People demand freedom of speech...

Science, art, culture, creativity. It's all here in On the Origins of the Arts. It's worth your time. An interesting factoid: monitoring of alpha waves in the human brain indicate that abstract design is most appealing when there's about a 20% redundancy of elements. A great quote from Picasso: "Art is the lie that helps us to see the truth."

GENIUS! Nipples at the Met is a photo blog of every nipple on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Why can't I think of this stuff?

Clients from Hell never ceases to be an amazing read, like this one about "we copied your signature." I shudder if only 10% of these are true.

This reeks of rationalization, but just having turned 50 I couldn't pass it by: middle age is an elite evolutionary benefit.

It's been a while since I found any Mario-related gaming stuff. Super Mario Summary has compressed each level into a single screen. See if you can play them all.

Can't recall whether I posted this before: a cheat sheet to keep handy in case aliens decide to make first contact with you.

Aviation pr0n of the week: the first XB-47 prior to its first flight. This is from a photo essay on Heavy Bombers of the Cold War. The article also includes information about WWII's Norden bombsight which is said to have cost half as much as the Manhattan Project which brought us the atomic bomb.

A brief piece on development of the SR-71 Blackbird.

This is likely more than you ever wanted to know about the Apollo Guidance Computers (including source code).

More programming slang: For example, a Loch Ness Monster Bug is something only one person has seen and no one else can repeat.

If you liked that, you'll love these cool but obscure Unix tools.

F-18 / source

What does a Space Shuttle launch sound like? Watch this video and turn up the volume. (In person the sound must be visceral.)

Things teh interwebs was made for #843: a collection of pocket protectors.

Will my beer geek friends think it's a sin or a virtue to infuse your beer with other flavors? Regardless, Dogfish Head wants you to try their beer flavor infuser.

Eight years in two minutes: see One World Trade Center rise.

I'm not certain what emergency would qualify for using this fold out chair that's hidden inside an end table.

Welcome to the Anthropocene is a cool video charting the expansion of humanity on earth over the past 250 years, if nothing else.

Drink your coffee with King Crimson.

Only for the most hard-core Genesis fans - an annotated guide to The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. 

Incredibox - make your own a cappella beat-box.

With the over-hyped NFL draft behind us, it's time to welcome these new players to the league. A former NFL player does exactly that in an open letter that warns "the NFL is about to destroy your life."

My brother lives outside Cincinnati so when I read that they had a mysterious monster there I naturally was curious. This thing they call Godzillus is a 7-foot tall fossilized cactus that "defies all known categories of organisms."

When you use Google to search for something, how many times do you go past the first results page? The second? The third? MillionShort throws out the top 1,000,000 results so you can start by searching deep.

One of many forgotten photos from the Gemini missions.

MIT's Technology Review magazine thinks these are the top 10 technology milestones achieved in the last year.

1. Egg Stem Cells
2. A Faster Fourier Transform (makes mobile faster)
3. Ultra-Efficient Solar
4. Nanopore Sequencing (for DNA analysis)
5. Light-Field Photography
6. Crowdfunding (e.g. Kickstarter)
7. Solar Microgrids
8. High-Speed Materials Discovery (because this involves battery technology, it gets my vote for #1)
9. 3D Transistors
10. Facebook's Timeline (MIT must have a sense of humor)

I promised to never again show art made with bodily fluids but I didn't say anything about painting with Coke.

You might have heard that I sliced my first avocado last weekend. That inspired me to read Kitchen 101: Cooking Methods. I was overwhelmed before they got to pan fry.

Pancakes in 45 seconds? Surely you jest.

People like this shouldn't be allowed to breed. A San Diego mom won a $3.5 million lawsuit when she discovered Nutella wasn't a health food. (I'm referring to the plaintiff, her attorneys, the jury, and any other parties who benefit from the class action portion of the award.)

But is it organic, fair trade, free range goat penis?

Just do this.

...as compensation for the freedom of thought they rarely use. ~Soren Kierkegaard