• 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

• Cloak of invisibility: Engineers use plasmonics to create an invisible photodetector
• How Pixar’s Toy Story 2 was deleted twice, once by technology and again for its own good
• Read Every Line of Dialogue Rihanna Says in Battleship
• Scarlett Johansson On The Ridiculous, Sexist Portrayals Of Superheroines
• The end of drug discovery?
• This INSANE Graphic Shows How Ludicrously Complicated Social Media Marketing Is Now
• SpaceX Dragon, first private ship to the ISS, launched successfully
• How do you cook a unicorn? Chef Anthony Bourdain’s got the recipe
• Andre the Giant: The Greatest Drunk on Earth

• Why politicians don’t get the internet
• Somebody please, for the love of god, fix shipping/couriers (YES!)
• George Lucas Does Something Likeable For a Change: Revenge on Rich Neighbors
  

  George Lucas’ rich neighbors don’t want him building a movie studio in their backyard. His response is the best thing he’s done in years.

• The Original Piece of Wood I Left in Your Head
  

  Wildcat pop-culture critic Perkus Tooth and Being John Malkovich director Spike Jonze met, at Tooth’s insistence, at Yonah Schimmel’s knishery on Houston Street in New York City. A small digital tape recorder was placed between them.

• 23 incredible new technologies you’ll see by 2021
• Reset Firefox – easily fix most problems

From the last company I’d have pegged to develop an awesome new technological advancement (though it kinda makes sense), Disney Research have released this video of their Touché interactive system that is both simple in it’s approach and incredibly versatile; by being applicable to almost any surface, be it water, wood or tasty, tasty human, the practical possibilities of this is huge.

Hell, the five examples they give at the end of this five minute video are amazing enough, but the more I think about it afterwards, the potential applications really do seem limitless. Check it.

Lego Houses by Mike Doyle

Peter Andrew’s Freeway Interchange series

A nuclear explosion, less than 1 millisecond after detonation

Been somewhat busy again, but no matter. Carrying on a recent trend of posting videos, here are a few more I’ve picked up my website absence…

First off is a reading of ’twas the night before Christmas’ in several impersonated voices.  Not all are spot on, but the range and ease of transitions are pretty damn impressive in this…

Second for some real good fun is this little animated pokemon short which everyone has probably seen by now but I just love.

And then we have a demonstration by the brilliant folks at MIT of a camera that can capture video of photons traveling at the speed of light.  Awesome concept?  Awesome concept.

Here’s a quick slice of some Battlefield 3 gameplay that is just top shelf with perfect choice of music…

And finally, this stop-frame animated short film is just brilliant and effective in its simplicity.

Actually, make that one second to last.  Thinking about it, I probably should have separated these out more, but meh…  This one can thematically round out this post where we started with something Christmas and we’ll end with something else Christmas-ish… (if it doesn’t inadvertently ends everything else in the world)…

You’re welcome.

NeverWet is a silicon based spary-on developed by the Ross Technology Corp that repels water and oils and, hell… it’s more impact to just watch this…

I’m throwing cash at the screen, but my ultimate slip n slide dreams aren’t coming true.

This is a really good talk on the need to preserve civilization’s history and how really groundbreaking 3D scanning technology will help in this endevour to do so.  Sweet demo of it at work at the end.

Here is founder of spacehack.org, Ariel Walden, presents a rather interesting talk on the possibilities of a more open source space/science community, taking the exclusivity of the field from governments and placing it into the hands of everyday people, whilst still helping to advance science and exploration.

It’s all very inspiring stuff and I’ve only manage to have a brief poke around the website, but man, I do love the thinking behind all these crowd sourcing projects lately.