…or catching up on about three months of internet.

Science

• Charles Darwin’s ecological experiment on Ascension Isle
• Lizards Rapidly Evolve After Introduction to Island
• Dinosaur Feathers Discovered in Canadian Amber
• 419-million-year-old armoured fish fossil resolves ‘missing link’ in evolution, scientists say
• Scientists link genes to why wounds heal quicker for young people
• DNA Double Take – having multiple sets of DNA is pretty common
• Scientist discovers DNA ‘biological clock’
• Gamers solve decade old HIV puzzle in ten days
• New drug mimics the beneficial effects of exercise
• Getting drunk without the hangover or health risks – scientist seeks investment for ‘alcohol substitute’ drug
• The Rat Pack study – Drug addiction: The complex truth
• Tastes Like Chicken: How one company created a plausible substitute for meat that has the texture of real flesh.
• How the shape of chocolate can change its taste
• How much can an extra hour’s sleep change you?
• Sleep – Now By Prescription
• Sleep debt and recovering from it
• The Curious Case of Polywater: In the 1960s, scientists ‘discovered’ a new form of water. How did they get it so wrong?
• Global warming: What the leading scientists say
• First sign that humanity is slowing its carbon surge
• Looking to disprove climate change, Nebraska fails in finding scientists to participate
• Breaking Deep-Sea Waves, as High as a Skyscraper, Reveal Mechanism for Global Ocean Mixing
• What would it be like if another planet just barely missed colliding with the Earth?
• Celebrating the Nobel win for it’s discovery, NYTimes made this great explanation as to what the Higgs is
• The Apmlituhedron: A Jewel at the Heart of Quantum Physics
• Quantum Experiment Shows How Time ‘Emerges’ from Entanglement
• The Crew That Never Came Home: The Misfortunes of Soyuz 11

Technology

Dialup handshake example

• The Printer That Can Print A 2,500 Square Foot House In 20 Hours.
• Transfer a secret audio message by poking someone with your finger
• Hyperloop—a theoretical 760 mph transit system made of sun, air, and magnets
• Police firing GPS tracking ‘bullets’ at cars during chases
• Engineers use sound waves to detect bombs remotely
• The Status of Moore’s Law: It’s Complicated
• Return of the Borg: How Twitter Rebuilt Google’s Secret Weapon
• You Might Have an Invisible Facebook Account Even if You Never Signed Up
• Hackers Courted by Government for Cyber Security Jobs: The Geeks on the Front Lines
• I challenged hackers to investigate me and what they found out is chilling
• Debugging a live Saturn V rocket

Sociology (and stuff)

The 1939 New York World’s Fair

• Is Google Wrecking Our Memory? Nope. It’s (transactive memory) much, much weirder than that.
• Why even the worst bloggers are making us smarter
• Online comment systems reveal multiple layers of social bias
• The datamune difference between funny and LOL
• The 29 Stages Of A Twitterstorm
• Kids Can’t Use Computers… And This Is Why It Should Worry You
• A vast cloud of blah: Charlie Brooker on taking a break from columns
• A Slate backpack investigation: When Did Two-Strapping Get Cooler Than One-Strapping?
• Even babies discriminate until taught not to
• Man… The ocean is broken
• The debate over: Is population growth out of control?
• Sweden closes four prisons as number of inmates plummets
• Urban Design: The secrets of the world’s happiest cities
• Golden Gate Bridge: Triumph, Tragedy : Suicide Rate Shadows the Span’s 50th-Anniversary Celebration
• PBS commentator Mark Shields says more killed by guns since ’68 than in all U.S. wars
• Amazon and the “profitless business model” fallacy
• Stoya on ethics, porn and worker’s rights
• 16 People On Things They Couldn’t Believe About America Until They Moved Here
• How to be miserable in ten easy steps
• Ten Surprising Facts About Rejection
• Comfort In, Dump Out: the Kvetching Order of handling traumatic (or any other kind of) crisis
• Perceiving Time: Why Waiting Is Torture
• Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming

