People demand freedom of speech as a...

~Bullets~

• It's coming. You've been warned. BERSERK! Promos: 1, 2, 4, 5, 6
• Also coming: new Daft Punk
• Know yer DNA.
• Search teh interwebs using Clusty.
• Get yer weather from Forecast.
• Still trying to figure out exactly how CSS Creatures works.
• The Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group, HORG

Hi-res image from the Lunar Reconnaisance Orbiter of the dark side of the moon. (I'm a week late with this.)

~TL;DR~

More risk taking by undergrads? Research projects are good and many engineering programs now offer some sort of undergraduate research experience. Communal showering doesn't qualify as being put in an unfamiliar situation (you have to read the article). Getting a summer internship might. Outcomes other than grades: an online portfolio is a great idea as is participation in design courses or competitions.

Or how about this? Evolution and existentialism are paradoxical chums in the union of science and humanity that I often advocate. Instead of risk taking what we might need is more disobedience. (You may think tl;dr.)

A union of science and the humanities is not a pipe dream. Nabakov was a very highly regarded lepidopterist.

Photographers broke the rules and climbed to the the top of the pyramids at Giza. But the photographs are fantastic.

Perhaps tl;dr for those not interested in security issues but how about a statistical analysis of PIN numbers? The most common PIN is 1234 (duh). The least common PIN surprised me as it duplicated one digit.

~Animation~

For Disney nerds only: a first-person account of a special Club 33 dinner event celebrating legendary animator Marc Davis' Centennial held inside the Haunted Mansion.

And Marc Davis did some work on the Disney WWII film Victory Through Airpower.

A transcript from a 1978 meeting about the storyline for Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Ray Bradbury, Picasso, and animation.

This image startled me when I first saw it. source

Princeton University's annual Art of Science.

~Intermezzo~

Results of a study show that great companies follow three rules.

1. Better before cheaper.  All things being equal, improve your product instead of dropping its price.
2. Revenue before cost. All things being equal, put your labors toward increasing revenue rather than finding ways to cut cost.
3. There are no other rules.

Quotations - the bane of teh interwebs. Carl Jung is quoted as saying "Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to a better understanding of ourselves." which sounds similar to an unattributed favorite of mine, "We hate most in other that which we fear in ourselves."

~Brewing~

How about the art and science of beer.

Turn your growler of craft beer into a mini keg with TapIt.

A case full of things you might not know about beer. (Warning: infographic). Cenosillicaphobia is the fear of an empty beer glass.

A Harley Davidson crafted from Guinness cans and bottle tops.

 ~SCIENCE!~

A few photos and a short video of the underwater Baker shot of the Operation Crossroads nuclear test from 1946.

Nukes lead this list of notable accidents.

Batteries, batteries, batteries. No, I won't let it go. Consider the potential of a graphene supercapacitor.

Use SleepTiming to decide when to go to bed based on when you wake up. For 5:00a, it's lights out at 9:15p. 

Augusta Westland's Project Zero, all-electric tilt rotor demonstrator.

~Fin~

Is it true that birds can't fart?

Boiled sheep head. It's what's for dinner - in Iceland, at least. Let me spoil (pardon the pun) the story for you. The subject of the story prefers the head so fermented he can "drink the eye out of the eye socket."

...compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use. ~Soren Kierkegaard

I apologize after the fact for feebleness of this post.

Insight to a "T" in Mechanical Engineering

It's that time again when I extol the virtues of some articles in Mechanical Engineering magazine (this time the April 2013 issue).

First comes The Psychology of Insight, an article about three relatively simple things that engineering professors can do to keep students from changing majors out of Mech Engr. And they do seem relatively simple but have been shown to actually work.

1. Use everyday examples in lectures. Because students will likely have had experience with these things it keeps them more engaged and promotes understanding. This idea also addresses a complaint of employers, that new graduates lack practical knowledge.
2. Develop 3D spatial/visual reasoning skills. There's something called the Purdue Spatial Visualization Test that serves as a predictor of student success in courses like graphics or CAD. Furthermore, work by students to improve their PSVT score has a direct influence on grades.
3. Ensure faculty-student interaction outside the classroom. This information interaction not only provides positive feedback but helps students see the professors as members of the profession.

