Beautiful shot of an Italian village
My own second-favourite way-to-visualise-the-quantity-of-something is that all the gold in the world (not including gold we have yet to dig up or somehow extract from seawater) would make a cube only 20 to 22 metres on a side, depending on who you ask. To help visualise the size of the cube, 21-ish-metres is about the length of two city buses parked nose to tail.
I think the conclusion is that we’re really bad at estimating volume.
Love the alt text. Btw, there’s alt text ;-)
(via xkcd: Ten Thousand)
Leave Only Footprints (by iain blake)
If you put a finger in your ear and scratch, it sounds like Pacman!
The History of Nintendo - Brawl in the Family (by BrawlintheFamily)
New CGI of How Titanic Sank (by NationalGeographic)
Half a million secrets (via TED.com)
Airports are effectively rights-free zones. Security officers have enormous power over you as a passenger. You have limited rights to refuse a search. Your possessions can be confiscated. You cannot make jokes, or wear clothing, that airport security does not approve of. You cannot travel anonymously. (Remember when we would mock Soviet-style “show me your papers” societies? That we’ve become inured to the very practice is a harm.) And if you’re on a certain secret list, you cannot fly, and you enter a Kafkaesque world where you cannot face your accuser, protest your innocence, clear your name, or even get confirmation from the government that someone, somewhere, has judged you guilty. These police powers would be illegal anywhere but in an airport, and we are all harmed—individually and collectively—by their existence.
Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg’s beautiful animated map of wind patterns in the US. It even shows speed based on the contrast. Oh, and the map is almost in realtime.
Riding the Booster with enhanced sound (by interbartolo)
Happy Tau Day!
Buzludzha, Bulgaria (via Forget Your Past – Timothy Allen)