• Delusional Doppelgängers: The Three Christs of Ypsilanti State Hospital
• I’m Sick Of Pretending: I Don’t “Get” Art
• NASA outlines ingenious plan to resurrect the Kepler planet hunter
• A spurned techie’s revenge: Locking down his ex’s digital life
• Physics explains why tapping the top of a beer bottle produces a geyser of foam
• TV Is Dying, And Here Are The Stats From The US That Prove It
• The Neuroscientist Who Discovered He Was a Psychopath
• The quest for Shadow of the Colossus’ last big secret
• Pop music is louder, less acoustic and more energetic than in the 1950s
• What the … Why everyone and your mother started using ellipses … everywhere
• A simple explanation of how money moves around the banking system
• U.S. family that tried living without anything ‘Made in China’
• Mexican Cartels Enslave Engineers to Build Radio Network
• Population 1: the town that’s been reclaimed by the prairie
• Confessions of a porn site boss: Part 1 & Part 2
• The War on the War on Death Begins
• Never let the facts get in the way of a good story eh?

Cape Times Selfies ad campaign

• Music skills evolved at least 30 million years ago in the common humans-monkeys ancestor
• Long commutes cause obesity, neck pain, loneliness, divorce, stress, and insomnia
• 21st century heists: Five more men charged in global bank heist that netted $45 million in hours
• The Pink Panther gang: The astonishing story behind the world’s most feared robbers.
• Havana Marking meets and interviews members of the Pink Panter
• Sigh…  The death throes of the keyboard cellphone
• Mike Tyson writes My Life As a Young Thug
• Goodness Gone Viral: Paying it Forward lives on in drive-thrus
• DIY your smartphone into a digital microscope for $10
• Witzelsucht: the neurological affliction that causes a person to make constant puns, jokes and sexual comments in an inappropriate and random setting

• “They make cars; I run a kitchen”: How Toyota donated efficiency to New York charity
• Your app makes me fat and the correlation of willpower and cognitive processing
• The genetic mutation that allowed ancient Europeans to drink milk
• The Hole in Our Collective Memory: How Copyright Made Mid-Century Books Vanish
• Ever looked at a clock and the second hand seemed frozen for more than a second? Chronostasis.
• What does it mean for light to be stopped or stored?
• A professor spoofed (falsified data) a $80M superyacht’s GPS on the high sea
• An ‘offline’ radio exchange with two women-hating trolls
• Edgar Wright’s polite exchange with the British censors over the usage of ‘cunt’ (and their refreshingly transparent reply unlike the MPAA)
• Man tries to smuggle turtle onto plane by hiding it in a hamburger
• George Clooney spent his Nespresso paycheck on a spy satellite to keep tabs on Omar Al-Bashir
• A message from firefighters: try not to get your penis stuck in a toaster
• Electric company sends threatening letter to a lamp post
• Great writing advice from Chuck Palahniuk

Earth from Saturn’s orbit via Cassini

• Share it like Cicero: How Roman authors used social networking
• The Sun, gravitational lensing and the 70 billion mile telescope
• DNA from a Russian cave: The Case of the Missing Ancestor
• Optogenetics: a new technique to controlling genes with light
• Scientists discover the molecule responsible for causing feelings of depression
• Life Satisfaction Linked to Personality Changes
• The Vitamin Myth: Why We Think We Need Supplements
• From the Manson Myth to My Friendship with Charles Manson
• The 11-year-old who ran away so she wouldn’t have to get married
• Six Brain-Damage Scourges That Cripple IQ in Sub-Saharan Africa
• Cool webpage design/animation: Riding the New Silk Road
• Professor E. Paul Zehr on How Wolverine’s Claws Could Work
• 18 obsolete words, which never should have gone out of style
• 50 Great Works of Video Art That You Can Watch Online
• Great re-issue review of (one of) my Mountain Goats favourites: All Hail West Texas

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

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 lengthy, well thought out breakdown of Pokemon’s Post-Capitalist society
• What Is Nostalgia Good For? Quite a Bit, Research Shows
• When launching a $200m rocket, install the parts right way up
• US agency baffled by modern technology, destroys mice to get rid of viruses
• Possible explanation for cosmic radio bursts: Meet the “blitzar”
• Sun’s Loops Are Displaying an Optical Illusion
• New Evidence: Antarctica’s Ancient, Ice-Covered Lake is Full of Life
• Study Finds Mammals Can ‘Choose’ Sex of Offspring
• 29-Year-Old Gets $15-Million to Decipher Song Lyrics
• The positive feedback loop: How IBM’s Watson Learns
• Marvel’s experimentation with the medium of digital comics
• Desert Bus: The Very Worst Video Game Ever Created
• If Films Were Reviewed Like Video Games
• Beverly Hills moms say pot makes them better mothers
• Artist uses rare comic book in paper mache sculpture
• 10 Musical Genres That Should Never, Ever Be Revived
• Planet of the Castors – Beaver kills man in Belarus

• 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

• Marketing research discovers ‘Netflix adultery’: the act of watching shows ahead of your spouse
• The twins, separated at birth, who led strikingly similar lives
• The Economist: How does copyright work in space?
• 7 Reasons Child Stars Go Crazy (An Insider’s Perspective)
• An editorial against ‘Bravery’ Debates
• Kiwi man sick of playing Xbox on home detention asks for jail
• Letter from Loretto – A Prison Letter from a CIA Whistleblower
• Japan’s radiation disaster toll: none dead, none sick
• Why DIY fecal transplants are a thing (and the FDA is only part of the reason)
• The self-inflicted brain wound that cured a man’s mental illness
• Peterborough City Hospital patients watch films during surgery
• The world that only formerly-blind people can see
• The World’s longest hangover
• Information Theory in Three Minutes
• Eric Weinstein may have found the answer to physics’ biggest problems
• How one man had sex on the moon
• Pixar’s Lightspeed will entirely ray-trace all of Monsters University
• 5 clever clues of foreshadowing in films
• Steven Spielberg predicts ‘Implosion’ of Film Industry
• If Developers Were Houses on Game of Thrones

And to cap off, some remarkable NASA footage of those Oklahoma tornadoes of late.

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.