Second was To a T: Recruiters Finding Breadth Outscores Depth in Engineering in which we learn that engineers with a broader skill set (the horizontal line in a letter "T") are more prized by companies than those with a deeper skill set (the vertical line in a letter "T"). Part of the reasoning is that a broad skill set promotes system-wide thinking and breaks down barriers to working with other disciplines. Personally, I believe it's paramount that an undergraduate engineering education provide students with a significant breadth of capability.

Just so that you don't think I'm a blind Mech Engr fan boi, I'll cite a letter to the editor in this issue that may be one of the most depressing things I've read about the profession. It starts out "It is true that a tiny fraction of engineers are allowed boldly creative work. The rest of us make careful calculations to effect small modifications." It's as though the author thinks most engineers are Milton from Office Space. The author believes that engineering is oversold by professors who are able to consult on the most challenging industry problems and are accordingly blinded to what most engineers actually do. (Which is contrary to the old adage that those who can, do; those who can't, teach.) Perhaps the most damning part of this letter is the statement that engineering careers can become obsolete as opposed to a psychologist who can keep practicing for an entire career based on their university education. I doubt the latter is true. And if you become obsolete, you only have yourself to blame. The author also (mistakenly, in my opinion) believes that companies are more likely to pay for entry-level engineers who have been "trained in all the hottest new methods" as opposed to someone with 30 years experience. Repeat after me - an engineering undergraduate education is not a trade school that results in training in "hot" methods. (See above about breadth.) Also, an engineer with 30 years experience should be able to learn new tools. [Hmm, why did I write more about the article I didn't like than the two that I did?]

Frequent Flyer by Lorenzo Feliciati and Official Bootleg Live 2012 by The Crimson ProjeKCt

There are precisely two reasons for combining my review of these two albums. First, I'm too lazy to write two separate reviews. Second, both albums feature versions of the King Crimson song Thela Hun Ginjeet.

Bassist Lorenzo Feliciati is the driving force behind the band Naked Truth. Influenced early on by Led Zeppelin, King Crimson, and Weather Report he has become one of Europe's most respected bass players and overall musicians.

Frequent Flyer is subtitled A Diary of a Travelling Musician and features Feliciati playing with various combinations of 17 other musicians. While Naked Truth classifies themselves as "omni-genre" this album has Feliciati more focused on jazz or fusion.

Standout tracks on Frequent Flyer include 93, performed with Pat Mastelotto on drums and Aidan Zammit on organ and strings. 93's up-tempo drumline is subdued by Feliciati's melodic bass and Zammit's orchestration. Cuong Vu (trumpet), DJ Skizo (turntables), and Pier Paolo Ferroni (drums) combine on Never Forget to bring a flavor of Naked Truth's jazzier leanings to the album with a smoky almost ambient feel. The White Shadow Story with its laid back funk is my favorite track on the album and features Daniele Gottardo on guitar, DJ Skizo, and Ferroni.

You can read more about Feliciati and hear some of his music at his website, www.lorenzofeliciati.com.

Official Bootleg Live 2012 is a live album from The Crimson ProjeKCt, a double trio consisting of Stick Men (Tony Levin, Markus Reuter, and Pat Mastelotto) and a variation of Adrian Belew's Power Trio (Belew, Julie Slick, and Tobias Ralph). If that line-up is too confusing for you, Levin, Mastelotto and Belew are former members of King Crimson and the two trios (who tour separately) came together as an opening act for Dream Theater. This is a recording of that act.

The album consists of eight tracks centered on music of the early-1980s King Crimson lineup but also ventures back to 1974 for Red and forward to the 1990s for B'Boom, Thrak, and Dinosaur which is how the album begins.

There are no surprises on Official Bootleg. You get fresh, live performances (perhaps with a slightly different accent) of King Crimson classics. For me, the album really picks up on track 4, Elephant Talk, from1981's Discipline.

