Art!

I don't know if any of you have seen this yet, but this guy is pretty awesome.

NMR vs. cancer

Turns out naked mole rats never get cancer. One reason is that they have a gene (called p16) that stops cell proliferation when density becomes to high. Unfortunately, this also makes NMR cells difficult to culture.

LHC is nuts

"A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one."

Dead Hand (reprise)

Some folks asked me about the Soviet doomsday machine the other day, and lo and behold but Wired has a full article on the topic.

The bottom line: frightened by Ronald Reagan, whom they thought was planning a first strike (justifiably, as it turns out, even though he didn't have any such intentions), a project called Perimeter was implemented not to deter foreign powers (they didn't tell anybody) but to appease potentially trigger-happy hard-liners. The idea is the following: if there is a situation where it appears that Russia is about to get bombed, they can activate Dead Hand and relax. If it is just malfunctioning equipment, then everybody is safe. If it is, in fact, a first strike, then they are safe in the knowledge that the US, too, will be enveloped in a radioactive firestorm. Therefore the incentive is to not launch a counterattack at what may be a flock of geese flying in front of a radar installation (something that has happened).

space!

This is a picture of every space exploration mission undertaken in the past fifty years. It's obviously not to scale, but it's pretty neat anyway.

SPIDER

More accurately, the cutest little spider ever!

Illicit agriculture vs. organized crime

It was once prognosticated that the only things the United States of the future will produce competitively are action movies and pizza delivery. Not so: it turns out that the multi-billion dollar United States marijuana industry, once heavily reliant on nasty Mexican drug cartels, is now producing nearly half of what it consumes domestically.

Why is this relevant? It turns out that while these cartels export meth, coke, heroin, and other 'hard' drugs, the majority of their revenue comes from the production of pot. It's this money that is fueling the violence that is plaguing many parts of Mexico.

Star Wars: Uncut

Star Wars: Uncut is a project where they take Star Wars: A New Hope and divide it into 15 second scenes, which are then claimed online to be remade by fans. It looks like it might be a pretty cool project.

Webcomic for the enlightened masses

REading this made me shudder in horror at the combination of two amazingly awesome and yet terrible things at the same time. Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy...yikes.

http://dresdencodak.com/2009/01/27/advanced-dungeons-and-discourse/

Warren Spector, Mickey Mouse, and creepyness

Together at last!

Mega64

This video here made me happy inside.

Zombocom

Has anybody ever tried to go to Hulu and accidentally visited huku.com? Apparently the website it links you to has been around for a decade...

Parrot party

"He looks so happy."

Economic systems, illustrated with stick figures

Cartoon featuring red person, blue person, lotsa guns, and sometimes even money.

Awesome update

Did you know the Soviets actually had a doomsday device, but never told anybody about it? The first part of this podcast detail why. The answer... may surprise you.

Also:

"'Many, including my mother, thought I was going crazy - people thought I was smoking marijuana .'"

"When not helping his family farm maize, he plugged away at his prototype, working by the light of a paraffin lamp in the evenings."

All that, and what it means for your weekend, at 10:00