That totally looks like leather! Here is a more traditional (and shiny!) example:

Both of these were made by dorodango artist Bruce Gardner. Here's some video of how the balls are made:

This video is good as well but if you want to create your own, these detailed directions will be a better guide.

The printing happened on large sheets of paper which were then folded into rectangles the size of the finished pages and bound. The reader then sliced open the folds. Paper knives, variants of letter openers, were used for this purpose.

The deckle edge on modern books is an imitation of what those sliced open books looked like.

Pluto. Never forget.

Somewhat NSFW in places.

Sam Anderson has a nice article in New York magazine about Chatroulette.

One such story was our earlier case about the old lady and her troubles with the Revenue Department official over a land title. Fed up with requests for bribes and equipped with a zero rupee note, the old lady handed the note to the official. He was stunned. Remarkably, the official stood up from his seat, offered her a chair, offered her tea and gave her the title she had been seeking for the last year and a half to obtain without success.

Are studios doing a better job protecting screeners and intimidating Academy members? Or was this year's crop of films too boring for pirates to bother with? I can't tell if this is a scene-wide trend or localized to the Oscars only.

(via snarkmarket)

As a young man, Timothy was an artist of tremendous talent. The canvases he leaves behind are filled with haunting and beautiful imagery. They are also filled with a palpable desire-to be heard, to connect, to be understood better by others and himself. The letters that inspired this journal's name were a continuation of that same lifelong effort to more intimately know the world and his place within it.

Dave Eggers tells the story of the real Timothy McSweeney and why he named the magazine after him.

I like best the ones where the hair doesn't give it away and you have to look to the cheeks or the eyes for evidence of upside down-ness. (via @brainpicker)

If this doesn't blow your socks off, then Hogan, who has just been appointed director of Fermilab's Center for Particle Astrophysics, has an even bigger shock in store: "If the GEO600 result is what I suspect it is, then we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram." [...] Our everyday experience might itself be a holographic projection of physical processes that take place on a distant, 2D surface.

My socks have been blown so far off they are in a parallel universe. We might be living in the shadow of Flatland. Read the whole thing...it's noodle-bending throughout. Reminds me of the discovery of cosmic background radiation. (via aegirthor)

In the past few years, a host of genome studies have demonstrated that DNA flows readily between the chromosomes of microbes and the external world. Typically around 10 per cent of the genes in many bacterial genomes seem to have been acquired from other organisms in this way, though the proportion can be several times that. So an individual microbe may have access to the genes found in the entire microbial population around it, including those of other microbe species. "It's natural to wonder if the very concept of an organism in isolation is still valid at this level," says Goldenfeld.

Read on for their hypothesis about how horizontal evolution drove innovation -- development of a universal genetic code and genetic innovation-sharing protocols -- in life forms early on in the Earth's history. Fascinating.

Part of its ability to resist damage seems to be the way the shell deforms when it's struck: It produces cracks that dissipate the force of the blow, and nanoparticles that injure whatever is attacking it

Several times when Subject 23 was asked to imagine playing tennis, Monti said, the region of the brain most closely associated with complex motor planning became highly active, and stayed active for 30 seconds after researchers prompted such imagery by saying "tennis."

Similarly, when researchers asked the patient to imagine walking through the house where he grew up and then said the word "navigate," Subject No. 23 responded with bursts of activity in the region of the brain involved in constructing and navigating a mental map.

The young, French-speaking man was the only subject who was then trained to answer simple yes or no questions -- whether his father's name was Paul (yes) or Alexander (no), whether he had siblings and how many -- using the imagery technique he had already learned.

Checking the patient's responses for accuracy and comparing them to the yes-no brain responses of a group of healthy volunteers, researchers discerned that Subject No. 23 was not only still "in there," but capable of purposeful thought and communication.

Delsaux's Burj image comes from a project called The Dark Lens, which features images of Star Wars characters populating the circa-2008 Earth. I believe that's the Millennium Falcon docking at the Burj:

Many more of The Dark Lens images are available on Delsaux's site.