You can purchase Official Bootleg from Iapetus Records.

As for the previously mentioned versions of Thela Hun Ginjeet (an anagram of "heat in the jungle") Crimson ProjeKCt's version is a driven, faithful-to-the-original telling of Belew's encounter with muggers during a break in Discipline's recording sessions. Feliciati's version, on the other hand, begins with a bouncy, Latin-tinged bass and drum duet but changes to melodic interplay of the vocal line and Feliciati's bass.

So whether you're looking for fresh versions of classic progressive rock or new fusion from a master musician you'll find something good on the Crimson ProjeKCt's Official Bootleg and Lorenzo Feliciati's Frequent Flyer.

It is easier to build strong children...

You might think hate is the opposite of love. But you'd be wrong. Indifference is.

Kintsukuroi: the Japanese craft of repairing pottery with gold, making something more beautiful for having been broken.

Tomorrow, 24 Mar 2013, is the 40th anniversary of the UK release date of Pink Floyd's iconic album, Dark Side of the Moon. The album will be streamed at pinkfloyd.com and listeners are invited to tweet their thoughts using #DarkSide40.

What was once lost is now found. The violin famously played as the Titanic sank is expected to fetch hundreds of thousands of dollars at auction.

Craft brewers' income grew 17% during 2012 and their volume brewed grew to about 6.5% of the total U.S. beer market.  In terms of dollars spent by consumers, craft brews now represent 10.2% of the U.S. market.

I wonder how much of that craft beer goes into this: craft beer ice cream from Frozen Pints. Vanilla Bock anyone?

Sam Gilliam, Swing 64, 1964

It's history of teh interwebs time: NSF and the Birth of the Internet.

Tectonic plates come and go. But sometimes they hang around longer than you think. Geologists have determined that an "anamoly" under a portion of California is actually part of the old Farallon plate that subducted under North America 100 million years ago.

Regardless of whether you believe Airplane! to be the funniest movie of all time, take this quiz to test your knowledge of this great film.

Leon may be getting larger but polar bear genitals are getting smaller.

Men may think with their penis but a giant sea cucumber eats with its anus.

Didn't I just say I hadn't seen many font generators in a while? Here's a kitten font generator called Neko Font.

I would award first prize to any science fair project that could turn cow dung into air freshener. In fact, I'd buy a case.

Have fun with book titles - Sorted Books.

Hollywood execs didn't like Blade Runner when it was screened in 1981. "This movie gets worse every screening."

More classic prog rock goodness. A 30-minute performance by Genesis in 1972 on Belgian TV.

Kids these days: engineering students don't understand math.

I guess those math slackers weren't involved in developing the ability to watch a chemical reaction at the molecular level in real time.

Science is a fickle bitch. Nothing can cut a diamond except another diamond, right? Wrong. Superheated water can etch a diamond.

Rashid Johnson, Cosmic Slop, 2011. I'll leave it for you to figure out how I got from this work to the Gilliam included above. (I also include this here for one reader whose buttons will be pushed by a black painting.)

The good news: the Japanese have invented a remote controlled toilet. The bad news: it only holds a tiny #2.

Meanwhile, in China they're serving a double beef, double sausage burger at McDonalds.

Disgusting. No crab should have a 9-foot leg span nor should anyone get into a tank with it and hold it.

...than to repair broken men. ~Frederick Douglass

12k Sampler 002 - Minimalist Music Sampler

In case that title's a bit too obscure for you, 12k is a music label specializing in ambient and minimalist music and Sampler 002 is a nicely priced, 12-song CD representing several of their artists. Given my recent success with free and/or low-cost compilations it didn't take much to get me to shell out $6 for this disc. Also, my good experience with Kane Ikin's Sublunar made me want to learn more about this label.

Here are brief impressions of each track. Keep in mind that describing music is hard enough, but ambience takes a vocabulary that I lack (as you shall see).

