One vintage ad warns women, "Don't let them call you SKINNY!" while another promises that smoking cigarettes will keep one slender. If the task of morphing their bodies into the current desirable shape isn't enough of a burden, women are also reminded that they stink.

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Brian Donovan captures incredible landscapes. This amazing image of the Golden Gate Bridge—taken in a perfect sunset as "the fog slowly filled the basin and the clouds began to light up"—is just one of them. Here are some more.

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Rosetta—the first man-made spaceship to land on an comet—is alive and well. It just sent its first signal to the world after going into sleep mode 31 months ago. Scientists were anxious, hoping that the computer and the interplanetary probe would alright. And indeed, it is—all systems nominal.

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Scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, have taken the first image ever (on the left) of the Cosmic Web that binds the Universe together. I use capitals because if there's a Cosmic Web that connects all galaxies through the Universe, it should be capitalized.

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How to Draw

“Eat, drink, and Bill Murray!”

“Lost in Illustration” is a t-shirt design by artist Andrew Gregory (a.k.a. “lunchboxbrain“) featuring a clever play on words and the iconic Bill Murray. T-shirts and aprons are available to purchase online from Shirt.Woot.

images via Shirt.Woot

submitted via Laughing Squid Tips

Nerd hero Matthew Broderick uses his modem to actually attract a girl. This did not often happen in real life.

MGM/UA

You've almost certainly never seen the place where I grew up, and you never will because it's long gone, buried by progress and made unreachable by technological erosion and the fine grind of time. What I did and learned there shaped me, but that knowledge is archaic and useless—who today needs to know the Hayes AT command set, the true baud rates of most common connection speeds, or the inner secrets of TheDraw? I am a wizard whose time has passed—a brilliant steam engine mechanic standing agape in the engine room of the starship Enterprise.

I am a child of the BBS era. BBSs—that's "Bulletin Board Systems"—were sort of the precursors to the modern Internet, though that's not quite accurate, since the Internet evolved separately and in parallel. It would be more accurate to say that many people in their 30s and older today were introduced to the world of the Internet either through or because of the interlinked telephone universe of BBSs. That one experience begat the other.

The author near the twilight of his BBS days. Notice the lack of girl, in contrast to Matthew Broderick above.

BBSs existed in a world that had yet to be soiled by smartphones and Facebook and Instagram; there was no Google, and indeed no World Wide Web at all. Up until 1992, the Internet was a thing primarily of text, and BBSs in many ways mimicked that. To get "online" was to sit down at your computer, open up an application called a "terminal program" (or just "term program" for short), pull up your carefully hoarded list of BBS phone numbers, and start dialing. Inevitably, most would be busy and you'd have to wait, but eventually you'd be treated to the sweet sound of ringing through your modem's speaker, followed by the electronic beeping and scratching of a modem handshake.

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An awesome compilation of “text book art” from the Internet! Enjoy!

[Via TechEblog | @___ayatakaoisii]

What if every virus in the world were collected into one area? How much volume would they take up and what would they look like?

Dave

It would be a huge pile, but human viruses would make up only a tiny fraction of it.

HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, has killed tens of millions of people worldwide, and over 30 million people are currently living with HIV. The number of copies of the virus carried in someone's blood can vary dramatically,[1]Data on viral load—the number of copies of the virus per mL of blood—can be found in this paper. but across all the people in the world, there probably exists about a spoonful worth of HIV.

The typical healthy human body contains about \(3 \times 10^{12}\) viruses. This is actually not as many as you might expect; by volume, humans are apparently a less friendly environment for viruses than, say, soil.[2]An area of wetlands in Delaware contains something like four billion viruses per mL of soil, in case you were looking for a fun vacation destination.

If you gathered together all the viruses in all the humans in the world, they would fill about ten oil drums:

These 10 barrels only represent a tiny portion of the global virus community. Most of the world's viruses aren't found in humans. They're found in the sea.

Seawater is full of microorganisms, and we've recently learned that those microorganisms are preyed on by viruses in a big way. Every day, about one in five living cells in the ocean is killed by a virus.[3]Marine viruses—major players in the global ecosystem These viruses are found from the surface of the ocean down to the depths.[4]Oddly, as you go further offshore and further down, the concentration of viruses doesn't decrease as much as the concentration of bacteria, so the virus-to-bacteria ratio is higher in the deep oceans than near the shore. Because the sea is so big,[5]Citation: Go and look at the sea. It's big. it contains a staggering number of viruses.

If you piled up all these viruses—more than 10³⁰ of them—in one place, they would be the size of a small mountain.

It's hard to say exactly what the virus mountain would look like, but it would probably resemble something in between pus and meat slurry.[6]Blame Dave—he's the one who asked. Regardless of its exact appearance, it would almost certainly be disgusting.

