This Cosmos clip of Neil DeGrasse Tyson is going viral, and for good reason. It's a terrific explainer of the difference between weather and climate change, and the role we humans play in warming the earth's oceans. It's just two minutes long. Read the rest

burning holes into your soul!!

Over the past few days there have been several time-lapse videos circulating around the web of a supercell storm forming over the skies in Wyoming. While that video is incredible, this footage by photographer Stephen Locke, captured near Climax, Kansas on May 10th of this year, is even more astounding. A massive vortex of clouds, rain, lightning, and a clearly visible sunset to boot. (via Vimeo)

From the editors of The American Scholar, the ten best sentences. Presumably in all of literature? Here's one of them, from James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

Why are these the ten best sentences?

LIX is the latest contender in the handheld 3D-printing field. Launched just a few hours ago on Kickstarter, the developers say the super compact design is smaller than any other pen on the market and it can even be powered by the electricity from a USB port. After turning it on the LIX takes less than a minute to heat up and you’re ready to start creating vertical illustrations. Via LIX:

LIX 3D printing pen has the similar function as 3D printers. It melts and cools coloured plastic, letting you create rigid and freestanding structures. Lix has a hot-end nozzle that is power supplied from USB 3.0 port. The plastic filament ABS/PLA is introduced in the upper extremity of Lix Pen. The filament goes through a patented mechanism while moving through the pen to finally reach the hot-end nozzle which melts and cools it down. An interesting fact about this light-weight, engineered pen is that these structures can be formed in any imaginable shape.

The LIX pen has a much sleeker form and a finer tip than similar devices we’ve seen like the 3Doodler, though it’s a bit more expensive. See more on their website. (via Mashable)

HBO is licensing some of their shows exclusively to Amazon for streaming on their Prime Instant Video service. Here's the scoop:

Beginning May 21, Amazon Prime members will have unlimited streaming access to:

- All seasons of revered classics such as The Sopranos, The Wire, Deadwood, Rome and Six Feet Under, and of recent favorites such as Eastbound & Down, Enlightened and Flight of the Conchords

- Epic miniseries, including Angels in America, Band of Brothers, John Adams, The Pacific and Parade's End

- Select seasons of current series such as Boardwalk Empire, Treme and True Blood

Game of Thrones and True Detective are notably absent from the deal. But Amazon Prime subscribers will be able to stream all of the shows above for free. (via deadline)

Broken Mirror/Evening Sky is a series of images by New York photographer Bing Wright who captured the reflections of sunsets on shattered mirrors. The final prints are displayed quite large, measuring nearly 4′ across by 6′ tall, creating what I can only imagine to be the appearance of stained glass windows. The series was on view early this year at Paula Cooper Gallery where you can learn more about the works, and you can see more on Wright’s website. (via Found Inspiration Moving Forward)

This funny comic by cartoonist Ryan Lutz of Terribly Drawn Comics...(Read...)

Kristin and her kid decorated their frozen walkway with these colored ice-balls, made by filling balloons with water and food-coloring and then letting them freeze outside (it took about 10 hours).

She notes, "They're really pretty close up with cracks and fissures and brighten the front walk. I was using it as a way to introduce formulas and recipes to the kid. She was playing with food coloring in a mixing cup and I was counting drops for her. When she found a color she liked, we put that many drops in a balloon and filled it with water."

Not Martha's 2010 tutorial for creating a Christmas tree bauble mobile that looks like an invisible tree is great, simple, and disarmingly effective.

For the top of the mobile I needed something that would allow me to easily secure a lot of hanging points without them sliding around too much. The perfect thing turned out to be a 17-inch steamer rack bought for about $6 from a restaurant supply store (I found mine at Encore Restaurant Equipment in the SODO neighborhood of Seattle). The rack comes with folding feet attached that were easy to pop out with a little bending. Turn the rack upside down and the spots where the legs were secured neatly become four hanging points...

