Cooper Griggs

After seven months of not-so-voluntary deep sleep, the comet lander Philae has finally woken up in earnest. The European Space Agency got in contact with its explorer for 85 precious seconds late on June 13th, receiving 300-plus data packets that she...

Dog plays recorder. 

(via livesick-dieill:werexwolf)

tastefullyoffensive:

A Florida man snapped this photo of a raccoon riding an alligator at the Ocala National Forest (full story). Photo by Richard Jones via WFTV.

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via http://www.flickr.com/photos/birdbrid/3617856328/

road trip clouds

[these photos were taken over 5 hours of driving, just for context]

i’ve always said that arizona has the best clouds. clouds that make you feel like you could reach up and touch them. clouds that make you realize there are clouds.

i’m having to amend this statement in light of new evidence brought forth by southeast nevada. their cloud game is strong.

we may have a tie.

suffire:

Dorothea lasky

Turkish sculptor Selçuk Yılmaz (previously) just completed work on three new mask-like sculptures depicting the heads of a lynx, tiger, and fox. Yılmaz uses thin strands of hammered and welded steel that give each piece a beautiful curved musculature. You can see more details of each piece over on Behance.

1.5 hours to go 10 miles

today on the way north to vegas midday, i ran headlong into the “cajon pass rehabilitation project”. somewhere in the back of my mind i remembered hearing about this becoming a real issue. an hour into going about 6 miles, i was kicking myself for not paying better attention.

this very traveled freeway is going to be borked like this through fall 2016.

note to self: avoid the 15 for the next year and a half.

i can’t complain though. the traffic going south, i kid you not, was backed up 25 miles. kid at the gas station in barstow said it can take 3 hours to get through.

the many skies of my day

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via http://eng.totonko.com/2010/05/inland-dan-mcpharlin/

via http://greyhandgang.com/

Wondering how the recently uncovered hack covering personal information from millions of government employees could be worse? We now have our answer, as sources have told the Associated Press and other outlets that in another breach, hackers accessed...

In honor of Jurassic World, I will be posting lots of animals with dinosaurs.

Spoiler alert. One of the most jaw-dropping moments of Christopher Nolan’s 2014 film Interstellar is the climactic moment when Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) enters a visually stunning environment that allows him to physically communicate through time using gravity. In the movie, the scene is manifested as a small library in his home that appears to infinitely repeat with versions of every moment that has ever occurred there. Essentially it’s a cube in four dimensions. Here’s a pretty good explanation of how it works:

The Tesseract is a means of communication for the bulk beings to express action through gravity with NASA. The bulk beings can perceive five dimensions as opposed to four, able to see every moment in the past, present, and future as well as influence gravity within any of those time frames. […] The tesseract allowed Cooper to communicate with Murphy Cooper [his daughter] in various time periods, presenting time itself as a dimension rather than linear. Everything is linked by the strings of time, which Cooper can manipulate. The beings made this comprehensible to Cooper by allowing him to physically interact with the Tesseract.

The idea of the tesseract scene alone was so daunting to the filmmakers, Nolan and his special effects team procrastinated for months before trying to tackle how it might work. After months of concepting and model building the team opted for the unusual approach of using minimal digital effects in favor of fabricating a massive set which the actors could physically manipulate. A remarkable feat considering not only the complexity of the concepts depicted, but the cost and labor of building something so large.

Included here are some shots of the set, a behind-the-scenes interview with Nolan and a number of people from the visual effects team explaining how it was done, and lastly the scene itself. You can watch even more of it here. (via Fubiz)

LOL

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