1. The Ballad of Failure by The Boats - Vocals and a drumline are a not how I expected this CD to begin.
2. Contrail by Kane Ikin  - This is more of what I expected. Tonal but not quite droning, punctuated by plucked strings and other sounds, it floats to an unheard rhythm until, amid a pulsating crescendo, it simply ends.
3. Cloister (excerpt) by Savvas Ysatis & Taylor Deupree - A richly layered and slowly building tonal structure. Wish I could've heard more than an excerpt.
4. Saika by Illuha - Piano with background ambient effects and what might be plucked guitar. The sound was in the Eno "Ambient series" tradition, so much so that I couldn't distinguish between Saika and the sounds coming in through the open window (in a good way).
5. In a Place of Such Graceful Shapes (excerpt) by Taylor Deupree & Marcus Fischer - A sense of minimalist, peaceful isolation created with guitar and effects. Alone, not lonely. Unhurried.
6. January 18 2011 (excerpt) by Kenneth Kirschner - A discordant segue from the previous track. Bell-like piano that brings to mind Eno's work for the Clock of the Long Now.
7. Moss (excerpt) by Moss - Woodwinds bring harmony to the proceedings with what's said to have been a live performance inside a church. The openness of that environment comes through in the recording.
8. Iris (Familiar) by FourColor - Melody and harmony continue to grow in this guitar piece with a breathy vocal line.
9. Schwarzchild Radius (excerpt) by Stephan Matthieu - Similar in structure and theme to Cloister above but wrapped by a low-end pulse and something on the high end that's almost vocal. I would like to hear more of this.
10. Cascadia Obscura by Marcus Fischer - Bits of electronica punctuate the ambience.
11. Meroo Forest by Seaworthy & Matt Rosner - The forest takes charge in this piece where tone is secondary.
12. When I Told You by Murralin Lane - Vocals take center stage on this last track, riding on top of a warbling, rumbling sea of tone.

To give you an idea of what this is about, here's a piece by Deupree and Fischer.

You can learn more about 12k at www.12k.com.

I received no compensation of any kind for this review.

Opportunity is missed by most people...

I'm often disappointed during job interviews when the candidate doesn't have any questions to ask beyond the standard "When can I expect to hear from you?" Here's a list of five good questions to ask during the interview. #5 Why would I not be a good fit for this job?

Beethoven might be shocked to find out how slowly his music is played today.

Never heard this story before, but apparently a pilot rolled a 707 during a test flight.

What do Jerry Jones and Chuck Jones have in common besides a last name? On April 13th the Dallas Opera will host a showing of Chuck Jones' What's Opera, Doc? on the 72 ft by 160 ft. HD video screen in Jerry Jones' Dallas Cowboys Stadium (aka Jerry World). The Bugs Bunny classic will be followed by a simulcast of the Dallas Opera's performance of Puccini's Turandot (my personal favorite). Better still, tickets are free.

You'll never guess what this is a video of. Hint: Have you ever played a musical instrument?

With spring upon us (or nearly so depending on your latitude), spend a few moments with looking at something .com.

Virginia Woolf has a few tips for us on how to read. First, don't let anyone tell you how to read. And then on poetry, "The impact of poetry is so hard and direct that for the moment there is no other sensation except that of the poem itself."

What's funnier than sketches from the Carol Burnett show? Outtakes!

Is everything we thought Wright about the birth of aviation actually wrong? Did Whitehead really fly in 1901?

I've always said that anyone who believes the human animal to be inherently good has never watched children play. Now science backs me up. It seems that infants are mean little SOBs.

Google Reader is being euthanized on July 1st. Anyone have suggestions for an RSS reader replacement? (No iOS or Android apps, please.)

For the truly hardcore animation fan comes this Tumblr of smears, a single cel with motion blur.

When dining out in a restaurant with a group you have 45 seconds to decide where to sit. Here's an infographic that will help you optimize your seat selection based on table shape and configuration.

A boat sank in 1840 with bottled beer in its cargo hold. The wreck was discovered and its cargo raised in 2010. Now, Finland's Stallhagen brewers will reproduce that old brew and release shipwreck brew in 2014.