Media

Supercut: 50 “four in the morning”s – Museum of Four in the Morning

• Warren Ellis on Breaking Bad and the Horrible Glory of Heisenberg
• Korra’s a Girl? TV producers think boys won’t watch girl heroines. Turns out that’s not true.
• Netflix studies piracy sites to decide what to buy
• Study accuses media companies of cooking the books on piracy losses
• David Byrne: ‘The internet will suck all creative content out of the world’
• How Marvel Unified Its Movie Universe (And Why That Won’t Be Easy for DC)
• Lucasfilm will combine video games and movies to axe post-production process
• Why Stephen King Spends ‘Months and Even Years’ Writing Opening Sentences
• Why Everyone Gets Robocop But Nobody Gets Starship Troopers
• Todd Alcott: Some thoughts on the state of screenwriting in 2013
• ‘Canned laughter’ doesn’t exist, so why complain about it?
• Soundworks: The Sound of Gravity

Randomness

https://thumbsandammo.blogspot.co.nz/

• Animals would stop the zombie apocalypse before it started
• “Christ, what an asshole” works for everything
• 35 years after the clock tower shooting, Whitman belatedly claims his 15th victim
• A Marine recounts his one afternoon with a notorious serial killer
• Get ordained for free as a Dudeist minister
• Mexico’s Tales of Bus Passengers Forced to Fight to the Death
• Colombian women get their road fixed by refusing to have sex
• Civ II’s “Eternal War” continues on reddit more than a year later
• Carpet designer threatens cosplayers with legal action
• This Guy’s Eaten Nothing but Raw Meat for Five Years
• A map of Pangea with modern political borders
• What happens when you replace guns with thumbs up?
• Images of Vietnam Zippo engravings (yes, gratifying rewards too as a Preacher fan)
• The wonderfully wierd emoticon art of Ryder Ripps
• Questlove’s Celebrity Stories
• Back to toilet reading basics with new technology: backlabel
• Webgame: Z-Type

Christ…

• The ‘end of history’ illusion and why we can’t imagine getting old
• “The finite is nested within the infinite” (or my favourite parable: somewhere in infinity, an alternate universe exists where you are the Batman)
• Of last year’s bestselling sci-fi list, only one was published that year
• Does a techno utopia require physical books?
• Reshaping the brain: scientists reprogram neurons after birth
• The mysterious disappearance of the Russian Crown Jewels
• The courtroom sketches of Bill Robles
• Inside the prison journal of West Memphis Three’s Damien Echols
• Papers reveal extent of the British royals’ veto over bills
• The Guardian’s stats on the size of their commenting community
• The science of why comment trolls suck
• An interesting design proposal: I want the world to scroll this way
• Good god, someone’s patent application disturbingly mirrors the artificial second stomach sketch from Tim and Eric
• Parkinson’s treatment can trigger creativity
• Password security in Deus Ex
• What Games Are: the fun boson does not exist
• To look into: a best comedy books of 2012 list

Lastly, a super-cut of famous people playing themselves

• Firefighter assembles terrifying/awesome supercut of helmet footage
• NYC iPhone owner tricks thief using dating App
• ‘Oompa-Loompas’ sought over city assault
• That’s Dedication: California couple visited Disneyland every day in 2012
• Top secret tombs: the classified stealth aircraft burial grounds
• The science behind 9 big diets
• Still smarting from SOPA, Congress to shy away from copyright in 2013
• NASA mulls plan to drag asteroid into moon’s orbit
• Binary star systems make for unstable planets
• The Helical Model – animations of a vortex solar system
• PlayStation 2 manufacture ends after 12 years
• Stats show the eBook craze is slowing
• My Father’s “Eviscerated” Work – Christopher Tolkien’s first interview in ever
• Ten things on Vince Gilligan’s mind as he writes the final Breaking Bad episodes
• Quentin’s World: NYT interview with Tarantino
• From kottke: Another great Bill Murray story

Approximately five minutes from each of the 22 Eon produced James Bond films have been cut together, in order and in sequence, beginning with the first five minutes of DR. NO (1962) followed by minutes 5-10 of FROM RUSSIA WITH LOVE (1963), minutes 10-15 of GOLDFINGER (1964), minutes 15-20 of THUNDERBALL (1965), continuing on through each of the remaining 18 Bond features (accounting for variables in each title’s running time) culminating with the final five minutes of 2008’s QUANTUM OF SOLACE.

