SKELETONS

Please show Poky!

how they made it!

More here.

paper

british accents

I can't get enough of this.  I wish it lasted 85 minutes rather than 85 seconds.

giant magellan telescope

I'm wondering how they deal with all the atmospheric effects...I assume they have some incredible software to remove those effects, but those effects also must be (I would think) much bigger than some of the actual signals they're trying to detect!

what Hong Kong looks like

The author's description: "One of the slowest things in Hong Kong... So I decided to speed it up... the full 2 hour route - East to West - condensed to under 4½ minutes..."

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.