CERN is now "pretty sure" that what they found was a Higgs boson.

Tom Peters goes off on a rant about "the best educated nation wins" and how we as a nation must attract the best and brightest to elementary education. What scored points with me is about halfway into the article where he contrasts the current call for STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) education with STEAM (science, technology, engineering, the arts, and math). This jives with Verne Harnish's (I think I'm remembering this correctly) mandate for businesses to "outlearn" your competition which might also be better stated as "out-teach" your competition (i.e. your goal should be to share all your knowledge about your field of endeavor with your customers).

Sweet connector/cable goodness at the online adapter museum. (DMS-59 to dual VGA? They got that.)

This photo from 1903 of Alexander Graham Bell kissing a woman holding a tetrahedral kite comes from National Geographics' must-see photo blog, Found.

Sometimes science gets it wrong. This early report of an unclassified life form found in a pristine lake beneath 2.2 miles of ice was wrong. Turns out it was contamination from the surface.

Look at all the new microbreweries coming to the Fort Worth area. 

This bit of work demonstrates the futility of statistics - the average color of the MoMA's art is #a79f94 (gray).

Lots of people died during the 20th century. Here's how.

I like progressive rock, but not enough to spend too much time on Prog Butts, a photo blog of prog rockers' derrieres. (Might the blogger be making a statement about the shyness of prog rockers - that they face away from the audience?)

Iron Maiden, on the other hand, aren't shrinking violets. So here comes their new beer, Trooper ("malt flavor and citric notes").

Haven't seen a font like this in a while - Men of Letters

On the difficulties associated with staging Lolita in Soviet and Putin's Russia.

From the legal corner comes this ruling that Homeland Security can't search your laptop at the border (or anywhere else) without probable cause.

Google Maps shows us the 10 biggest asteroid impacts. (Didn't know about the Chesapeake Bay crater, made about 35 million years ago.)

Photo essay: a day in the life of a bacon lover.

Hawt lobster on lobster action.

Is that a twelve foot long penis in your mouth or did we just discover a whale's brain radiator?

...because it comes dressed in overalls and disguised as work. ~Thomas Edison

Democracy is the art and science of...

Yes, we're well into March. But that won't prevent me from promoting The Best of Bootie 2012, A+D's mashup of their favorite mashups from last year. You can stream it from their website or download the tracks including 10 bonus tracks that didn't make the final cut. (What's not to like? The first track includes Men at Work's Land Down Under as one of its components. That song was popular when I was an undergrad back at Syracuse, which coincidentally I just returned from visiting.)

I had never heard about painter Arthur Pinajian until this news story about lucky house buyers who also got a bunch of his works as part of the deal. Turns out the collection is worth about $30 million (they paid $2,500). So I'm trying to learn more about why his work is so valuable. Like here.

This will be something to keep an eye on: 100 Painters of Tomorrow is a juried competition for painters at the early stages of their career.

The Clyfford Still Museum is on Pinterest. Maybe you follow, OK?

What is perhaps the first silver dollar minted by the U.S., a 1794 silver dollar, sold at auction for $10 million.

If you'd like to cash in on numismatic mania keep an eye out for these not very well known U.S. coins. The half dime is of interest to me due to my collection of 5-cent pieces.

And lest you think that coin collecting is like the lottery (which I never win) read about how just getting a roll of coins from your bank can yield treasures - like pre-1965 silver coins and things like odd strikes.

In World War II a soldier had a 1.8% chance of getting killed. But in what U.S. war were the odds 3.7 times higher?

A little baby Jupiter (bright orange blob on the right) has been observed in its formative stages in the gas and dust surrounding the star HD 100546, located over 300 million light years away.

Stardust is a visually rich, gorgeous short film about Voyager 1.

Learn this name: Siding Spring. It's the nom de guerre of comet C/2013 A1 that will come very, very close to Mars in October 2014. If it actually hits Mars the resulting explosion will be in the 1 billion megaton range, something astronomists call "big."