The pile wouldn't stay mountain-shaped for long, any more than a mountain of any organic secretion would.[7]If you don't believe me, try building a mountain of earwax or snot. You'll find you can't make it higher than a few inches before your friends and family show up and sit you down for a talk. To avoid a gigantic flood, it might be better to collect them into some kind of container.

MetLife Stadium, host of Super Bowl XLVIII, has a volume of about 1.5 million cubic meters. Earth's viruses could fill the stadium about 150 times over.

So if you watch the Super Bowl, take a moment to picture all the players floating, suspended, in a sea of yellowish-white secretions.

Enjoy the game!

خوشم آمد(۱۸)خوشم نیامد(۰)

نوشته عکس های نشنال جئوگرافیک (جدید – ۳۰ دی) اولین بار در محفل دوستان امید-omid20-109.biz 20 پدیدار شد.

It turns out that if you remove the cowling from a CT scanner, you get something that looks like a cross between a Stargate and a whirling Katamari Damacy. It's pretty mesmerizing to watch.

thingsfortwwings:

[Image: A screencap from Iron Man of a fragment of code with a progress bar in front of it; the code is reproduced below.]

moviecode:

From: http://deeperdesign.wordpress.com/2010/02/26/is-iron-man-made-of-lego/

I was re-watching Iron Man recently and noticed something interesting.  During Iron Man’s first “boot up sequence”, in the “terrorist” caves of Nowhereistan, some butchered C code is displayed on a faked up laptop screen.

The code displayed on screen, although missing some syntactically important characters such as semi-colons, is actual valid C source code.  So valid in fact that I wondered where it came from.

After a quick Google I found it. This code is in fact as follows:

    send[0] = 0x65;
    send[1] = 1;
    send[2] = 3;
    send[3] = 5;
    send[4] = 7;
    send[5] = 11;

    if (rcx_sendrecv(fd, send, 6, recv, 1, 50, RETRIES, use_comp) != 1) {
	fprintf(stderr, "%s: delete firmware failed\n", progname);
	exit(1);
    }

    /* Start firmware download */
    send[0] = 0x75;
    send[1] = (start >> 0) & 0xff;
    send[2] = (start >> 8) & 0xff;
    send[3] = (cksum >> 0) & 0xff;
    send[4] = (cksum >> 8) & 0xff;
    send[5] = 0;

    if (rcx_sendrecv(fd, send, 6, recv, 2, 50, RETRIES, use_comp) != 2) {
	fprintf(stderr, "%s: start firmware download failed\n", progname);
	exit(1);
    }

    /* Transfer data */
    addr = 0;
    index = 1;
    for (addr = 0, index = 1; addr 

The code above comes from a firmware downloader for the RCX (a programmable, microcontroller-based Lego brick), written in 1998 at Stanford University by Kekoa Proudfoot. You can get the full source file here and it is distributed under the Mozilla Public License.  This is the same license used by Firefox and many other Open Source software products.

The sequence in the film in which this code appears suggests that the code is either being downloaded as firmware to the Iron Man suit or being used to upload firmware to an RCX Lego brick that is somehow involved in the operation of Iron Man.

So it appears that Iron Man is either powered by Open Source software or made of Lego.  I’m not sure which is cooler.

marielikestodraw:

jtotheizzoe:

kenobi-wan-obi:

bouncingdodecahedrons:

Carl telling us how (not) to science.

"conclusion: dinosaurs" is still my favorite rebuttal to just about anything tbh.

Second perhaps only to “Therefore: aliens”

This is perfect

"This is wrinkling my brain."

Chances are if you’ve on the internet over the last few years you’ve run into a few amazing bird murmuration videos, like this one from Islands and Rivers or the one we featured on Colossal from Neels Castillion, where countless numbers of starlings flock together and move almost impossibly in concert. Artist Dennis Hlynsky, a professor at the Rhode Island School of Design, wondered what would happen if he could better trace the flight paths of individual birds, what kinds of patterns would emerge from these flying social networks?

Hlynsky first started filming birds in 2005 using a small Flip video recorder, but now uses a Lumix GH2 to record gigabytes of bird footage from locations around Rhode Island. He then edits select clips with After Effects and other tools to create brief visual trails that illustrate the path of each moving bird. Non-moving objects like trees and telephone poles remain stationary, and with the added ambient noise of where he was filming, an amazing balance between abstraction and reality emerges. The birds you see aren’t digitally animated or layered in any way, but are shown just as they’ve flown, creating a sort of temporary time-lapse. Above are three of my favorite videos, but he has many more including the movement of insects, ducks, and other animals.

Windows: Whether you're troubleshooting poor performance on your own wireless network, or you're trying to figure out how overloaded the hotel Wi-Fi is where you're staying, Who Is On My Wi-Fi is a free Windows utility that can show you exactly what the name implies.

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kadrey:

X-Men only