DSD

The best part of this video may not be the ridicu­lous crossover machine, but the hilar­i­ous reporter with min­i­mal skat­ing skills (via Neatorama):

Via Neatorama, comes this swingin’ entry by Berke­ley grad­u­ate stu­dents Patrick Ben­nett and Ryan Miyakawa in the “What is Nano?” com­pe­ti­tion:

Phil Plait over at Bad Astron­omy has a great post fea­tur­ing some awe­some facts about everyone’s favorite star. Alright, you prob­a­bly know some of them. But there’s some good stuff in there. A cou­ple of my favorites:

Usu­ally, dam­age to the eyes from look­ing at the Sun hap­pens dur­ing a total solar eclipse. The eclipse itself doesn’t hurt you — after all, the point of the eclipse is that the Sun is cov­ered by the Moon! — but the dam­age hap­pens in the moments right after the eclipse. While the Sun is blocked, your pupil dilates to let in more light, so when the first sliver of the bril­liant Sun reap­pears your eye is flooded with light. This can cause dam­age to your retina called solar retinopa­thy. It’s actu­ally not heat dam­age, but pho­to­chem­i­cal; the flood of UV light actu­ally alters the chem­istry of your cells, dam­ag­ing them.

In gen­eral, the dam­age is minor and can heal well, though there can be some per­ma­nent though rel­a­tively minor effects (in other words, you still shouldn’t stare at the Sun). Usu­ally the dam­age is worse in chil­dren because their lenses let in more blue light (the lens yel­lows with age, act­ing as a nat­ural fil­ter for UV light). […]

Inci­den­tally, using sun­glasses to look at the Sun can actu­ally make things worse, since they block vis­i­ble light and your pupil dilates to com­pen­sate. If you want to observe the Sun — and I rec­om­mend it, because it’s fas­ci­nat­ing and utterly beau­ti­ful — then read Mr Eclipse’s guide to safe solar view­ing. It’s a site for sore eyes.

The Sun is not an aver­age star […] As with most things in nature, the num­ber of objects depends on the size. There are very few high mass stars, more inter­me­di­ate mass stars, and gazil­lions of low mass stars. Roughly 10% of all stars by num­ber in the Milky Way Galaxy are like the Sun, which means that very few are more mas­sive. Even being con­ser­v­a­tive, I’d say that the Sun is more mas­sive than 80% of the stars in the Galaxy.

Van­ity Fair has a dif­fer­ent kind of slideshow that has its own kind of his­tor­i­cal sig­nif­i­cance…

Jonah Hill, Paul Rudd, Seth Rogen, and Jason Segel, The Pretty Young Things

Time has a won­der­ful lit­tle photo essay fea­tur­ing pic­tures of Barack Obama as a fresh­man at Occi­den­tal Col­lege.

In 1980, when Obama was a fresh­man at Occi­den­tal Col­lege in Los Ange­les, he was approached by an aspir­ing pho­tog­ra­pher named Lisa Jack, who asked him if he would be will­ing to pose for some black and white pho­tographs that she could use in her port­fo­lio. […] Ini­tially, before she dug the film out from her base­ment, Jack never thought her pic­tures would have much life beyond her own dark­room.

As I sus­pect most high energy physi­cists do, I stay acutely aware of what’s hap­pen­ing on Lubos Motl’s blog. Today, he offered a par­tic­u­larly illu­mi­nat­ing anal­ogy describ­ing our rela­tion­ship to some cur­rent phys­i­cal theories

So we are some­what sim­i­lar to a prim­i­tive tribe that finds a wash­ing machine (pro­duced by some­one else). At the begin­ning, they will use it as a fridge. As their knowl­edge increases, they will learn how to do the laun­dry. How­ever, if they become even more skill­ful, they may update the device a bit — or press a hid­den but­ton — and use it as a fridge, too. I didn’t tell you: it was one of the wash­ing machines that can also cool the clothes down.

Via Design You Trust, comes this nifty video from 1950’s Italy. I guess it wasn’t enough just to have the trains run on time.

Brows­ing The Super­est again, I stum­bled across this, and couldn’t help shar­ing it:

This site is so ridicu­lous. I highly rec­om­mend start­ing from the begin­ning some­time, and work­ing your way through.