...I used jewelry monofilament secured with crimp tubes to hold the ornaments. I simply created loops at both ends. I made a bunch of different lengths (details on that below). I secured each line to points in the rack grid using lanyard hooks, and hung a basic wire ornament hook at the bottom ends. The lanyard hooks at the top are strong enough to hold heavier ornaments, and because they close they won’t fall off if the mobile is bumped. The basic ornament hooks allow one to easily move ornaments around from one spot to another. My tip to you: Keep the lines as separate as possible while you’re working with them. I spent more time untangling clear threads than doing anything else on this project. It was maddening. After I discovered just how maddening I started hanging them in groups by length from a curtain rod and weighing them down with an ornament to keep them separated, doing this made the hanging of the ornaments go quickly.

Christmas tree ornament mobile, how-to (via Super Punch)

I’m really enjoying this series of photos by photographer Lucas Zimmermann captured on a foggy night near Weimar, Germany. You can see more from the series over on Behance. (via Faith is Torment)

Don’t worry if you don’t know what a Schwibbogen is – I didn’t either. As builder Robert H. kindly explains, it’s a type of traditional German Christmas decoration in the form of an ornate candle holder. Robert’s full-size LEGO Schwibbogen is modeled after a famous one, and depicts artisans at work.

We had a really good time chatting with Sam Sykes, author of the Aeon's Gate series. Among other things, we learned what a flying shark is good for, why he left the Horde, what a 'stealfie' is, and how Sam keeps his daily threat-making to a minimum. Plus your questions! Enjoy.

Sword and Laser is not just a podcast; we’ve also been a book club since 2007! Each month we select a science fiction or fantasy book, discuss it during kick-off and wrap-up episodes of the podcast, and continue that discussion with our listeners over on our Goodreads forums. So come read along with us, and even get a chance to ask your questions to the authors themselves!

Sword and Laser: Subscribe RSS | iTunes | Download this episode

In forms that seem inspired by cast bronze or pewter sculptures, but with incredible geometric textures, these folded masks are made entirely from single sheets of paper by origami artist Joel Cooper (previously). As if making the shape of a face from paper wasn’t already difficult enough, Cooper uses a method of folding called tessellation where an elaborate grid is first folded into a hexagon-shaped piece of paper, a process he goes into great detail in this blog post. You can see (and purchase) more of his work over on Zibbit and Etsy.

Success is typically a function of our passion for work and accomplishment—my clients and students are generally “happy workaholics” who love what they do and wish there were more hours in the day to get things done. (I view myself this way as well.) The concept of life/work balance isn’t that helpful for us, because there’s always more work to do, we’re eager to do it, and we wouldn’t have it any other way. In some cases, particularly in junior roles early in our careers, this tendency can be exploited by a dysfunctional culture or an uncaring manager, and at those times we need to protect ourselves to avoid burnout. But as we advance professionally we’re less subject to those external forces, and we need to protect ourselves primarily from our own internal drive.

Here’s one way to think about protecting yourself. Years ago my colleague Michael Gilbert suggested that we substitute “boundaries” for “balance”: while balance requires an unsteady equilibrium among the various demands on our time and energy, boundaries offer a sustainable means of keeping things in their proper place. Gilbert drew upon his training as a biologist in his definition of healthy boundaries: “Just as functional membranes (letting the right things through and keeping the wrong things out) facilitate the healthy interaction of the cells of our bodies, so do functional personal boundaries facilitate the healthy interaction of the various parts of our lives. Bad boundaries lead to either being overwhelmed or withdrawal. Good boundaries lead to wholeness and synergy.”

What does this look like in practice? What types of boundaries do we need?

Temporal boundaries designate certain times exclusively for family, friends, exercise, and other non-work pursuits. Note that I’m talking not about balance but about boundaries; the amount of undisturbed time we preserve for certain activities will vary and may be quite small, but what matters is that we create and maintain a functional boundary around that time.

Physical boundaries ensure that we get out of our offices and workplaces at regular intervals and create actual distance between us and our work (which includes not only the office itself but also all our professional tools and artifacts–laptops, tablets, phones, papers, everything.) Again, the question is not about balancing the two worlds, but establishing boundaries to create the needed separation.