This fresh look at the “James Bond Formula” provides a new exploration of the evolution of the series into a filmmaking genre uniquely its own. With few exceptions, each title’s transition into the picture that follows it is nearly seamless, creating a viewing experience that at first might serve to remind us “if you’ve seen one Bond film, you’ve seen them all,” but looking more closely it is in fact an endearing homage to a character who single-handedly shaped modern cinema’s action/adventure formula and who continues to leave an indelible mark on generations worldwide.

• The Secret Lives of Supercutters
• NASA is actually working on a Faster-than-Light Warp Drive
• Cambridge to study technology’s risk to humans
• Shinichi Mochizuki’s ABC proof too tough even for mathematicians
• China’s state paper falls for Onion joke about Kim Jong-Un, publishes 55 photos in “sexy” tribute
• The New Moot: 4Chan wants to make Kim Jong-Un Time’s Person of the Year
• What would happen if Texas actually seceded?
• Building the World’s tallest skyscraper in 90 days
• An interesting outcome to a really good job interview

• 10 of the oddest/awesome entries into 2013’s Guinness World Records
• Wind power: how we could supply all our energy needs without altering the global climate
• Wired profiles Cosmo the hacker ‘God’ who fell to Earth
• James Cameron puts to rest the idea that Jack could have fit on that plank with Rose
• Nice…  who did invent sliced bread?
• This man hasn’t missed a day at the pub for 72 years

Also, celebrity say “fuck” super cut…

Have a fucking good weekend y’all.

• Some guy called Brad does acid, live-tweets it
• Ordos: The biggest ghost town in China
• Sweden is so efficient with its waste-to-energy program, that it’s importing trash from other European countries
• Awesome: Focus on the Family is giving up on reaching out to Millennials
• The TPP: A first-hand look at the secret international talks that could change the Internet
• A university built a supercomputer with Raspberry Pi(s) and Lego
• Mathematician claims proof of connection between prime numbers
• It Ain’t 1979 Anymore: Why this week’s attacks on American embassies aren’t the Iran hostage crisis all over again.
• Somehow missed: Vice interviewed my hero cinematographer Christopher Doyle
• Cool… 45 Years of the John Peel Show is available on Soundcloud.
• Comedian Josh Sankey will travel across the U.S. with only bacon as currency
• On the tubes: a recording of Tolkien reciting a poem in Elvish

Lastly… cats compilation video, because cats compilation video.

Banksy gifs

• Get a bad review? Sue them… How to Piss Off a Theatre Critic
• The two-year editors battle over Sir Mix-a-Lot’s Baby Got Back page
• The Political Awakening of a Republican: ‘I Had Viewed Whole Swaths of the Country and the World as Second-Class People’
• Why wood pulp is world’s new wonder material
• A week on after the Department of Justice’s ruling and E-books are already getting cheaper
• On that here are 375 Free eBooks to download to Kindle, iPad/iPhone & Nook
• Google VP says Apple v Samsung verdict was a “wake-up call”
• From Foreign Policy: How America’s biggest corporations became cyber vigilantes
• The childhood gamer in me is pretty excited over Chris Roberts returns to space sims

And here’s a super cut of memes over the years. It’s titled ‘A Mess of Memes’, but the jury is still out on that pluralisation.

Eclectic Method’s tribute to one of the hippest dudes of Ever!

Sourcing footage from almost 300 movies (295 to be precise); here is Sir Mix-a-Lot’s classic romantic ballad in ‘spoken verse’.