Poo doesn't get the credit it deserves. Apparently it's great at blocking radiation. Which is great for future astronauts traveling to the Red Planet because they can line the walls of their spacecraft with little brown planets to block cosmic rays. (Does anyone else think it would have been more realistic in the opening sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey for the early human to throw his poo instead of that bone? And let's not even start talking about how phallic the Discovery One is.)

Teh interwebs was made for this: the virtual toilet paper museum.

Even further back in time, a publication no less than Scientific American shares the history of butt wiping, including the ancient Greek practice of using rounded bits of ceramic stones and the accompanying axiom "three are enough."

A friend's diet includes the restriction "nothing with lips." I'm not certain I could eat anything with mandibles, even this delicious looking Predator cake.

First Harry Ford, now Carrie Fisher - she'll reprise the role of Princess Leia in the upcoming Star Wars VII (but hopefully without the gold bikini this time).

I must respectfully disagree with Mr. Deresiewicz - C.P. Snow's Two Cultures is not a solution seeking a problem. It's an advisory to avoid knowledge silos.

Just in time for Easter, here's a brassiere made of peeps. (Next, a jock strap made of circus peanuts.) (Words not to confuse: brassiere and brasserie.)

Beef. Rainbow. Two words that you wouldn't normally put together. But beef rainbows are real - caused by light reflecting off a moist morsel that's been sliced against the grain.

Cursive vs. printing. Is it a case of schoolhouse bait and switch? Or is cursive to printing what algebra is to math, an evolution of the skill? (I'm a fan of cursive. Between the lack of cursive instruction and kids' increasing reliance on "keyboarding" we get college graduates whose handwriting looks like it was done by a left-handed spider monkey with ADHD and a caffeine addiction.)

When you master cursive you can create your own handwriting font from it.

But there's nothing wrong with using a computer for writing. Do you know which novel was the first ever written on a word processor? It was Len Deighton's Bomber from 1968. I found this interesting because Len Deighton's SS-GB from 1978 is a proud member of my collection of alternate history books.

Comedian Louis C.K. did one of the funniest stand-up routines I've ever seen (HBO reruns it a lot - look for it). A fan took the time to compile a list of his more famous quotes. "Now we live in an amazing, amazing world and it's wasted on the crappiest generation of spoiled idiots."

When I was a kid my mother used to hang laundry in the backyard to dry. Will my kids ever see that? This collection of 1930s photos from NYC will show you how they did it in the Big Apple.

I don't claim prescience but allow me to repeat myself: energy generation is an important topic of research but energy storage might be even more so. For example, consider these micro-supercapacitors made from graphene.

Do you know what a "marbit" is? Learn that factoid and 10 others about foods.

Scalping concert tickets should be illegal. There, I said it. But there are other reasons why you can't score a ticket to the big show.

How do humans judge the passing of time? Ho-hum, using external stimuli, especially visual cues, that let the brain interpret the rate of change of stimuli leading to a sense of time. Not too surprising. The more interesting question from quantum physics is why in our universe only 4 dimensions (of 10? or 11?) unfurled (3D in space + time) but of those four only time restricts us to forward movement. (In other words I can go backward and forward in x, y, and z but only forward in t.)

TV mavens will love America, The Home of Television by James Chapman showing where TV shows are located. If you're like me the first thing you do is find what's missing. For example, why did WKRP (Cincinnati) and The Drew Carey Show (Cleveland) get skipped?

For obvious reasons, I haven't seen any of these TV shows that got cancelled after one episode. But Heil Honey I'm Home! looks like a true winner.

Follow along with one person's quest to read every book from the top of Publisher's Weekly bestseller list for every year since 1913.

A nice little morphing of facial models of human ancestors.

The last Harlem Shake video you ever need to watch.

...running the circus from inside the monkey cage. ~H.L. Mencken

I prefer the folly of enthusiasm...

It's that magical time of day when...  No, wait. That's someone else.

Sights!

Someone really likes the architecture of the Clyfford Still Museum.

