The microbes in your body at this moment outnumber your cells by ten to one. And they come in a huge diversity of species -- somewhere in the thousands, although no one has a precise count yet. By some estimates there are twenty million microbial genes in your body: about a thousand times more than the 20,000 protein-coding genes in the human genome. So the Human Genome Project was, at best, a nice start. If we really want to understand all the genes in the human body, we have a long way to go.

Now you could say "Who cares? They're just wee animalcules." Those wee animacules are worth caring about for many reasons. One of the most practical of those reasons is that they have a huge impact on our "own" health. Our collection of microbes-the microbiome-is like an extra organ of the human body. And while an organ like the heart has only one function, the microbiome has many.

When food comes into the gut, for example, microbes break some of them down using enzymes we lack. Sometimes the microbes and our own cells have an intimate volley, in which bacteria break down a molecule part way, our cells break it down some more, the bacteria break it down even more, and then finally we get something to eat.

Another thing that the microbiome does is manage the immune system. Certain species of resident bacteria, like Bacteroides fragilis, produce proteins that tamp down inflammation. When scientists rear mice that don't have any germs at all, they have a very difficult time developing a normal immune system. The microbiome has to tutor the immune system in how to do its job properly. It also acts like an immune system of its own, fighting off invading microbes, and helping to heal wounds.

While the microbiome may be an important organ, it's a peculiar one. It's not one solid hunk of flesh. It's an ecosystem, made up of thousands of interacting species.

Members of Monty Python's Flying Circus are reteaming for "Absolutely Anything," a sci-fi farce combining CGI and live action, with Terry Jones to direct and Mike Medavoy to produce.

Plans are for filming to begin in the U.K. this spring, with the Pythons voicing key roles as a a group of aliens who endow an earthling with the power to do "absolutely anything" to see what a mess he'll make of things -- which is precisely what happens. There's also a talking dog named Dennis who seems to understand more about the mayhem that ensues than anyone else does. Robin Williams will voice the character.

"It's not a Monty Python picture, but it certainly has that sensibility," Jones told Variety.

(via ★vuokko)

The idea is simple: I invite a group of writers, educators, type makers and type users to look back at 2011 and pick the release that excited them most.

Skip ahead to about 1:30...everything before that is just filler. (via ★bryce)

When John Davidson's apartment gets robbed, he learns that the easiest way to get his stuff back is to have one drug dealer lie to another drug dealer while he lies to the police.

(via ★vuokko)

Someone needs to come up with a term for this sort of thing (history bridges? no.). There's also this 1956 game show appearance of a Lincoln assassination eyewitness and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841-1935) shaking hands during his lifetime with both John Quincy Adams (b 1767) and John F Kennedy (d 1963), one man spanning 200 years of American history. (via ★mattbucher)

[1] Tyler actually had two children after Lyon...Robert was born when he was 65 and Pearl followed at 70. ↩

[2] Lyon's second wife was 36 years his junior and actually younger than each of his three previous children. ↩

With Martin's system, each crewmember gets a cell phone that operates using a prepaid SIM card; they also get a two-week plastic pill organizer filled with 14 SIM cards where the pills should be. Each SIM card, loaded with $50 worth of airtime, is attached to a different phone number and stores all contacts, text messages and call histories associated with that number, like a removable hard drive. This makes a new SIM card effectively a new phone. Every morning, each crewmember swaps out his phone's card for the card in next day's compartment in the pill organizers. After all 14 cards are used, they start over at the first one.

Of course, it would be hugely annoying for a crewmember to have to remember the others' constantly changing numbers. But he doesn't have to, thanks to the pill organizers. Martin preprograms each day's SIM card with the phone numbers the other members have that day. As long they all swap out their cards every day, the contacts in the phones stay in sync. (They never call anyone but each other on the phones.) Crewmembers will remind each other to "take their medicine," Martin said.

That's clever. The "take their medicine" detail reads like it's straight out of the movies.

What the economists found was that some of the tallest buildings of their day were built around City Hall, where the bedrock reaches its deepest point in the city, about 45 meters down, between there and Canal Street, at which point the bedrock begins to rise again toward the middle of the island. Indeed, Joseph Pullitzer built his record-setting New York World Building, a 349-foot colossus, at 99 Park Row, near the nadir, as did Frank Woolworth a decade later.

(via @bobulate)

For all those who are in the situation of Hero and Leander, and similarly to them can only exchange secret signs about the feelings of their hearts, here we publish the secrets of the language of stamps. If the stamp stands upright in the upper right corner of the card or envelope, it means: I wish your friendship. Top right, across: Do you love me? Top right, upside down: Don't write me any more. Top right, thwart: Write me immediately. Top right, upright [once more again???]: Your love makes me happy. Top left, across: My heart belongs to someone else. Top left, upright: I love you. Bottom left, across: Leave me alone in my grief. In line with the name: Accept my love. Same place, across: I wish to see you. Same place, upside down: I love someone else.

