Well, There Go a Couple of Hours I'll Never Get Back

I was wrong before. THIS is what the internuts is for. I am sorry. So very sorry.

Another Reason My Children Will Probably Need Therapy

See previously -- the same applies here.

Scientists for Obama

It's a New York Times day for me, evidently.  It reports:

Sixty-eight Nobel Prize winners in the science fields, including the two Americans who won this year’s chemistry prize, have signed a letter endorsing Mr. Obama over his Republican rival, Mitt Romney.

“President Obama understands the key role science has played in building a prosperous America,” the laureates wrote in a letter that was released on Wednesday. Mr. Obama “has championed investment in science and technology research that is the engine of our economy.”

The signers said that Mr. Romney, by contrast, “supports a budget that, if implemented, would devastate a long tradition of support for public research and investment in science at a time when this country’s future depends, as never before, on innovation.”

If ad hominem arguments matter, this matters.

"A Rogue Climate Experiment Outrages Scientists"

Via The New York Times:

A California businessman chartered a fishing boat in July, loaded it with 100 tons of iron dust and cruised through Pacific waters off western Canada, spewing his cargo into the sea in an ecological experiment that has outraged scientists and government officials.
       * * *
Marine scientists and other experts have assailed the experiment as unscientific, irresponsible and probably in violation of [international] agreements, which are intended to prevent tampering with ocean ecosystems under the guise of trying to fight the effects of climate change.

Though the environmental impact of the foray could well prove minimal, scientists said, it raises the specter of what they have long feared: rogue field experiments that might unintentionally put the environment at risk.

The businessman, Russ George, apparently sold his iron seeding services for $2.5 million to several coastal tribes. The theory was that they could claim carbon tax credits. That would appear unlikely. Calling it an "ecological experiment," given the absence of ability to measure results and the absence of controls, also seems unlikely.

You'll Either Think "This is Great" or "Please for All that is Holy Make It Stop"

Via Miss Cellania, who is a national treasure (and whose pen name I didn't understand for too long, so maybe I should be called Mister Point?):

"A Portrait a Day Keeps Myself Sane": Artwork of David A. Johnson

Charles Dickens

A Portrait a Day Keeps Myself Sane (archive link, my preference) is a fantastic Tumblr blog.  Each day it features a new line drawn portrait by its author, David A. Johnson, whose work is simple, direct, and very beautiful.  He's drawn for a number of "leading" media companies, for example, the New York Times Book Review, and illustrates children's books.  The work tends to be of historical figures and entertainment folks, but, frankly, it does not matter to much to me who is being drawn (maybe it should) -- I like it better when finding out who it is is a bit of discovery. And his artwork is designed to be downloaded -- how cool is that?  Though it is perhaps of no moment, his partner appears to be Barbara McClintock, another great children's book author and illustrator.

"Starship Dimensions"

Screen grab of a tiny part of the site

Starship Dimensions is a website that has excellent scaled drawings of hundreds of fictional spaceships as well as some actual rockets, the ISS, iconic buildings, and so forth to scale. Did I mention the to scale thing yet.  Anyway, the depth of coverage, attention to detail, and precise craftsmanship makes this site a treasure.

The Surreal Street Art of Andre Gonzaga "Dalata"

Over at Colossal there's a spread of some of Andre Muniz Gonzaga's street art done in dilapidated shells of houses and on broken down walls.  Gonzaga, who is from Brazil, goes by the street name "Dalata" and does a lot of "regular" graffiti street art as well as gallery work. Colossal, as always, has a great spread but, unusually,  I thought some of the best stuff was overlooked. So, below the break are some of my favorites from all of his work on Flickr.  there's another good gallery of Gonzaga's work over at Fotolog.

