September 2011
A brief history of the brain -New Scientist →
New Scientist tracks the evolution of our brain from its origin in ancient seas to its dramatic expansion in one ape – and asks why it is now shrinking.
So why didn’t our brains get ever bigger? It may be because we reached a point at which the advantages of bigger brains started to be outweighed by the dangers of giving birth to children with big heads. Or it might have been a case...
4 tags
2,000 years after they were written, Dead Sea... →
Find them here
The scrolls, considered by many to be the most significant archaeological find of the 20th century, are thought to have been written or collected by an ascetic Jewish sect that fled Jerusalem for the desert 2,000 years ago and settled at Qumran, on the banks of the Dead Sea. The hundreds of manuscripts that survived, partially or in full, in caves near the site, have shed light...
1 tag
Ivan Krstić » How Porsche hacked the financial... →
This reads like a spy thriller:
Adolf Merckle, one of the world’s richest men, committed suicide yesterday by throwing himself under a train, Bloomberg reports. Financial difficulties, and particularly great losses he suffered on Volkswagen stock, are being cited as the key reason he ended his life:
[Merckle’s company] VEM was caught in a so-called short squeeze after betting...
Edgar Wright’s Top 10 from The Criterion... →
Mighty fine selection.
1 tag
constihill:
via via
from Tastefully Offensive | Bonus Funny http://bit.ly/nT2QuI
“We do need time to think. We do need time to digest. We do need time to...”
– The Slow Science Manifesto
“People call me a cynic but I think it might be truer to think of myself as just...”
– Warren Ellis
2 tags
“The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own...”
– Oscar Wilde
On The Superluminal Neutrino
Two days ago, a team of experimentalists at CERN published the results of their OPERA experiment.
It seems a bunch of subatomic particles are traveling faster than the speed of light. You can read their arvix paper here.
Let’s get one thing straight. Modern physics -and when we say modern we are really talking about everything that was built since Einstein’s Annus Mirabilis- holds...
How We Look at Women, and Why - 3QD →
Joy Icayan:
Walk the talk, we often say. I would like to think we have perhaps a better awareness of women’s rights. Most people would anyway; most people condemn violence against women—rape, sexual assault, neglect etc etc. We are all advocates for this—that is easy enough at least in theory, but to prevent the unnecessary sexualisation of women, to fight against the kind of environment that...
“Has anybody been watching the debates lately? You’ve got a governor whose state...”
– Barack Obama
WatchLOOK EFFECTS filmreel 2011
Lovely shot breakdowns to be seen in ‘ere for The King’s Speech, Black Swan and Captain America.
Interesting that Joe Johnson hates working with previz but makes quite an extensive use of virtual sets.
1 tag
CEOs in Comics: Villains Earn, Heroes Inherit →
Julian Sanchez, on why heroes like Bruce Wayne or Tony Stark inherited their fortune while villains like Luthor or Ozymandias built their financial empire from nothing.
While the pattern in comics inverts the meritocratic ideal that seems to rule in most modern American fiction, it fits quite naturally with a pre-capitalist aristocratic ethos, which persisted at least through the early 20th...
How Hollywood Accounting Can Make a $450 Million... →
Derek Thompson:
How can a movie that grossed $475 million on a $32 million budget not turn a profit?
Imagine you’re running a lemonade stand with your buddy Steve. Your mom says you have to share half your profits with your sister. But you don’t wanna! So you pretend your buddy Steve is actually a corporation — call him Steve, Inc — charging you rent for the stand,...
Commemorative Calculus: How an Algorithm Helped... →
A fascinating and humbling account of the thought process behind designing the 9/11 Memorial.
They carried him, they commandeered an off-limits elevator, and the three men eventually reached the 36th floor before Wald said he could go no further. Zhu escaped at the urging of a firefighter, but Ramos stayed with Wald, telling him, “Victor, don’t worry. I’m with you.” The...
4 tags
2 tags
“17 : The only men who should wear black suits during the day are priests,...”
– 25 pieces of basic sartorial knowledge
so you don’t look dumb