Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming...

Some new music to check out: Orion Tango, Marco Minnemann's Above the Roses, Ilimaq.

PLUG is a very good sci-fi short film. Watch it.

More of that? How about The Looking Planet.

Random? Yes. Useless? Maybe, maybe not: randomuseless.info.

Callum Innes, Untitled, from the Cento series, 2011. source

The National Security Archive presents recently declassified (and supposedly the first declassification ever) Cold War nuclear targeting data. Sobering, yes. But not necessarily surprising.

Northrop Grumman's LRS-B winning design (i.e. the "B-3") has its own web page now, probably in response to the Lockheed Martin/Boeing lawsuit against the award.

If you prefer your bombers vintage, here's a tour through a B-17.

The NY Times covered the winning video's from APS DFD's gallery of fluid motion.

Interesting idea for a business: deliver gasoline and fill up peoples' cars wherever they are. Booster Fuels

...that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

We always love people who admire us...

Here's a football-based math teaser quoted directly: "In a special football game, a team scores 7 points for a touchdown and 3 points for a field goal. What’s the largest mathematically unreachable number of points that a team can score (in an infinitely long game)?" Click for answer

As I say each year, if you're only going to listen to one mashup per year, make it this one: DJ Earworm's United State of Pop.

Mark Rothko, Untitled, 1953. Soon.

On Christmas afternoon, don't forget to register your new drone. It's the law now.

Buzzfeed's top sci fi books of 2015 tell me I need to read more sci fi.

Whether or not you believe that 2050 is "just around the corner," this planet's human demographics are changing. More old folks (except in Africa). But did you know that 70% of the population will live in urban centers? Read more in the WSJ's essay on our demographic destiny.

How well does Google know you? Let us count the ways. To 7.

Trivia: the first presidential campaign TV commercial was for Eisenhower in 1952. And it was an animated piece. Made by Disney.

Believe it or not, new movies are coming that don't involve light sabers.

• Star Trek Beyond
• Independence Day 2 (also here)

Planet X - is it out there past Neptune?

Like Uber, but for gasoline. Startup Booster Fuels will fill up your car's gas tank while it's parked at work. Read more here.

In this video, drones are like statistics: what they reveal is interesting, but they conceal what's really important.

The BB-8 Builder's Club is pretty much just like it sounds.

If it's not snowing where you are, sit back, relax, and watch this.

...but we don’t always love those whom we admire. ~La Rochefoucauld

So Much Bookmarked Art

For some reason, I have a lot of newly bookmarked art. Don't know why.

Michelle Marie Murphy, Business Casual. source

Daniel Libeskind, Vanke Pavilion. source

Gabriel Schama, Mandala 4. source

Anne Truitt, 1 April '65. source

Mary Corse, Untitled (Black and White with Blue Outer Bands, Beveled). source

Sara Carter, Grid Twenty Two. source

Aydin Hamami, 2 Green Grid. source

Thornton Willis, Co-Chief. source

Mack McInnis, City Streets. source

Thaddeus Wolfe, Patterned Reliefs. source

Holly Miller, Twist #2. source

All empty souls...

From the "I didn't know you could do that" department, listen to Wikipedia.

Nominations for the 43rd Annie Awards (for animated films) have been posted and Inside Out, Shaun the Sheep, and The Good Dinosaur are up for best feature film. Pixar has record 25 nominations. And you can see clips from the Sundance film festival's animated short nominees.

Fan of ambient guitar soundscapes? Check out wajobu's Searching for Sound.

Barbara Hepworth, Small One, Two, Three (Vertical), 1975. I've finally been seduced by a sculptor.

Run to your attic (or your mom's attic) and start searching for a Mickey Mantle rookie baseball card because one just sold for over a quarter million dollars.

Tom Peters shares with us The Works, his 14 chapter, 250 page, 50,000 word book (in PowerPoint format) on excellence. (I'd like to hear Edward Tufte's thoughts on this document and Tom's rebuttals.)

Disney + B-17 = nose art

We've all written scholarly articles. But we're apparently not reading any. A study shows that half of all "academic" papers are read by only 3 people and 90% of journal papers never get cited.

The same appears to be true for the infamous white paper.

For the first time, the folks at Pantone give us TWO colors of the year for 2016: rose quartz and serenity (i.e. pink and blue) that they call a "soothing sense of order and peace."

Every LEGO color ever produced. source

Science answers the questions you only dare consider in the dark of night such as why have men been shown to eat nearly twice as much as normal when in the presence of women?

Is your alma mater on Forbes' list of America's top 50 colleges? Mine is not.

Why can't we have highway underpasses that look like these from The Netherlands?

Keep forgetting how your 3rd cousin twice removed is related to you? Check out this handy relationship chart.

And now, 10 hours of musical, marching, animated cats.

Or for something R-rated, a supercut from the cinema of actors saying "shove it up your ass."

As an apology for that last link, play with these fractal gears.

...tend toward extreme opinions. ~Yeats