Why all of a sudden I'm posting large scale and/or 360 degree panoramic photos is beyond me. But keeping in mind that I'm not usually a big fan of photography nor can I take decent photographs myself, here's a 360 degree photo of the Ta Prohm Temple in Cambodia.

Read as someone manages to relate Mondrian and Led Zeppelin.

Where is the largest multi-touch screen in the United States? The Cleveland Museum of Art. Read about how they use Gallery One.

U heart NYC? Then take a gander of this photo from 1903 of the NYT's building under construction.

Found! The world's oldest color film footage.

Eulerian video amplification. What could you do with it?

Sounds!

Today's soundtrack is Jane9, a track from the upcoming May 2013 album from Harold Budd, Jane 1-11. Jane Maru created videos for each of the 11 tracks on the album.

This woman must really love Disney. She sings this one-woman a cappella video medley of Disney theme songs.

Pat Mastelotto and Marcus Reuter contributed to Moonbound's Peak of Eternal Light.

Every national anthem played simultaneously.

Tastes!

Know yer veggies.

Impress your boss with this bacon necktie.

How long would it take to decorate an entire wall with 60,000 beer bottle caps? The folks at Kegworks know and will show you in this time-lapse video.

Too late for Valentine's Day but you might still want to try Sankt Gallen's chocolate stout in a chocolate cup.

Rants!

Someone I follow tweeted about Can Twitter Make White People Less Racist? and called it a "good read." I beg to differ - it's appalling. The claim that all white people are racist is laughably and disgustingly false. The author has attempted to stain everyone with this politically correct version of original sin. (Never mind the fanciful fine line between being racist and being a racist.) I'd like to tear each paragraph in the article a new one, but I'll let you read it and decide for yourself. (Oh, and the premise that Twitter has a Kumbaya role to play here is so weak it's inconsequential.)

Here's another one, this time from the NYT: The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food. By tossing in the word "addictive" we've been absolved of individual blame for weight and health problems caused by eating too much Taco Bell. It's the evil food companies that are to blame, darn it. Hey everyone - step up and take responsibility for yourself. As a friend of mine says, I'm fat because I choose to be fat. In other words, I choose to put a higher priority on other behaviors. That could change if I choose to do so.

Feeling disgruntled? Let's fix that with Gruntle Me.

Maps!

I feed my map fetish with this interactive world map of vaguely rude place names. For example, Vagina, Tyumenskaya oblast, Russia.

From Psychology Today we get this state-by-state map of where Craigslist "missed connections" occur. Shame, shame Texas. Walmart? Really?

Stuff!

Have I mentioned this before? The Walton 1913 Liberty Head 5-cent coin (one of only 5 known to exist as the Buffalo Nickel was introduced in 1913) is expected to fetch $2.5 million at auction.

I don't even really like badminton but this shot is pretty amazing.

Who is this dude named Jonty? You might have seen his work. But what does he mean by Generation Pi?

Love reading? Check out this book/library pr0n. 

Machines!

Strap into the cockpit of an F-18 as shown in this video of carrier flight ops from the Ike.

Here's an update on the guy who's creating 3D CAD drawings from scratch for the U.S.S. Missouri.

Things that go boom: the USAF is getting ready for B-2 flight tests of an improved 30,000 massive ordnance penetrator. (Hmm, who might be getting some of these right up the keister?)

Mycestro (mice + maestro?) - a 3D mouse you wear on your finger.

Decadence!

Only the Japanese could come up with such a cute tool for cleaning out the "600 types of bacteria partying 24-7 at Club Umbilicus."

600 types of bacteria partying 24-7 at Club Umbilicus. - See more at: http://inventorspot.com/articles/thats_sick_seven_strange_bizarre_japanese_medical_devices#sthash.QnV85dV3.dpuf

600 types of bacteria partying 24-7 at Club Umbilicus. - See more at: http://inventorspot.com/articles/thats_sick_seven_strange_bizarre_japanese_medical_devices#sthash.QnV85dV3.dpuf

Science sometimes reaches the wrong conclusion. The "don't fart on an airplane" law trumps the ideal gas law.

...to the indifference of wisdom. ~Anatole France