It’s a little heavy on the movie Easter Eggs but if you ever wanted to find some interesting stuff in your favorite software — this is a good place to start.

Boone gets snoozy when the desk light warms up his little brain too fast. This is his day job: Kitty Wigs!

Check out the excellent homage video. 

Everyone’s favorite fictional band (no, not that one) plays an awesome live show – including such hits as Because, It’s Midnite and Trogdor.

      
This month’s National Geographic has a beautifully-written feature on
the state-of-the-art in biomimetics, the science and art of looking to
nature for design inspiration. The article is accompanied by
mind-blowing photographs, and fortunately the whole package is
available online, with video too. Seen here is an invention inspired by
the way burrs stuck to a dog’s fur… Velcro! From National Geographic:

A research fellow at the Natural History Museum in London
and at the University of Sydney, Parker is a leading proponent of
biomimetics–applying designs from nature to solve problems in
engineering, materials science, medicine, and other fields. He has
investigated iridescence in butterflies and beetles and antireflective
coatings in moth eyes–studies that have led to brighter screens for
cellular phones and an anticounterfeiting technique so secret he can’t
say which company is behind it. He is working with Procter & Gamble
and Yves Saint Laurent to make cosmetics that mimic the natural sheen
of diatoms, and with the British Ministry of Defense to emulate their
water-repellent properties. He even draws inspiration from nature’s
past: On the eye of a 45-million-year-old fly trapped in amber he saw
in a museum in Warsaw, Poland, he noticed microscopic corrugations that
reduced light reflection. They are now being built into solar panels.

Parker’s work is only a small part of an increasingly
vigorous, global biomimetics movement. Engineers in Bath, England, and
West Chester, Pennsylvania, are pondering the bumps on the leading
edges of humpback whale flukes to learn how to make airplane wings for
more agile flight. In Berlin, Germany, the fingerlike primary feathers
of raptors are inspiring engineers to develop wings that change shape
aloft to reduce drag and increase fuel efficiency. Architects in
Zimbabwe are studying how termites regulate temperature, humidity, and
airflow in their mounds in order to build more comfortable buildings,
while Japanese medical researchers are reducing the pain of an
injection by using hypodermic needles edged with tiny serrations, like
those on a mosquito’s proboscis, minimizing nerve stimulation.

Katz-Bassett has been working on a project called Hubble, a system that
apparently is able to track what he refers to as information black
holes. These are situations where a path between two computers does
exist, but messages – a request to visit a Web site or an outgoing
e-mail – get lost along the way. Katz-Bassett has published a Hubble
map that enables users to monitor such black holes worldwide or simply
type in a network address to check its status.

To determine a network status, Hubble sends test messages “around
the world” to look for computers that can be reached from some but not
the entire Internet, a situation that is described as “partial
reachability”. Katz-Bassett said that short communication blips are
ignored. However, if a problem surfaces in two consecutive 15-minute
trials, it is listed as a “problem”. The research team found that more
than 7% of computers worldwide experienced this type of error at least
once during a three-week period in fall of 2007.

The fifty greatest comedy sketches of all time from Nerve and IFC. All with video. Some highlights: SNL’s consumer probe & word association; Mr. Show’s pretaped call-in show, Upright Citizens Brigade’s ass pennies, The State’s porcupine racetrack, lots of Monty Python, some classics, and the inevitable winning sketch.

There’s no more sure-fire way to kill something’s intrinsic comedic
value than to try to examine what makes it funny. The minute you start
thinking, you stop laughing. So why, then, have Nerve and IFC.com
devoted an enormous amount of time, manpower, monetary resources,
server space and posh catered lunches to the pursuit of ranking the
boob tube’s finest sketch comedy offerings?
 

 

In part, we’re here because magical new technology
(*coughYouTubecough*) allows us to do more than just pontificate for
paragraphs on end — now we can pontificate for paragraphs on end and
provide audiovisual evidence to back up those pontifications. We
provide the context, share our thoughts and feelings, and let you
commence with the guffawing and, naturally, the disagreeing. After all,
the comedy sketch — short, sweet, completely silly or shot through with
social commentary — worms its way into the public mind like nothing
else, and has easily made the leap to the web when other forms have
faltered.
 

 

Any list is bound by the limitations set on it — consciously and
unconsciously — by its creators: we kept our 50 selections to stuff
that’s appeared on television by choice, and to what’s appeared in
English out of necessity. One must also bear in mind the availability
of material; who knows what comedic treasures are lost to us because
they simply don’t exist anymore?

If Rube Goldberg played pool, he’d set up trick shots like the gent in this video.

Remember Me.
A multimedia documentary about one family’s struggle to deal with the
loss of a parent. This series is the 2008 Pulitzer winner for feature
photography.

It’s kind of intense.

The Smithsonian’s Jules Verne Centennial site has a collection of a large number of high quality scans of original, engraved illustrations from Verne’s works. From the fantastic (interior of space vehicle, flying ship, spacewalking) and mundane (two dogs, a nice meal, elephant trying to break free from a hot-air balloon). And don’t forget to check out the portrait of Jules Verne and his many technological prophecies. For information about the publishing history of Jules Verne read this scholarly article by Terry Harpold about illustrations of Jules Verne stories, focusing on Le Superbe Orénoque. It also includes a wealth of illustrations. Finally, as a bonus, here’s a picture of the National Air and Space Museum’s scale model of the spacecraft Verne came up with for his De la Terre à la Lune.

Tevis Howard, a 2007 Brown University graduate and recent recipient of the Draper Richards Fellowship and the Rainer Arnhold Fellowship, is the 2005 Founder and Executive Director of
KOMAZA, a non-profit community-based
organization in Kenya. KOMAZA’s mission is to “end chronic poverty in
Kenya by promoting health, economic growth, education, and
infrastructure development” through a tree farming social enterprise. Partnering with the Tree Biotechnology Project, KOMAZA plants fast-growning, drought-tolerant Eucalyptus trees as a cash crop for rural, substinance farming communities.

In 2002, then 17-year-old Tevis Howard was recognized by Forbes ASAP magazine (which ceased publication in October 2002) as an ASAP Teenage All Star and won third place in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair for his research developing a novel treatment for multiple sclerosis. Declared to be a “prodigy” and a “whiz kid” early on, Tevis helped publish a report in 2002 on immunology and Malaria in Kenya. In 2006, Tevis won a Rhode Island competition for his KOMAZA business plan.