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November 17, 2011
As the salar has no natural outflow, when it does rain the salar floods with an extremely thin layer of water (barely ankle deep even at its most extreme), creating what is essentially the world’s largest mirror.
posted by Chrysostom at 9:42 PM PST - 16 comments
Donald Crowhurst (1932–1969) was a British businessman and amateur sailor who died while competing in the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race, a single-handed, round-the-world yacht race. Crowhurst had entered the race in hopes of winning a cash prize from The Sunday Times to aid his failing business. Instead, he encountered difficulty early in the voyage, and secretly abandoned the race while reporting false positions, in an attempt to appear to complete a circumnavigation without actually circling the world. Evidence found after his disappearance indicates that this attempt ended in insanity and suicide. (previously: 1, 2)
posted by Trurl at 9:14 PM PST - 11 comments
Nature, one of the most well known (and well cited) scientific journals, recently published a humor piece entitled
Womanspace. A senior editor of
Nature, Henry Gee,
commented last month on the article: "I'm amazed we haven't had any outraged comments about this story." Well, the outraged comments have arrived.
[more inside]
posted by demiurge at 7:18 PM PST - 89 comments
Some interesting things have recently happened in the world of solar power:
Evergreen and
Solyndra have gone bankrupt, panel cost has gone sub $1.00/watt, and China has vastly increased production capacities.
[more inside]
posted by thewalrus at 6:51 PM PST - 103 comments
On 11/11/11,
Homestuck entered
Act 6 (of 7). This follows
an explosive 13-minute finale to Act 5, which brought down its host
Newgrounds on the day of its unveiling and was released with
a fantastic companion soundtrack. In the two and a half years since it was created, Homestuck has become a full-blown epic, approaching the length of War and Peace, but with hours of
accompanying animation,
several interactive games, a
loop machine, and a baffling 19 soundtrack albums, ranging from
VG-inspired soundtrack to
jazzy mood music to
solo piano to
parody kids TV show soundtrack. It also has an obsession with
Nic Cage and
Betty Crocker, and comes with a metawebcomic called
Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff which is in and of itself pure gold. Intimidated? You probably should be! But it's hilarious, epic, and surprisingly addictive, so if you've got nothing else on your plate, you can either
start from the beginning, or, if it seems too daunting, you can learn...
[more inside]
posted by Rory Marinich at 6:11 PM PST - 66 comments
What Middletown Read. Robert and Helen Lynd's immersive studies of early 20th century Muncie, Indiana, published as
Middletown (1929) and
Middletown in Transition (1937), are classics of American sociology. Ball State's
Center for Middletown Studies has created a database of the circulation records from the Muncie Public Library from 1891-1902, providing a rare glimpse of the reading habits of turn-of-the-century middle America.
Slate examines the project and what it reveals.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 5:03 PM PST - 7 comments
Google Music v
iTunes Match v
Amazon Cloud Player.
Google has officially launched its (U.S. only) "Google Music" service, which aims to do for the Android market what iTunes and the recently unveiled (U.S. only) iTunes Match service does for Apple. All three services allow you to upload thousands of songs to the "Cloud". This
music store showdown could revolutionise the way people collect, store and listen to music -
or not.
posted by joannemullen at 3:45 PM PST - 85 comments
A tiny V-12. This video shows the machining, assembly, and running of a very, very small 12-cylinder engine.
posted by FishBike at 1:39 PM PST - 46 comments
In 1975, 10-year-old Stephanie was followed by photographer Jill Krementz as the subject of the book A Very Young Dancer (Stephanie was a student at the
School of American Ballet, and was chosen by George Balanchine to play Marie in that year's production of
the Nutcracker. Now, 34 years later, the New York Times has
found her again.
posted by ChuraChura at 12:55 PM PST - 26 comments
Leaping Sundogs "...that little wisp suddenly snaps into a new shape, as if someone had stopped the video, waited for the cloud to change, then started up the video again." More here.
posted by dhruva at 9:54 AM PST - 11 comments
Tomato: fruit or vegetable? In 1893, the US Supreme Court
unanimously ruled in Nix v. Hedden that the tomato is legally a vegetable and not a fruit, botanical definitions be damned. In 2001,
the European Union disagreed, saying that "tomatoes, the edible parts of rhubarb stalks, carrots, sweet potatoes, cucumbers, pumpkins, melons and water-melons are considered to be fruit".
[more inside]
posted by davidjmcgee at 7:51 AM PST - 91 comments