(via @unlikelywords)

I have never written an advertisement in the office. Too many interruptions. I do all my writing at home.

I'll bet if you asked every French politician where the web was invented not a single one would know this. The Franco-Swiss border runs through the CERN campus and building 31 is literally just a few feet into France. However, there is no explicit border within CERN and the main entrance is in Switzerland, so the situation of which country it was invented in is actually quite a tricky one. The current commemorative plaque, which is outside a row of offices where people other than Tim Berners-Lee worked on the web, is in Switzerland. To add to the confusion, in case Tim thought of the web at home, his home was in France but he temporarily moved to rented accommodation in Switzerland, just around the time the web was developed. So although, strictly speaking, France is the birthplace of the web it would be fair to say that it happened in building 31 at CERN but not in any particular country! How delightfully appropriate for an invention which breaks down physical borders.

She's holding the pole [of the IV drip]! Marc, it was a pole with four wheels on the bottom, and we're riding around this hospice, and you could hear the goddamn wheels jangling and banging; it was insane.

And then I pass the front door, and all these nurses are standing out front, and they're all crying. They're watching us, and they're crying. And I didn't know why they were crying. I was like, Why are they crying? I didn't get what they were seeing. I didn't know. Because I was just in it; I was living it. I knew my wife who had suffered, she was a prostitute, she was a freakin' heroin addict, she was beaten by pimps -- this was her past -- and then she ends up with AIDS, and she's dying, and all she wants is a goddamn ride on my motorcycle.

So the next thing you know we're on I-95, because women, it's never enough for them. We're on I-95, and she unhooks the pole, and she's holding the morphine bag over her head with her gown that's flying up in the air so you could see her entire naked, bony body with the morphine bag whipping in the wind, and we're passing by these guys in their Lamborghinis, and I'm looking at them like, What the hell kind of life are you living? Look at me, I'm on top of the world here.

I love this story. The podcast from which it was taken is available here.

Or Inception directed by Fritz Lang?

(thx, al)

(via cup of jo)

(via sly oyster)

(via ★vuokko)

Second, it's not stylistically suitable. Verdana is a built-in font on nearly every Windows and Mac computer. It's used on zillions of web pages. It's ubiquitous. Therefore, the person who uses Verdana suggests to readers "I couldn't be bothered to pick anything better." It's also well-known as the corporate font of IKEA -- probably not the association you're going for.

(via ★aaronsw)

But then one gray morning did Internet Explorer 6 no longer load The Google. Refresh was clicked, again and again, but still did Internet Explorer 6 not load The Google. Perhaps The Google was broken, the people thought, but then The Yahoo too did not load. Nor did Hotmail. Nor USAToday.com. The land was thrown into panic. Internet Explorer 6 was minimized then maximized. The Compaq Presario was unplugged then plugged back in. The old mouse was brought out and plugged in beside the new mouse. Still, The Google did not load.

(via @coudal)

There's also a 1910 copy of what is basically the German version of the ATF book. Look at these swirls! (via @h_fj)

One of the real dilemmas we have in our country and around the world is that what works in politics is organization and conflict. That is, drawing the sharp distinctions. But in real life, what works is networks and cooperation. And we need victories in real life, so we've got to get back to networks and cooperation, not just conflict. But politics has always been about conflict, and in the coverage of politics, information dissemination tends to be organized around conflict as well. It is extremely personal now, and you see in these primaries that the more people agree with each other on the issues, the more desperate they are to make the clear distinctions necessary to win, so the deeper the knife goes in.

(via ★davidfg)

This is... This is... What? What?! This is huge! This is like ten CDs in one. How many songs does it have on it?

I believe the record in question is from Jonathan Coulton. (via ★mathowie)

And I venture to predict that after all the huzzas have been uttered and the public acclaim is but a memory, you will derive the greatest satisfaction from the serene knowledge that you have discovered new truths. You can say to yourself: this I saw, this I experienced, this I know to be the truth. This experience is a precious thing; it is known to all researchers, in whatever field of endeavour, who have ventured into the unknown and have discovered new truths.

See also kids digging up graves in Greenwood Cemetary, the abandoned West Side Highway, and what looks like a bombed-out Bushwick. (via gothamist)

Lucas has decided to devote the rest of his life to what cineastes in the 1970s used to call personal films. They'll be small in scope, esoteric in subject and screened mostly in art houses. They'll be like the experimental movies Lucas made in the 1960s, around the time he was at U.S.C. film school, when he recorded clouds moving over the desert and made a movie based on an E. E. Cummings poem. During that period, Lucas assumed he would spend his career on the fringes. Then "Star Wars" happened -- and though Lucas often mused about it, he never committed himself to the uncommercial world until now.

