DSD

The bizarre and inter­est­ing site spacecollective.org has a fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle about Cher­nobyl, which, after hav­ing been aban­doned by humans for 20 years, is being retaken by its nat­ural environment.

The peo­ple are gone, and in their place are now thriv­ing pop­u­la­tions of deer, elk, wild boar, wolves, and even lynx. Trees are push­ing up through Lenin Avenue and moss is cling­ing to the bro­ken side­walks and aban­doned build­ings through­out the 19-miles that make up the Exclu­sion Zone. […]

Radi­a­tion lev­els are still too high for long term expo­sure, but the Ukraine has opened up the nearby city of Pripyat to daytrip­pers look­ing to catch a glimpse of what an urban cen­ter would look like after 20 years with­out a human foot­print.

Another strik­ing page on SpaceCol­lec­tive is the gallery, which has a wealth of sci­ence related/inspired imagery. Worth check­ing out, but though beau­ti­ful, it’s a lit­tle over­whelm­ing and poorly organized.

(From Lizzy Stew­art.)

I dare you not to smile :)

Kind of reminds me of

A totally sweet col­lab­o­ra­tive music project from Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey:

Bicy­cle Built For 2,000 is com­prised of 2,088 voice record­ings col­lected via Amazon’s Mechan­i­cal Turk web ser­vice. Work­ers were prompted to lis­ten to a short sound clip, then record them­selves imi­tat­ing what they heard.

Phil Plait, over at Bad Astron­omy, turns out to be an inspired poet:

A Poem Beyond Belief

A

is Ad hominem, attacks quite insult­ing,
They may feel good but no good is resulting.

B

is for Bible, they swear it’s all true,
But so do the Mus­lims, and Bud­dhists, and Jews.

C

is Cre­ation, 6000 years past;
But when looked at the evi­dence is always half-assed.

D

is Debunker, it’s said with a jeer.
But we can­not debunk with­out bunk, that is clear. […]

Truly, mind­bog­glingly, fantastic

That, by the way, is some­thing like a Theremin. The cat, though tal­ented, is not this good.

The NYTimes has an inter­est­ing arti­cle today about artist and med­ical stu­dent Satre Stuelke’s Radi­ol­ogy Art project. If you’re an artist with access to expen­sive med­ical equip­ment, what bet­ter to do than scan ran­dom stuff and see what happens?

Stuelke’s medium of choice is a CT Scan­ner, which takes a series of X-ray images of an object with dif­fer­ent focal lengths and from dif­fer­ent angles. The data can then be assem­bled into a 3D image of the object through a process called “tomosyn­the­sis.” This, in turn, allows you to dis­cern impor­tant facts. For instance, appar­ently, the bunny to the right is filled with beans.

From the Uni­ver­sity of York Film­mak­ing Soci­ety comes this amaz­ing video of Kill Bill Parts 1 & 2, in one minute.

Are you Bill?

Turns out Pres­i­dent Obama picked his own bracket for the NCAA Tour­na­ment. This is per­haps unsur­pris­ing, con­sid­er­ing how big a bas­ket­ball fan he is. How­ever, the video of him con­struct­ing this bracket is sur­pris­ingly hilarious:

Three imme­di­ate responses:

1. This is awesome.
2. Does he implic­itly con­done gam­bling at the end of the video? (Not that I really care, but I’m sure Sarah Palin would be self-righteously incensed if she knew.)
3. Imag­ine what it’s like to be a col­lege bas­ket­ball player, know­ing that the pres­i­dent of the United States knows who you are, and is siz­ing you up.

The full arti­cle about Obama’s picks, includ­ing dis­cus­sion and com­men­tary is here.