Cognitive boundaries help us resist the temptation to think about work and focus our attention on the people or activity at hand.  This is by no means an easy task, particularly given that so much in our work environment is designed to capture our attention (email alerts, message reminders, innumerable blinking lights and flashing icons). Recognizing when our attention is being held hostage by work and turning it elsewhere requires persistent, dedicated effort, but it yields substantial rewards, in part because our focused attention is one of our greatest resources. (And one reason I often recommend meditation is an improved ability to control where we direct our attention.)

This subtle shift – eschewing balance and establishing boundaries – isn’t easy work, but it’s worthwhile in trying to protect us from ourselves.

Many of my executive coaching clients and MBA students at Stanford are going through a transition that involves a step up to the next level in some way. They’re on the cusp of a big promotion, or they’ve launched a startup, or their company just hit some major milestone. Very few, if any, of these people would say that they’ve “made it”; they’re still overcoming challenges in pursuit of ambitious goals. And yet their current success has created a meaningful inflection point in their careers; things are going to be different from now on. The nature of this difference varies greatly from one person to another, but I see a set of common themes that I think of as “the problems of success.” You can read my first post here.

Beer advent calendar made in the shape of a Chiristmas tree...(Read...)

In celebration of his 44th birthday, Jay Z ranked his solo albums:

Here's the annotated list:

1. Reasonable Doubt (Classic)
2. The Blueprint (Classic)
3. The Black Album (Classic)
4. Vol. 2 (Classic)
5. American Gangster (4 1/2, cohesive)
6. Magna Carta (Fuckwit, Tom Ford, Oceans, Beach, On the Run, Grail)
7. Vol. 1 (Sunshine kills this album... fuck... Streets, Where I'm from, You Must Love Me...)
8. BP3 (Sorry critics, it's good. Empire (Gave Frank a run for his money))
9. Dynasty (Intro alone...)
10. Vol. 3 (Pimp C verse alone... oh, So Ghetto)
11. BP2 (Too many songs. Fucking Guru and Hip Hop, ha)
12. Kingdom Come (First game back, don't shoot me)

(via @anildash)

How much of the Earth's currently-existing water has ever been turned into a soft drink at some point in its history?

Brian Roelofs

0.0000005%.

First, a tiny bit of background: In the beverage industry, "soft drink" technically refers to any non-alcoholic packaged beverage, but it's commonly used to mean carbonated beverages.[1]In the US, the word people use to refer to a generic carbonated beverage—"soda" vs. "pop" vs. "coke"—strongly depends on where they live. Carbonated water was first produced in the 1700s, and gained popularity as "tonic water" (carbonated water mixed with quinine powder, which has anti-malaria properties), and in carbonated lemonade.[2]Shahan Cheong, Taking the Waters: The History of the Modern Soft-Drink, Not Yet Published (blog post)

The vast majority of all soft drinks ever consumed have been consumed in the last 40 years. Carbonated beverages were fairly popular in the industrialized world throughout the 20th century, but population growth and the spread of companies like Coca-Cola into the developing world mean that the total soda consumption per year has grown relatively fast.

Total soft drink consumption in 2013 was about 188 billion liters. That's 26 liters per person annually, or 70 mL/day.[3]MarketLine, Carbonated Soft Drinks: Global Industry Guide (In the US, the average was 170 liters, or about one 16-oz drink per person per day[4]Dan Check, Matt Dodson, and Chris Kirk, Americans Drink More Soda Than Anyone Else (slate.com)).

Over the past several centuries, humans have probably consumed about 6.5 trillion liters of carbonated beverages.[5]This is a ballpark guess based on population growth and some rough estimates of when soda-drinking became popular in different parts of the world.

That's a lot, certainly. For example, it's enough to fill every house and apartment in the US to a depth of 12 inches:

Even if we assume that every soda is made from an entirely new batch of water, and doesn't include any water from previous sodas, it still represents a tiny fraction of the world's fresh water, and an even tinier fraction of the total volume of the oceans.

What if we expand the question to cover all drinking water? What percentage of water molecules have been drunk[6]Drank? Drinked? Drankéd? by someone at some point?

