Evolution of the alphabet

I really should be posting this stuff more often rather than piling up these posts over the course of days. Well, should…

• So Cool: A surgical knife that diagnoses cancer almost immediately on contact
• Shit. Lack of sleep is key in activating excessive worrying
• Elon Musk wants to get you from NY to LA in 45 minutes
• Curiosity Mars Rover Passes Kilometer of Driving
• Four scientists debate on the origins of mathematics
• Damn, I want to see this chart: Family Tree of Fish Yields Surprises
• 33,000 feet (10 Km) up, is a bubble of bacteria that surrounds the Earth
• When at the ends of the Earth: On getting drunk in Antartica
• How Scientology changed the internet
• Woman’s work: The twisted reality of an Italian freelancer in Syria
• Yes: I Write All My Blog Posts Out Longhand, and You Should Too
• Reuters, deliberately toning down their Climate Change coverage
• Here’s What It Looks Like When You Replace Photographers With iPhone-Wielding Reporters
• Think Your Office Is Soulless? Check Out This Amazon Fulfillment Center
• Woman sues Japan Yamaguchi-gumi crime boss to refund protection money over “employer liability”
• If true, this is a charming twitter story of how Erin Faulk tried to find Matt Damon
• From the master cinematographer: 20 Tips by Roger Deakins
• Rock, Paper, Shotgun interviews Charlie Brooker
• They’re making a Star Wars comic based on the original draft, looks good
• 10 of the most cryptic texts in the world
• Gallery: What does 200 Calories look like?
• Whoa, an augmented reality colouring book: colAR App

Was going to post and comment on this write up’s ‘counter-arguement’ on Curiosity’s cultural investment/benefits, but then this high resolution footage of the rover’s decent phase from the rover’s point-of-view came out and the thinking is simply: Who care? It’s still goddamn amazing enough that we’ve got a friggin’ Tank of Science on another planetary body.

UPDATE: some reddit user has interpolated the original’s images, creating a ‘smoother’ 25 fps version of the original video. Nice.

History of Comics in 6 Panels with write up via Paul Lopes

• The first color 360-degree panorama from Curiosity
• The Internet May Have Upended Traditional Institutions, But It’s a Brittle Weapon
• The Internet Archive Now Offers Torrent Downloads
• New software that helps employers read your emotional state
• New Global Warming Culprit: Dams
• New salt-based battery a leap for green energy
• How rogue biohackers are revolutionising the human body
• The science of Staring
• A new prehistoric species of humans identified
• Conservative pundits are plain wrong: Barack Obama hasn’t lost Europe. That was his predecessor’s doing.
• How billionaire backers pick America’s candidates
• The Fog of War: How can we talk about the military if we can’t define what it is?
• The Elephant in the Map Room: The Israel/Palestine Border
• The 1916 Shark Attacks that were the inspiration for Jaws
• Wait… There’s a 30 minute longer cut of The Shining?

• 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: https://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.

Whilst the music is somewhat of a pretty over-dramatic Inception knock-off (which consequently detracts from the overall message), this video just released from NASA demonstrates the complex multitude of stages that their 890 kilograms Curiosity rover will have to go through in order to land on Mars surface in August. Even ignoring the at times jarring music, this shit looks to be one awesome (and nail-biting) feat of engineering.