Drunk History -- Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr

Okay, since I mentioned the Alexander Hamilton -- Aaron Burr feud last night, I felt that I should not have failed to link to this important reference material:

Lindsey Stirling: "Elements -- Dubstep Violin"

Via Neatorama, and apparently popular, mixing in a New-Agey way violinishness and dubstep rhythms:

The Odd Politically Connected Life of Daniel Sickles

Today, oddly, is the birthday of Daniel Sickles, an oddity because I had planned to post on his odd life just out of interest and then discovered he was, in fact, born 193 years ago to this day.  And his life was odd: Sickles was the first person in the U.S. to ever successfully assert the insanity defense.  The unarmed person he killed -- in plain sight, in the middle of the day -- was his friend, the son of Francis Scott Key. Sickles then became a general in the Union army and nearly cost the Union the battle of Gettysburg (and possibly the Civil War) when he insubordinately moved his troops, leaving a hole in the lines that was only closed at the loss of hundreds of lives. His leg was blown off in the melee by a cannon ball and both are now on display in the National Museum of Health and Medicine. Really. After the war he became the commander of a large military district in the South, from which he was relieved of duty. Later he managed to become the U.S. ambassador to Spain where it seems he had an affair with the Queen of Spain.  He then married her consort.  After he returned he held a series of minor political posts, until finally, as the chairman of the New York Monuments Commission, he was forced out after $27,000 was discovered oddly missing. Then he became a U.S. Senator again, and then blew though an inheritance of millions of dollars. But that hardly gets below the surface of his odd life nor explains the "politically connected" part of the title of this post ... there's a lot to this story.

"Solarized is the Mother of All Color Schemes"

Via MetaFilter, the color scheme of Solarized which is used for programming interfaces, text editors, work stations, and so forth. It's apparently free, looks well designed and well tested, and beautiful.

The color set could be used in a lot of contexts, so, for what it's worth, here they are:

#002b36   base03
#073642   base02
#586e75   base01
#657b83   base00
#839496   base0
#93a1a1   base1
#eee8d5   base2
#fdf6e3    base3
#b58900   yellow
#cb4b16   orange
#dc322f    red
#d33682   magenta
#6c71c4   violet
#268bd2   blue
#2aa198   cyan
#859900   green

"The 50 Most Interesting Articles on Wikipedia" According to the Blog, Copybot

According to the blog Copybot someone named Ray Cadaster, who I can't locate, has put together an exhaustive list of interesting articles on Wikipedia, and these are his top 50.  He's got a list, as well, of his second 50, should you exhaust these.

1.  Marree Man
2.  War Plan Red
3.  Vela Incident
4.  Tybee Bomb
5.  United States Numbered Highways
6.  Wow! Signal
7.  Tube Bar Prank Calls

"Christiaan Huygens": Ah Nuts, I've Been Saying It Wrong

Christiaan Huygens was a brilliant dutch physicist who possibly ranks in the class of Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and Leibniz and yet, of those, the one so few people (in the U.S.) seem to know about. For what it's worth, he wrote an early version of what became Newton's second law of motion (no, Newton did not come up with this stuff all by himself), invented the pendulum clock, demonstrated that light has wave properties, independently discovered the balance spring, discovered coupled oscillations (see also!), solved the tautochrone problem (which was critical to the creation of a useful pendulum clock), used an early geometric form of calculus predating Newton, developed the theory and formula for centripetal force, wrote the first lengthy work on probability, designed a large tubeless telescope, was the first to understand that Saturn has a ring around it, discovered Saturn's planet Titan, was the first to draw the Orion Nebula, designed an early internal combustion engine that was intended to work with gunpowder, and designed a pocket watch (an outgrowth of the balance spring), among many other inventions. His father, grandfather, and brother were also very successful (his father, though Dutch, was knighted by both England and France and is historically one of the Netherlands most famous poets as well as a composer and was a friend of John Donne and an acquaintance of Rembrandt and Descartes (who lived in the Netherlands for 20 years)).

So, okay, here's the deal: it turns out pretty much everybody who isn't Dutch has been mispronouncing his name all along.  According to Wikipedia it's pronounced like this; according to the video below it's {Huh}{clear your throat or something}{ens}. Also, while we're on it, Euler is pronounced {oiler}, Leibnitz is pronounced {laip}{nits}, and Newton is pronounced {New}{ton}.  Dr. Lewin, below, is right: I've got no idea how to say it.

BTW, Dr. Lewin's other physics videos are also awesome. Via Neatorama.