Sitting in a sun-drenched office, his voice boyish, Lucas talked about himself as if he were a character in one of his movies. He's at the end of an epic saga; he's embracing a new destiny ("Make the art films, George"); he's battling former acolytes who have become his sworn enemies; and George Lucas is -- no kidding -- in love. Before he takes his digital camera with him into obscurity, though, Lucas has one last mission. He wants to prove that with "Red Tails," he can still make the kind of movie everyone in the world will want to see.

(via @itscolossal)

It's a girl, a film being released this year, documents the practice of killing unwanted baby girls in South Asia. The trailer's most chilling scene is one with an Indian woman who, unable to contain her laughter, confesses to having killed eight infant daughters.

The statistics are sickening. The UN reports approximately 200 million girls in the world today are 'missing'. India and China are said to eliminate more female infants than the number of girls born in the US each year. Lianyungang in China has the worst infant gender ratio on record with 163 boys born for every 100 girls. Taiwan, South Korea and Pakistan are also countries in which unwanted female babies are aborted, killed or abandoned.

Here's more information on the mentioned film. (via @cshirky)

Clockwork would be shown in standard cinemas as a quality platform release, which meant there were many options per city. I knew that Don Rugoff's Cinema 1, the most prestigious cinema in New York, had to be the New York theater, but how to be sure that the film would be booked into the best cinema in Indianapolis or Cleveland or Atlanta? To choose the right theater in each city, we needed to know which cinema sold the most tickets to the most interesting pictures. But while a studio would know what its own films grossed, detailed box-office figures of competitive films were closely held secrets. There was no comparative information, and that is exactly what Stanley wanted.

Influenced by Kubrick's system, Variety released their first nation box office rankings chart a few months later. (via df)

This is the story of the worst project I've funded on Kickstarter. I am posting this not to single out the creators behind it, or bad mouth their business, but to go over my disappointment in the hopes that future Kickstarter project creators can learn from it. It's all about communication with your funders, setting up and delivering on expectations for funders, and doing the right thing when things go wrong.

Shipping a product or app is hard. It requires experience, hard work, and a little luck. But providing effective and genuine customer service might be even harder because you just have sit there, take it, and react well under pressure over and over and over. The entrepreneur side of your brain is saying "this is a great product and I am proud of it and anyone who says otherwise is wrong and I will show them and succeed" and sometimes customer service is acknowledging publicly and repeatedly the exact opposite thing...that the product isn't meeting needs, you are right, we will fix it, and thank you sir may I have another? That's a lot of potential cognitive dissonance! The best teams and companies deflect that dissonance and turn customer service problems into opportunities to improve their products, their teams, and their relationships with their customers (current and potential). That's when the magic happens.

The New Groupthink has overtaken our workplaces, our schools and our religious institutions. Anyone who has ever needed noise-canceling headphones in her own office or marked an online calendar with a fake meeting in order to escape yet another real one knows what I'm talking about. Virtually all American workers now spend time on teams and some 70 percent inhabit open plan offices, in which no one has "a room of one's own." During the last decades, the average amount of space allotted to each employee shrank 300 square feet, from 500 square feet in the 1970s to 200 square feet in 2010.

The new offices of Foursquare and Buzzfeed (where I work from) are a perfect example of the New Groupthink Cain refers to....rows and rows of people sitting next to each other in open spaces. Much of this is because of NYC's insane rental market, but Fog Creek's offices are a nice counterexample:

Every developer, tester, and program manager is in a private office; all except two have direct windows to the outside (the two that don't get plenty of daylight through two glass walls).

Woo does similar illustrations outside the Star Wars universe...here's the T-1000 from Terminator 2 wearing Thom Browne. (via flavorwire)

See also the decline in piano quality over the last 100 years. (thx, judy)

1. Midnight In Paris
2. Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes
3. Moneyball
4. The Skin I Live In
5. X-Men: First Class

(via moviefone)

ps. Can you hear that sound? That's Kingdom Rush sucking all your free time away this weekend. You're welcome.

(via ★mattb)

Rather, the skyway system originally emerged from a twofold desire. First, planners in the 1940s and 50s were very concerned about managing increasingly dense pedestrian flows, and viewed skyways as a way to maximize the use of urban space for both people and automobiles (Byers 1998 154). Second, business owners were interested in maximizing their property values, and saw the skyways an opportunity to double the amount of valuable retail space in their downtown buildings (Byers 1998 159).

I used to work in downtown Minneapolis, and the skyways were great in the winter. To be able to take a walk and get lunch without having to bundle up in coat, hat, mittens, scarf, etc. was almost like living in a warm climate...and that's no small thing during a long, dark Mpls winter. (via ★than)