.

• Scientists to Use Venus Transit to Hone Alien Planet Search Techniques
  Plus: video observations from the SDO and collected photos on the Big Picture.
• Toward a Dissident Architecture?
  

  The question posed by Wang’s Pritzker selection could be articulated like this: If you provide a particularly humane or humanist built environment within the context of occasionally inhumane political or economic conditions, to what extent are you reinforcing or resisting those conditions? Are you offering a tangible alternative or a mere respite?

• The Pirate Bay evades ISP blockade with IPv6, can do it 18 quintillion more times
• How search engines will develop sentient responses?
• Radiolab: The Art and Science of Digital Shamanism
• Why Great Television Is More Like A Novel Than A Play
  

  Why do still watch plays by Euripides, born some 2,500 years ago, or Shakespeare, who is nearly 450 years old? Writer orthodoxy says it’s because the fundamental rules for drama have never changed, since they are eternal, rooted in human nature.

• Why Americans See Racism Where The French See No Problem
• Wes Anderson: Whimsical Like a Fox
  See also: his collaborator’s radio interview on how he soundtracks his movies.
• Francis Ford Coppola: On Risk, Money, Craft & Collaboration

Finally, was pointed to an upcoming Ubisoft game titled “Watch Dogs”. Not much details have been released yet, but based on this E3 trailer, it looks to be one of those rare high concept, modernist thinking games that only get produced once in a blue moon. Plus the trailer itself is a magnificently designed video.

• Carl Sagan on Mastering the Vital Balance of Skepticism & Openness
  

  Seven years ago this week, David Foster Wallace argued that “learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.” Yet in an age of ceaseless sensationalism, pseudoscience, and a relentless race for shortcuts, quick answers, and silver bullets, knowing what to think seems increasingly challenging.

• ‘Are SF writers “slacking off” or is science fiction still the genre of “big ideas”?’
  

  Calls for more big ideas in SF are generally a political cri de coeur. We might equally imagine a similar essay in the context of mid-sixties Soviet fiction, calling for more fiction about tractors and breakthroughs in agricultural genomics.

• How Facebook Threatens the Legitimacy of the Stock Market
• The Perfection of the Paper Clip
• Could Angry Birds lead to mass murder?
• 2012 TV Body Count Study Results

What better way to spend a day off work, than hungover and catching up on the entire Game of Throne series from start to the lastest damnit-how-long-until-the-next-one episode?

Finally, I can now appreciate the massive appeal of this series and of the entire country’s massive data spike when season 2 premiered on Tuesday; it’s like a high production medieval  soap opera, but thank the fuck christ the characters have got some great dimension on them and the motivating themes are well fleshed out.

Anyhow, I don’t really have much to really say on the show, but figure I should maintain some kind of regularity to posting on here. It’s been a 12 hour blur of good storytelling today; one that’s at least made me want to bust out the old fantasy novels for the first time in a long time.

Oh, but of all the things, after six months of it in my bookmarks, I am finally be able to spoiler free-ly check out Arrested Westeros, the Arrested Development/Game of Thrones mashup tumblr.

Professor Brian Cox hosts a lecture and guests include Jonathan Ross, Jim Al-Khalili, Charlie Brooker and Simon Pegg to name a few? Definitely relevant to my interests.