Cats that Look Like Pin-up Girls

Violating this blog's long standing policy of no animal posts and under no circumstances of any kind no animal pictures, goddammit, we present you with the website Cats that Look Like Pinup Girls. We feel we have an obligation to keep you, the reader, abreast of the latest developments in world media, and if this isn't a tragic development in world media, nothing is. We regret the inconvenience.

Rapture on the Storm

This is evidently what the apocalypse will look like:

My Continuing Series on "Libraries": Googlemania

Google has incredible data storage centers -- today's practical libraries -- and a great series of photos documenting them. They're not set up to scrape easily off the web -- that's a shocker -- so visit the site.  It's what one would expect and a lot more.  for previous posts, please see here and here.

Albert Newton Designs Our New Furniture

Photo of Albert Newton, our Editor in Charge of There/Their/They're Correction, goofing at his desk drawing "gravitational furniture" instead of doing his job.  There a lot of people like this.

Color Photos of Kutno, Poland, 1939-40, on the Brink of Annihilation

Via Kottke, here are color photos of residents of Kutno, Poland, shortly after it was captured by the German army in September 1939; it was then turned into a ghetto and ultimately its Jewish residents shipped to their deaths.  The photos are by  Hugo Jaeger, who was an ardent Nazi who sometimes served as Hitler's photographer. Kutno, which is almost smack dab in the center of Poland, was the scene of a critical battle between the Germans and the Poles during the German invasion, and that may have been why Jaeger was there.

Jaeger's photographs are surprisingly humane, and Life magazine, which has a spread of the photos on its website, speculates why Jaeger took the photos in this manner (scroll down on link site to read).  Suffice it to say we don't really know.  We do know that most of the people in these photos would be dead in a short while due to disease, starvation, or outright murder by the Nazis (mostly in Chełmno extermination camp).

Matchbook Illustrations by Jason D'Aquino

Via Colossal, Juxtapoz, and Inked magazine, the work of Jason D'Aquino. A graphite and tattoo artist, D'Aquino draws incredible miniatures on the insides of matchbooks (a really great collect of which can be found at Colossal) and draws on other found objects, as well as, apparently, on people.

Because Libraries

Culled from various places (see also yesterday), this, I believe, is called "library porn":

From Le Blog De Jean-Paul Sartre

At The New Yorker (via Metafilter):

     * * *
Wednesday, 22 July, 1959: 10:50 A.M.

This morning over breakfast S. asked me why I looked so glum.

“Because,” I said, “everything that exists is born for no reason, carries on living through weakness, and dies by accident.”

“Jesus,” S. said. “Aren’t you ever off the clock?”

"Light Drive" by Kim Pimmel

This is a stop-motion video by Kim Pimmel, who photographs colored lights using very long exposures in dark spaces.  There's no computer graphics here.  Rather, his photos are made using more or less everyday objects (as you can see at the beginning of the video) and stringing them together stop-motion style.  At Flickr Pimmel has a large set of photos, some of which explain his techniques further, and at the always great Colossal, where I first saw some of Pimmel's images, there's a set of large sized stills of Pimmel's work.  The net effect of the long exposures and stop motion is that what looks like it is happening very fast must have taken place over a lengthy period of time -- in fact, the time compression may be part of what adds to the beauty.

Apparently the Women Come Separately

It turns out that getting a binder full of women is a lot harder than Mr. Romney said at the Presidential debate.  There are a lot of customer complaints at Amazon (read the comments).  I think if Romney fails to get elected, this will be why.

A (Not Quite) Final Teen Spirit Mashup

This works shockingly well:

My Kids Believe This to be the Original Version

When they hear either Stayin' Alive or Another Brick in the Wall they think of the other song. In fact, I now do that, too. Don't judge me. Please for heaven's sake ... I couldn't help it.

Because Libraries can be Awesomely Beautiful

At right is an image of the personal library of Jay Walker from an article from Wired several years ago. It's an incredible space -- he calls it the "The Walker Library of the History of Human Imagination" -- and the many images at Wired of the library and the library's artifacts are worth scrolling through ... or go to this short video of it at Vimeo.  Walker has also given a TED talk about it.

