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

Lots of New Music Out There

There's lots of new music out there or, if not already out, coming soon. Here are a few that have caught my attention (in no particular order).

Colin Edwin is posting on Facebook and Twitter that he and Jon Durant have started working on their next album as Burnt Belief (link is to website for previous album). Status = waiting patiently

I just discovered Trey Gunn's 2-disc "best of" album called I'll Tell What I Saw. Status = just ordered.

A fan (presumably) compiled all of the free tracks released on King Crimson's website into what looks like 34 albums (volumes they're called) sorted by performer. The site is called The Forbidden Files. Status = have started downloading. (Warning: lots of ad crap.)

TU, the duo of Trey Gunn and Pat Mastelotto, have a live recording called Official Bootleg that I just discovered. Their Live in Russia album is a favorite of mine. Status = just ordered.

The duo of Colin Edwin and Alessandro Pedretti (aka Endless Tapes) have a debut album up for pre-order. Brilliant Waves is due for release in January. Status = bookmarked

Ilimaq is a collaboration between composer John Luther Adams and Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche. Percussive and ambient? Status = thinking

The latest album from progressive fusion band Naked Truth was recently released. Status = listening and enjoying.

And to round it out, I'm currently enjoying my annual purchase of this year's album, Lab 2015, from the University of North Texas' One O'Clock Lab Band. Status = enjoying

Gratitude turns what we have...

A new short film about the adventures of Scat, that squirrel from Ice Age.

The quantum energy states of a hydrogen atom contains the formula for pi. Pause to consider.

One reason why the engineer-turned-marketer can be the hardest person to work for: stop being such a perfectionist.

If you're in the DFW area, take time to visit the Dallas Museum of Art for Jackson Pollock: Blind Spots, the only U.S. stop for this exhibit of Pollock's black drip paintings.

If you're in Tehran (?), an almost literally hidden treasure is the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. (If you think about it, it's surprising that these works haven't been destroyed by now by the nut-jobs who run that country.)

And while I'm not one to judge, Russia may be a bit out of the way to go see Sly Stallone's paintings.

Adolph Gottlieb, Burst, 1973. source

If you have two hours to spare, watch this 1976 interview with art critique extraordinaire Clement Greenberg in which he says Adolph Gottlieb is a vastly under-appreciated painter (better than De Kooning, Klein, and maybe even Still).

(Lots of art today.) The Jones family's latest addition to the art on display at AT&T Stadium (home of the Dallas Cowboys) is Ellsworth Kelly's White Form 2012. If you are not aware of it, the stadium has an impressive collection of artworks that you can enjoy in person (they're on display in public areas that everyone can see during games) or online via their own Facebook page.

Ridley Scott says that Alien: Covenant will be the sequel to Prometheus. And it's nothing like Neill Blomkamp's proposed Alien film in which a grown-up Newt would've starred.

Ever wonder why airplane propellers look funny when photographed? Here's why.

ICYMI, the Raspberry Pi Zero sells for $5; a computer for a fiver. (Yes, I know. It bothers me too. Why not call it the Pi Five?)

...into enough. ~anonymous

Reality leaves a lot...

Star Trek predicted the future: researchers have developed transparent aluminum.

Mystery Science Theater is one of the two funniest TV shows I've even seen, the other being Most Extreme Elimination Challenge. There's a Kickstarter campaign to bring MST back and it's already exceeded its goal of $2 million.

A new gene here, a new gene there and soon you have a blue strawberry.

Aviation nerds: watch time-lapse video of a Spitfire being reassembled.

History buffs should enjoy this high-resolution 3D photo tour of Ellis Island.

College majors with the highest starting salaries. Yes, comp sci and engineering are #1 and #2. But check out #6.

Distance to the nearest grocery store. Longer lines identify food deserts.

Fourteen more maps. And a video history of counties in the U.S.A.

Writing a novel or screenplay? You're in luck. The 37 basic plots were documented back in 1919 for your reference. #13 Disastrous situation precipitated without criminal intent: fatal indiscretion.

Or you can just consult the Writer's Guild of America's list of the 101 funniest screenplays. #4 is Airplane!

NASA's Voyager spacecraft includes 116 images to introduce humans to extraterrestrials. But I bet there are a lot of humans who'd benefit from understanding them too.

The periodic table of  jack o' lanterns. (Only a month late.)

Neuroscience explains why bass instruments are fundamental to music.

UCSB has made available recordings made from old cylinders.

Color photos from America in 1910.

Brice Marden, Uphill 4, 2014. From his exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery in NYC.

Oswald the Lucky Rabbit from a long-lost 1928 film, Sleigh Bells.

And in other "lost things" news, does anyone know how to assemble a whale skeleton?

Just in time for holiday shopping comes the history of electronic music in poster form - Electric Love Blueprint (detail shown above).

From the rumor mill: Chrome OS is going to be rolled into Android.

Average marriage age worldwide. source (This map's data legend can use a little Tufte-esque improvement to make it more legible cuz I can't tell what age is indicated by the color for the U.S.)

Have you ever wondered where you can touch another person on their body? Well worry no more. Science has mapped that out for you.

Nutscaping. Think about what that might be, then click the link. On a related note, there's still time to fund the Scrote'n'Tote.

And now, a dance party.

...to the imagination. ~John Lennon