Syndicated from Dave Pell's NextDraft email newsletter.

For a better afternoon, open a tab and let the music from this video play forever. (via ★acoleman)

Photographers Stephanie Bassos and Timothy Burkhart are working together on a project called People vs. Places.

This double exposure project allows us to step back from having full control of the image making process and trust in one another while allowing coincidences to happen naturally on film. Stephanie exposes a full roll of 35mm film of only "people," and Timothy reloads the film again into the same camera, to imprint only "places" and locations to the same roll. These images are all the end result of our ongoing series and are unedited negatives straight from the camera.

Many of the images are unremarkable but every once in awhile, boom:

(via co.design)

(via @ptak)

To create the piece, Penone removed the outer rings of the tree to reveal the younger tree within. (via ★spavis)

Of course, this is how you really pronounce Laphroaig, courtesy of Pronunciation Manual.

(via @benhammersley)

How that happened is an interesting story.

The sixteen scarves that Kermit has designed for Hermès represent three decades of work. Kermit takes six months to a year to design each one, depending on the intricacy of the image and the research required. When he finally arrives at a finished composition, he paints it onto a ninety-by-ninety-centimeter square of watercolor paper, the same size as the scarves, and sends it by FedEx to Hermès in Paris. After the design atelier there approves it, it moves on to the production facility in Lyon, where each color in the painting is traced onto ninety-centimeter-square slides and, in turn, each slide is etched onto a silk screen. That is to say, every color requires its own screen, and because Kermit's work is both so colorful and so intricate, his scarves are some of the most laborious to print. They are also some of the most beloved. T. Boone Pickens's wife, Madeleine, and Chase Bank executive Elaine Agather are said to be huge collectors. And while there are thousands of scarves designed by Kermit in the world, they are so treasured that few are ever available for purchase at any given time, and the handful that do make it to eBay sell for $800 or $900. An employee of the Hermès store in Houston told me that when a new design of Kermit's is announced, it usually sells out before it even hits the floor.

(via @youngna)

It feels like an honor. We get the honor of building things that a billion people use. I mean, there's no core need. It isn't a core human need to use Facebook. It's a core human need to stay connected with the people you care about. The need to open up and connect is such a deep part of what makes us human. Being in a position where we are the company--or one of the companies--that can play a role in delivering that service is just this ... it's an honor.

The interviewers also asked about how Facebook gets its next billion users and, while Zuckerberg demurred somewhat, Quartz had a look at the version of FB designed for countries without wide smartphone adoption. It runs on WAP and is called Facebook Zero (just like Coke Zero, OMG). Users of the text-only FB are not charged for the data used, and the article posits FB is making the gateway drug argument to the telecoms:

This is because, for the telecoms networks, free Facebook represents a solution to an ever-present existential threat. Their first subscribers were relatively rich; the ones they are gaining now are ever poorer. So the revenue per user is shrinking. At the same time, the amount of data being pushed through their networks is increasing, and customers are demanding faster connection speeds, pushing up the cost of infrastructure. The networks are looking for ways to get more users, and make more money from each one of them.

"The fact is that Facebook has made a compelling argument to operators, which is 'You should give Facebook away [to consumers] for free,'" says Eagle. "I don't know how Facebook is making that case, but if I were Facebook, the argument I'd make is that Facebook is one of the most addictive things on the internet. If you have someone try out Facebook for the first time, it might lead them to want to try the rest of the web, and a lot of these other services they can charge for."

This doesn't necessarily jive with something Zuckerberg said in the Businessweek interview, and has said numerous times in the past. Facebook doesn't want to be the gateway drug to the internet, it wants to be the internet.

The whole vision around News Feed was it should be like a newspaper and shouldn't just be a list of posts your friends are making. I mean we should be able to really show you interesting trends and things that are happening. There are already trillions of connections between friend requests and all the content that's being pushed into the system. At some point, that will start to be a better map of how you navigate the Web than the traditional link structure of the Web. I think there's an opportunity to really build something interesting there.

The website for now is just a place mark as financing has yet to be completed. I'm cautiously optimistic that this can happen soon and couldn't be happier with the filmmakers that have committed to the project so far.

But it's been more than two years since then so I am somewhat less than cautiously optimistic. :( In the meantine, Carruth worked on some effects for the time travel sequences in Looper.

The logic is quite neat. Columbus Day is about one guy and the (actually untrue) claim that he was the first person to discover America. Inherently, that's pretty Euro-centric, which is a big part of why it sits awkwardly in a pluralistic country. But exploration is inclusive. The ancestors of Native Hawaiians were explorers who crossed the ocean. The ancestors of Native Americans explored their way across the Bering land bridge and then explored two whole continents. If you look at the history of America, you can see a history of exploration done by many different people, from many different backgrounds. Sometimes we're talking about literal, physical exploration. Other times, the exploring is done in a lab. Or in space. But the point is clear: This country was built on explorers. And it needs explorers for the future.

If you want to help out, sign this petition to Congress or this one to the White House.

"Oh, deer." "That skateboarder deerly missed an accident." "Too bad the skateboarder couldn't deer out of the way." "Did you deer about the downhill skateboarder?" "Deer clear of animals on the track." "Deer we go again!" "No ideer where that came from." "Nothing to fear, but deer itself." "Skateboarder should have been in a lower deer." "Deered up and ready to go." "Deer force of will." "Happy new deer." (via @carveslayer)

(via @heyitsgarrett)

Saw one of the coolest things ever tonight: a meteor burning up in the lower atmosphere. Super bright, exploded at the end like a firework.

It turned out that "one of the coolest things ever" wasn't hyperbole. You see, earlier that day over the UK, a meteor streaked across the sky for about 50 seconds:

And then the one I saw happened about two-and-a-half hours later. Spurred by this unlikely coincidence, mathematician Esko Lyytinen of the colorfully named Finnish Fireball Working Group of the Ursa Astronomical Association did some calculations and determined that the two events were actually the same meteor.

He believes a large body grazed the upper atmosphere, dipping to an altitude of 33 miles (53 km) over Ireland before escaping back to space. Because it arrived moving at only about 8 miles (13 km) per second, barely above Earth's escape velocity, it lingered for more than a minute as it crossed the sky. (This explains why some witnesses mistook it for reentering spacecraft debris.)

Lyytinen says the brief atmospheric passage took its toll. As the meteoroid broke apart, its velocity dropped to just 5.7 miles (9.2 km) per second, too slow to make an escape back to space. Instead, it became a temporary satellite of Earth, looping completely around the globe before reentering the atmosphere -- this time for good. "It looks now that the fireball witnessed 155 minutes later in U.S. and Canada, may have been one fragment of the British fireball, most probably the biggest one," Lyytinen explains.

These earth-grazers are not common but they do happen from time to time. But a visible Earth grazing meteor that enters the atmosphere twice? Unprecedented. So cool! (thx, alex)

The Clowns were baseball's answer to the Harlem Globetrotters. Players entertained the crowd with various comedic antics, including "shadowball", where they would go through a warm-up routine with no baseball. When the team joined the Negro American League, they dropped the "Ethiopian" moniker and played straight baseball.

(via @tcarmody)