In the three years since Hammami made his way to Somalia, his ascent into the Shabab's leadership has put him in a class of his own, according to United States law-enforcement and intelligence officials. While other American terror suspects have drawn greater publicity, Hammami exercises a more powerful role, commanding guerrilla forces in the field, organizing attacks and plotting strategy with Qaeda operatives, the officials said. He has also emerged as something of a jihadist icon, starring in a recruitment campaign that has helped draw hundreds of foreign fighters to Somalia. "To have an American citizen that has risen to this kind of a rank in a terrorist organization - we have not seen that before," a senior American law-enforcement official said earlier this month.

See also a New Yorker article about Adam Gadahn, an American who is now a member of Al Qaeda.

My only interest in photographing is photography.

The heavy use of computer analysis has pushed the game itself in new directions. The machine doesn't care about style or patterns or hundreds of years of established theory. It counts up the values of the chess pieces, analyzes a few billion moves, and counts them up again. (A computer translates each piece and each positional factor into a value in order to reduce the game to numbers it can crunch.) It is entirely free of prejudice and doctrine and this has contributed to the development of players who are almost as free of dogma as the machines with which they train. Increasingly, a move isn't good or bad because it looks that way or because it hasn't been done that way before. It's simply good if it works and bad if it doesn't. Although we still require a strong measure of intuition and logic to play well, humans today are starting to play more like computers.

The section about people using computers *during* matches is particularly interesting.

* Q: Wha? A: These previously published entries have been updated with new information in the last 24 hours. You can find past updates here.

Hilarious. He made it all the way up to 141st St & Broadway! (thx, micah)

I really can't do a good job, any job, of explaining magnetic force in terms of something else you're more familiar with, because I don't understand it in terms of anything else you're more familiar with.

This is why science is so maddening for some and so great for others.

This sentence contains a provocative statement that attracts the readers' attention, but really only has very little to do with the topic of the blog post. This sentence claims to follow logically from the first sentence, though the connection is actually rather tenuous. This sentence claims that very few people are willing to admit the obvious inference of the last two sentences, with an implication that the reader is not one of those very few people.

The comments are worth a read too. (thx, mira)

Update: See also Charlie Brooker on How To Report the News. (thx, christian)

Update: I've gotten some angry emails saying that I have spoiled the Lost season premiere for people by embedding this video showing the still frame of Jack on an airplane. To rebut:

1. Lost is unspoilable. What you think is happening either didn't happen, won't happen, will happen again, and has nothing to do with with happened previously or afterwards.

2. Seeing the first two minutes of a TV show doesn't spoil the TV show...that's just watching the show.

3. At the end of last season, if you picked the most obvious scenario for season six to open with, it would have been that the bomb reset the timeline and then seeing everyone on Flight 815 headed safely for Los Angeles, oblivious of all that we've witnessed in the past five years. You can't spoil the obvious.

Update: Ok, here's the first hour of the season premiere (starts at around 1:35:20). It's a poor recording with even worse sound, but it's watchable if you have to know RIGHT NOW. (thx, jeffrey)

I'll be writing about the elements of mathematics, from pre-school to grad school, for anyone out there who'd like to have a second chance at the subject -- but this time from an adult perspective. It's not intended to be remedial. The goal is to give you a better feeling for what math is all about and why it's so enthralling to those who get it.

More subject blogs like this, please. There are lots of art, politics, technology, fashion, economics, typography, photography, and physics blogs out there, but almost none of them appeal to the beginner or interested non-expert. (thx, steve)

The free afternoon program will consist of four panel discussions: "Zoning Diet," about the hidden corsetry of policy, access, and economics that gives shape to urban food distribution; "Culinary Cartography," a look at the kinds of things we can learn about New York City when we map its food types and behaviours; "Edible Archaeology," about the socio-economic forces, technical innovations, and events that have shaped New York food history, in the context of the present; and "Feast, Famine, and Other Scenarios," an opportunity to collaboratively speculate on changes to the edible landscape of New York in both the near and distant future.

The event takes place in NYC on Feb 27th; it's free and the entire thing will be available online as well.

Update: The NYC Oasis map features a satellite view from 1996 and an imagined sat view from 1609. (thx, steve)

What happened to my bonus? What happened to my job? What happened to my country? Why can't it all go the way it's supposed to go? You mean having a kid won't solve my marriage problems? Why don't these drugs make me feel better? Where's that goddamn waiter with my salad? Have you seen the stupid weather today? Is this really all there is?

See also preemptive irritation and Louis CK on Conan talking about how everything is amazing and nobody's happy. (via @dooce)