This report from PBS takes a look at a Berkeley University study that examines the psychology of wealth and its influence on generosity and altruism. The findings? Yeah, people with more money are jerks. Plenty can attest to that, but this time that person is science!

Still tracking down a copy of the study, but the video documents a good portion of researcher Paul Piff’s methodology and the results, while not very surprising, is still fairly disturbing in its practical implications.

• A few notes on The Culture by Iain M Banks
• A Nigerian cook survived 2 days underwater in a shipwreck air bubble
• CIA Releases Analyst’s Fascinating Tale of Cracking the Kryptos Sculpture
• Why France insist school pupils master philosophy
• A SEAL Team 6 veteran comes out as transgender and what it could mean for the military
• Fitch says China credit bubble unprecedented in modern world history
• The numerous crazy keywords the NSA is tracking
• Brain training app brings big data to human cognition
• Recent breakthroughs mean we are on the cusp of Big Graphene Solar Sails for crude interstellar missions
• How Close Are We to Getting Google Glass in a Contact Lens?
• Is “ironic” the most abused word in English? When is it correct to say “that’s ironic?”
• The Quiet Shame of the Half-Book Reader
• At The Movies, The Women Are Gone
• I wanna play Ultimate Tic-Tac-Toe

Final supper! Last meals by Henry Hargreaves

• Thieves in Germany made away with five metric tons of Nutella
• How the Internet (and sex) amplifies irrational group behavior
• News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier
• Brain scans show what pain looks like
• Why ‘neuroskeptics’ see an epidemic of brain baloney
• New music ‘rewarding for the brain’
• The latest on where we’re going with reading people’s dreams
• How a heavily cited economics paper contains a very erroneous Excel formula
• New App Prevents Icelanders from Sleeping With their Relatives
• China: Sex Game Horror as Live Eel Slithers Up Man’s Anus and into His Guts
• Elon Musk want to send 80,000 people per year to Mars
• Teen’s Strange Ramen Addiction – “(she) has the health of an 80 year old”
• Amusing case of the impossibility of IT Security in a Nutshell
• 9 Fascinating Abandoned Mansions from Around the World
• Fucking condom snorting is apparently a fucking ‘thing’. I fucking hate this planet sometimes.

• 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

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

Bilateral gynandromporphism – half female, half male. This genetic anomaly is usually restricted to arthropods, but has been known to express itself in birds as well.

• An Inuit village, too remote for cars is on Google Street View via tricycle
• The medical case of the woman who needed to be upside down
• From The Atlantic: How Headphones Changed the World
• From BBC News: DNA test jailed innocent man for murder
• Finally some traction: UK clampdown on debit and credit cards surcharges
• The Verge interviewed Rian Johnson on Looper
• To ripen a tomato, place a ripe banana beside it
• There is a place called Monkey Island and it’s in the name of science!
• A top 10 list of strange topics that need more explaination
• Alternate Histories: 7 Ways the World Could Be Completely Different
• Water Worlds: 15 Real Floating Towns & Ocean Cities
• The Mysteries and Tragedy of Russia’s Bottomless Karst Lake
• Shame it’s only for the US, but still very cool: wind map site
• Word Dynamo: How many words do you know?

Also, this is a video of a guy fashioning some molten glass into a horse in under two minutes. Yeah, it’s impressive.

• 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…

Here’s a simple and fascinating short video by NPR that visually explains how the human population has exponentially reached 7 billion people by using a collection of glassware and coloured water. The visual execution of this is really well done and to see the growth of the different continents over time makes for good brain juice.

This also reminds me of another video I’d meant to post ages ago, but could never figure out when/how to post it (that or I was just being a lazy sonnofabitch); but following on one of the last points in the above video: why is the world population expected peak at 10 billion? Given that we’ve gone from 1 billion to 7 billion in only two centuries, how can they come to this conclusion?

At TEDxSummit 2012, science polymath Hans Rosling gave a talk on the subject of this 10 billion threshold, framing it in the context of ‘Religion and Babies’ and trying to find the correlation between the two, which he concludes: it is non-existent. Instead, his research reasons that it’s actually the economic climate of a country that effects birthrates and via his fun humor and totally awesome data software, provides a very entertaining and informative talk on just where we’re heading.

Recommended.

LEGO life-size forest in the Australian outback

• Don’t wipe out the masterpiece! A teacher who makes 25-minute whiteboard artworks in his lunch break
• The Master Race’s Graphic Design Manual
• Here’s What An Animated Font Looks Like
• The Not-So-Perfect Kilogram and Why the Metric System Might Be Screwed
• Dark Matter Filament Found, Says Scientists
• Women Infected with Toxoplasma Gondii Parasite Have Increased Risk of Attempting Suicide
• GQ writer interviews six people on different levels of income
• San Diego Accidentally Set Off All Its Fourth Of July Fireworks at Once
• Pearl Jam Allows Longtime Fan To Create Setlist For Amsterdam Show
• Forget rap disses, here’s The 30 Harshest Author-on-Author Insults in History

Lastly, this: Super Moonwalking.