Walker, by the way, made the many millions necessary to pay for things like this library from Walker Digital, a company that has acquired a reputation as a patent troll.

Stunning Discovery Reveals Earth Sized Planet Only .00000443 Light Years Away From Earth!

**PRESS RELEASE**PRESS RELEASE**PRESS RELEASE**

While the astronomical world was abuzz today with the discovery of an Earth sized planet "only 4.3 light years from Earth," dubbed Alpha Centauri Bb, Galileo Feynman announced his discovery of an Earth sized planet one million times closer.  He is calling the planet “Venus.”

"Venus" is only.00000443 Light Years Away From Earth.

Scientists are excited about the possibility of colonizing Alpha Centauri Bb which, according to Space.com, has a surface temperature of 2,240 degrees Fahrenheit. Feynman asserts the temperature of his so-called “Venus” is substantially below 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. “While colonization of Alpha Centauri B b is certainly a good idea for its discoverers,” Feynman said, “we may want to send others to Venus first.”  He listed a series of prominent Republicans and pundits.

Although The New York Times says the discovery of Alpha Centauri B b brings "the search for another Earth about as close as it will ever get," Feynman speculates that there are other small planets much closer to earth. In addition to his so called "Venus," he named other potential planets "Mars" and "Mercury," suggesting that we might have already landed one or more probes on them. In a flight of fancy, he also suggested that some huge planets near Earth might have moons of their own which would be colonization candidates. He offered suggested names of "Titan" and "Europa." Space colonization, of course, is inevitable.

OMG, I Had No Idea, That's So Sad!

Via America's Finest News Source®:

Tearful Mitt Romney Announces He Has Rare Disease Where You Can't Sit Quietly On Stool When Repeatedly Asked To

HEMPSTEAD, NY—Highly emotional in the wake of last night’s town-hall-style debate, a tearful Mitt Romney called a press conference this morning to “come clean” about having a rare, little-understood disease known as Shuttlesworth Syndrome, a condition that prevents its victims from sitting quietly on stools anytime they are repeatedly told to do so. “As a sufferer of this rare disorder, being told to sit down and shut up—particularly when a stool is involved—only provokes in my central nervous system a violent overreaction that forces me to behave in the exact opposite manner,” Romney told reporters, his voice cracking with emotion as he revealed his secret to the world. “Without meaning to, I reflexively stand up, stride forward, and continue trying to speak—doing so even, and especially, when one or more people are instructing me to stop talking immediately and go back to my stool. It is a truly debilitating condition that I have battled all my life.” Romney said additional symptoms of the syndrome include an inability to maintain a convincing human smile, inexplicable reversals of previously stated policy positions, and an impaired ability to chuckle without sounding like a deranged maniac.

I've been excessively political here lately, and I am sorry about that.  Really sorry.  Sorry.

On Matrindale's "The Reference Desk"

I posted A List of Reference and Educational Sites yesterday, and, without surprise, I quickly learned of another site that has an extraordinarily detailed list of reference materials on the internet, Jim Martindale's The Reference Desk.  I've updated my post include it.

I've noticed, though, that  what my list offers and what Martindale's list offers are substantially different.  For example, I could find no link to nine of the tweleve sites my post identified as the most important, including the current mother of all references, Wikipedia.  There are a lot of other sites I consider important I haven't been able to find there, such as some key federal agency reference sites like EDGAR, the Census, and the National Archives, book and journal sites like Project Gutenberg and SSRN, and some really excellent general information sites like FindLaw and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.  That doesn't mean they're not there, by the way; it means I wasn't able to find them, and that's part of the problem.

Martindale's site was started many years ago, and it seems to revel in the sheer number of listings it has.  It looks like a great place to poke around in, like poking around in the stacks of a library.  In fact I plan to go there and do that a lot.  My list was designed for practical purposes, and I pared down my list to about 150 as my goal is to provide ready reference.  Not distinguishing between the highly useful and the less useful makes the important and best stuff less accessible.  But that's not the only valid approach, and martindale's heaps of links have a place.  It is obvious that Martindale's site has been carefully composed and developed over years; it's a musty library but a really nice place to browse.