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

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.

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!

• 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

• Women in the porn industry are as healthy as any other women claims new study
• Hacking my vagina: making a vibrator that listens to your body
• Yeah, it’s Pitchfork, but still: How much money is actually made from streaming music?
• Interesting piece on misogyny in Industrial Music
• SpaceX’s Elon Musk: Your ticket to Mars? Half a million dollars
• Sweet… Notch, Gearbox, Yogscast, Day[9], Bethesda and Valve to go head-to-head in a TF2 charity match
• Teleglitch: Doom with a (top-down) view
• Teller (of Penn & Teller) on how magicians manipulate the mind
• How one fake press release on a Google “acquisition” fooled the press
• Facebook makes it official – an external advertising network coming soon
• Researchers have discovered the ‘White Noise’ of smell: ‘Olfactory White’
• And, thanks to nature, you are most likely to die at 11 am

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.

• 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: https://thisissand.com/

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

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.

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