Saturday, September 22, 2012

Nothing is so firmly believed...

The U.S. Navy is commissioning littoral combat ship USS Fort Worth (LCS 3) today in Galveston.

We all use crutch words when speaking (and sometimes when writing). I am guilty of excessive use of "OK" and "So" among others.

The U.S. interstate highway system drawn in the style of a subway map.

Those wacky scientists at IBM have taken the first ever photograph of the bonds within a molecule using a technique called noncontact atomic force microscopy. This is probably the coolest thing I've got this week so I won't blame you if you stop reading now.
Who's hiring college graduates? Tech and engineering are two of the top 10 fields attracting new talent according to CollegeStats.org. However, one questions whether the list is truly insightful because it spans from those two to social work and accounting.

Good news: companies expect to raise base pay in 2013 by more than they did in 2012 and 2011. Bad news: the average raise in 2013 will be 2.9%.

Texas Rangers owner and numismatist Bob Simpson purchased for $1 million a rare 1943-D penny mistakenly made from bronze instead of zinc-clad steel.

Jacqueline Lou Skaggs, Field of Sleeping Peasants, 1971, oil on penny
And if you like painting on pennies you might like carving on nickels.

Will this report of room temperature superconductivity prove as elusive as cold fusion?

Judge for yourself: a Pakistani version of Dave Brubeck's Take Five. (Part of me wonders if this is for realz.) There's a sitar for sure, but the dude on the bongo drums is rockin' it. For fun, listen to the Dave Brubeck Quartet's version from 1966 immediately after. The latter is a wonderful example of west coast jazz, so open, spacious, and almost minimalist. (Kinda reminds me of Steely Dan.)

The other day on the way home from work I saw a police car pushing a disabled vehicle along the shoulder with its bumper. Now imagine doing this in an F-86 over enemy territory during the Korean War, a feat that will land you on the cover of Time magazine.

My gawd, look at all that sausage! source
And what better to wash down sausages than a refreshing sauerkraut drink?
And after eating and drinking all that, I hope you ladies are wearing your Knock Out! brand Smart Panties with NO TRACE odor absorbing technology otherwise things might get a little funky.

There are two problems with Let it Bean, a rendering of the Beatles' Abbey Road done with the components of a full English breakfast. 1) The image has strict copyright protection preventing me from reposting it here. 2) Only the Brits would eat baked beans with breakfast.

These faux kids books are truly LOL material. See them all here including A Good Place to Hide the Body Parts.
There's a right way and a wrong way to program Javascript. This is JS: The Right Way.

Settle back for a little blast from the Cold War past with GAMBIT - The Eye of the Eagle, a declassified video about the KH-7 reconnaissance satellite.

Didn't I recently share scale drawings of sci-fi spacecraft? Here are more called 2 meters per pixel.

"Cursing is beautiful, it extends the horizons of expression, and perhaps most of all, it provides a kind of profane pleasure."

Where are our flying cars? The hell with that. Where are our breast washers?
David Byrne, he of Talking Heads fame, seems to agree with the adage "form is liberating" but stated a little differently as it pertains to music: "music is shaped by context."

Zimoun is a artist who creates sound installations. Anyone who is a fan of ambient music will also be a fan of Zimoun. (Be sure to watch all the videos.)

Airplane! The funniest film ever according to a study of laughs per minute. Enjoy a few deleted scenes. And what tribute to Airplane! would be complete without a few of Johnny's scenes.

If ei π = -1 makes your insides all wiggly perhaps you ought to watch this video explanation of Euler's formula. (It's about traversing a circle.)

"I feel that the disjunctive perturbation of the negative space verges on codifying the inherent overspecificity" Painting by Ad Reinhardt, No. 6 1946, critique from the Instant Art Critique Generator.
If you use Chrome or some other modern browser, you can spend the rest of the day enjoying 500 Chrome experiments otherwise known as cool browser tricks.

If you're overwhelmed by 500 different things to choose from, make teh interwebs your coloring book with Hippo Paint. Type in a search term (for example, T-Rex), select one of the resulting pictures, and color away.

Still not happy? You must've been one of those kids who liked getting dizzy. Try this: The revolving internet.

...as what we least know. ~Michel de Montaigne

4 comments:

Jim said...

The Pakistani Take Five was enjoyable. (Maybe a little too much sitar.) Thanks for posting it.

Regarding the photo of the molecular bond, Tecplot had been working on some visualization plugins for molecular bonds - it would be interesting to compare them.

John said...

A great validation case for Tecplot!

If it weren't for the sitar, it might've sounded like just muzak.

Joel said...

I miss my obligatory craft beer content....

Though I suspect some of today's non-existent free time will be spent wasted on a Chrome trick or two

John said...

Joel, I don't make the news I just re-report it.