Humans have been around for a few hundred thousand years, and the total number of humans who have ever lived is usually estimated to be around 110 billion. The question of how much water we should drink per day is the subject of furious debate—the "8 glasses" thing seems to be a myth—but the amount of water we actually drink per day seems to be about a liter.[7]EPA, Estimated Per Capita Water Ingestion and Body Weight in the United States–An Update (2004) This amount varies a little depending on climate, but if we assume the average historical human drank a liter of water per day for 40 years,[8]This is a rough ballpark estimate; it's lower than the 70 or 80 years you might expect because we have to account for the changing human lifespans throughout history and the decreased water consumption by children. then our species has drunk about 100 trillion liters of water in total.

100 trillion liters (100 km³) is still very little compared to even the volume of all rivers (1,200 km³). This means that, since our drinking water passes through the water cycle and is quickly diluted by rivers and oceans, the majority of the water molecules we drink have never been drunk by any other human.[9]On the other hand, it's just about guaranteed that some of the water molecules in any mouthful have been drunk by someone else.

But we're just one species.

Dinosaurs, as a taxonomic group, have been around[10]They're still around! for 230 million years, but their heyday was the mid-to-late Jurassic period. In this period, there were probably around 5 trillion kilograms of dinosaur alive at any given time.[11]Jerzy Trammer, "Differences in global biomass and energy use between dinosaurs and mammals", Acta Geologica Polonica, Vol. 61 (2011), No. 2, pp. 125–132 (Today, there are probably only a few hundred billion kilograms of living dinosaur,[12]I haven't been able to find an estimate for total global bird biomass, but I'll take any chance to cite my favorite journal article ever: "How Many Birds Are There?", by Kevin J. Gaston and Tim M. Blackburn, which estimates the total number at about 300 billion. A later paper lowered the estimate to about 80 billion, so unless the average bird weighs 140 lbs, there is far less dinosaur in the world today than in the Jurassic. 50 billion of it chicken).

If we assume Jurassic dinosaur water requirements were similar to mammal ones,[13]Animal weights and their food and water requirements then this suggests dinosaurs drank something like 10²² or 10²³ liters of water during the Mesozoic era—more than the total volume of the oceans (10²¹ liters).

The average "residence time" of water in the oceans—the amount of time a water molecule spends there before moving into another part of the water cycle—is about 3,000 years,[14]K. L. Schulz, Water in the Biosphere and no part of the water cycle traps water for more than a few hundred thousand years. This means we can assume that, over timescales of millions of years, Earth's water is thoroughly mixed—and dinosaurs had plenty of time to drink it all many times over.

This means that while the chances are that most of the water in your soda has never been in another soda, almost all of it has been drunk by at least one dinosaur.

Why are you so grumpy when we have science?

Get framed signed Explodingdog prints and more directly from me at my store Building a World

Photo by Ayao Yamazaki

Photo by Ayao Yamazaki

Photo by Ayao Yamazaki

If you ever had an overwhelming desire to eat paste or paint chips as a child, this might be for you. Created by design firm Nendo (previously) for the Seibu Department Store in Japan these 12-piece paint sets are completely edible, paint tubes and all. Instead of paint, each tube contains a different flavored caramel or syrup matching the color of its label from green tea to strawberry to honey. Nendo previously designed a set of edible chocolate pencils back in 2007. If you liked this also check out Chocolate Nails and Elsa Lambinet’s Modular Gourmet Chocolates. (via Yatzer)

French artist Amose

Whereas the authorities in Istanbul are quick to buff any political graffiti, they seem to be quite tolerant to other public art — both sanctioned and unsanctioned. Here are a few more examples of what currently can be seen in the city:

Space Invader

German artist Dome

Portugese artist Demo

Local artist Eskreyn

Both local and international writers here — including Hure and Utah

Just about every shutter has become a canvas for bombs and throw-ups

Thanks, again, to Erbil Sivaslioglu for sharing his knowledge of his city’s street art scene with us.

Photos by Lois Stavsky & Dani Reyes Mozeson

Lois Stavsky for Vandalog | Permalink | No comments

The app generates music in real-time based on how you already drive, so your habits behind the..(Read...)

Builder Nick V (Brickthing) is heating up his Iron Builder competition with Andrew Lee with this fantastic creation. The Pixar short that originated this little guy was hilarious (and directed by LEGO fan Angus MacLane). This LEGO rendition looks quite worthy of source material. Build on guys!