Rare video of a tornado vortex that loops back into itself.
interesting
This is what a human heart looks like in the earliest stages of development of a human baby.
Mauritiana’s amazing ship graveyard. Hit Google’s image search for more amazing pics.
"Genius is an African who dreams up snow."
Vladimir Nabokov
"Everything you’ve learned in school as “obvious” becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There’s not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines."
Richard Buckminster Fuller
Suren Manvelyan’s “Animal eyes”
Windswept is a wind-driven kinetic façade consisting of 612 freely-rotating directional arrows creating a large-scale observational instrument that reveals the complex interactions between the wind and the building. The wind arrows serve as discrete data points indicating the direction of local flow within the larger phenomenon.
Mark your calendars!There’s a new comet coming that’s brighter than even the full moon!
A new comet has been discovered that is predicted to blaze incredibly brilliantly in the skies on 28 November 2013; current predictions are of an object that will dazzle the eye at up to magnitude —16. That’s far brighter than the full Moon. If predictions hold true then C/2012 S1 will certainly be one of the greatest comets in human history, far outshining the memorable Comet Hale-Bopp of 1997 and very likely to outdo the long-awaited Comet Pan-STARRS (C/2011 L4) which is set to stun in March 2013.
European mind-reading genius reveals all his mind-reading secrets
Ancient mist-covered Chinese inn is breakthtakingly beautiful
The Three Natural Bridges is a series of natural limestone bridges located in Wulong County in southwest China’s Chongqing Municipality. The whole area is made of Karst landscape (see footnote).
Situated under the Three Natural Bridges is the Lucky Dragon inn built by the ancient Tang dynasty. Situated right next to a 30m waterfall and surrounded by verdant lanscape made of natural caves and bridges, this inn has become quite a sensation with tourists lately. It is a UNESCO World Heritage site and has also been featured in Zhang Yimou’s movie “Curse of the Golden Flower”.
Notes:
- Karst is a geological process in which water (acidic, with CO2) dissolves carbonate bedrock (usually limestone, dolomite, or marble). Usually occurring over thousands of years, karst features unusual surface and subsurface landforms: sinkholes, vertical shafts, streams, springs, underground caves, etc.
This is what it would look like if Jupiter was as close to Earth as the moon is.
I don’t know why this terrifies me, but it does. Maybe because of Melancholia.
Would be cool for a while I think.
Martian volcano Mt.Olympus is so tall and so vast that someone on the surface can’t see the summit as it lies beyond the horizon. Since it has a gentle slope, you can simply walk up the mountain to reach space. Once you reach the summit and look around, it won’t feel like you’re on top of a mountain because the surface lies beyond the horizon and you don’t have low-lying plains around to give you an indication of how high you are.
Thermococcus gammatolerans is the most radiation resistant organism known to man.
The resistance to ionizing radiation of T. gammatolerans is enormous. While a dose of 5 Gy is sufficient to kill a human, and a dose of 60 Gy is able to kill all cells in a colony of E. coli, Thermococcus gammatolerans can withstand doses of up to 30,000 Gy, enough to kill off an entire football stadium full of humans.
Might not be coincidence that it’s also green like the hulk. This thing is a champion among champions - makes even a super monster like Deinococcus radiodurans, capable of withstanding upto 15,000 Gy, look like a clueless kid.
How Einstein was able to go where others couldn’t
Found this anecdote from Alan Kay while reading Bret Victor’s piece on how using symbolic abstractions in Math is the most fucked up thing ever invented by man and that genius-class scientists and inventors are able to do what they do because they have a deep, intuitive understanding of the topic and resort to f(x) and g(x) style symbolic math only after making landmark discoveries but somehow need to communicate the game-changing results to mere mortals.
Here’s Alan Kay on how Einstein did math that baffled the planet…
Jacques Hadamard, the famous French mathematician, in the late stages of his life, decided to poll his 99 buddies, who made up together the 100 great mathematicians and physicists on the earth, and he asked them, “How do you do your thing?” They were all personal friends of his, so they wrote back depositions. Only a few, out of the hundred, claimed to use mathematical symbology at all. Quite a surprise. All of them said they did it mostly in imagery or figurative terms. An amazing 30% or so, including Einstein, were down here in the mudpies [doing].
Einstein’s deposition said, “I have sensations of a kinesthetic or muscular type.” Einstein could feel the abstract spaces he was dealing with, in the muscles of his arms and his fingers…
The sad part of [the doing -> images -> symbols] diagram is that every child in the United States is taught math and physics through this [symbolic] channel. The channel that almost no adult creative mathematician or physicist uses to do it… They use this channel to communicate, but not to do their thing. Much of our education is founded on those principles, that just because we can talk about something, there is a naive belief that we can teach through talking and listening.
Alan Kay, Doing with Images makes Symbols
Einstein didn’t do math, he experienced math like how you and I would feel hot or cold depending on our surroundings. For Einstein, e = m x c x c is literally a walk in the park, a mathematical one. That visceral experience is why he could go where no one could go before. That is what we should be helping kids do, not drown them in formulae and equations that even the teachers themselves can’t make head or tail of.
Our educational system is fucked, our teachers suck, our tools suck and it’s high time we did something about this.
