Paying it forward

If you place an order at the Chick-fil-A drive-through off Highway 46 in New Braunfels, Tex., it’s not unusual for the driver of the car in front of you to pay for your meal in the time it took you to holler into the intercom and pull around for pickup.
 “The people ahead of you paid it forward,” the cashier will chirp as she passes your food through the window.
Confused, you look ahead at the car — it could be a mud-splashed monster truck, Mercedes or minivan — which at this point is turning onto the highway. The cashier giggles, you take your food and unless your heart is irreparably rotted from cynicism and snark, you feel touched.
You could chalk it up to Southern hospitality or small town charm. But it’s just as likely the preceding car will pick up your tab at a Dunkin’ Donuts drive-through in Detroit or a McDonald’s drive-through in Fargo, N.D. Drive-through generosity is happening across America and parts of Canada, sometimes resulting in unbroken chains of hundreds of cars paying in turn for the person behind them.

More here.

World War 2 in 7 minutes

The battle lines of World War 2, for every day of the war.  I find this rather thrilling to watch

Astronomy Picture of the Day

There is a daily Astronomy Picture of the Day!  Use the arrows at the bottom to look at more.

This one is described as:  "Dramatic prominences can sometimes be seen looming just beyond the edge of the sun. Such was the case last week as a large prominence, visible above, highlighted a highly active recent Sun. A waving sea of hot gas is visible in the foreground chromosphere in great detail as it was imaged in one specific color of light emitted by hydrogen. A solar prominence is a cloud of solar gas held just above the surface by the Sun's magnetic field. The Earth, illustrated in the inset, is smaller than the prominence. Although very hot, prominences typically appear dark when viewed against the Sun, since they are slightly cooler than the photosphere below them. A quiescent prominence typically lasts about a month, and may erupt in a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) expelling hot gas into the Solar System, some of which may strike the Earth and trigger auroras."

Black MIDI

There is apparently a subculture that tries to create sound files with the largest possible number of notes.  They call it "Black MIDI," where MIDI is a type of sound file and "black" because there are so many notes the page looks black.  This example has about 8 million notes.

Let's do the math.  8 million notes in a 5 minute song, or 300 seconds.  That makes 26,666 notes per second.  Since a keyboard has 88 notes and these appear to correspond to a regular keyboard, each key would have to be pressed an average of 300 times each second throughout the song.  Or maybe I should put scare quotes around "song"...

A bit more here.

The Man Who Built Catan

“Collectively, all the rest of our portfolio doesn’t add up to Catan,” Mayfair’s Fenlon told me. The company originally sourced all of the materials for the game from Europe, but, when demand began to take off, the manufacturers didn’t have enough wood to keep up. Mayfair expanded to American companies for more resources. Today, every box of Catan that Mayfair produces is an international affair: the dice are tooled in Denmark; the more intricate wooden pieces are done in Germany; other wood parts are made in Ohio; the cards are from Dallas; the boxes, Illinois; the cardboard, Indiana; the plastic components, Wisconsin; finally, everything gets put together on an assembly line in Illinois.

Full story here.

big moon

Rainbow!

I'll keep going, just stay by my side

I think this song is beautiful.  Crisp and simple, no tricks or bells or whistles.  All created by the artist in her home studio.  And though it's specifically about Minecraft, you can pull the lyrics out of that setting and they still work beautifully.

to mars!

Just days after the launch of India’s Mangalyaan satellite, NASA sent off its own Mars mission, five years in the making, named Maven. Its cost: $671 million. The budget of India’s Mars mission, by contrast, was just three-quarters of the $100 million that Hollywood spent on last year’s space-based hit, “Gravity.”

From this NYT piece.

WE ARE THE ROBOTS

More here