Informative Links

6 Things that Resemble the Death Star. The purpose of each thing is something other than destroying planets or making George Lucas wealthier.

Thinking Outside of the Toy Box: 4 Children's Gizmos That Inspired Scientific Breakthroughs. The best argument yet for letting people play while at work. (via Boing Boing)

Look Deep Into the Mind's Eye. A man who lost his ability to generate mental images didn't suffer any loss of skills, and gave neurologists an opportunity to study the remarkable resiliency of the brain.

6 Spectacularly Bad Ideas From History's Greatest Geniuses. To b fair, These men were the type who kept reaching for the stars until they finally hit a brick wall.

Popular Science has published its annual list of the ten worst jobs in science. You won't want to read this while eating.

Preparing for Passover, a scientist looks at the injunction to welcome and feed hungry strangers. Modern refugees aren't much different from wanderers of the past, so we are we so afraid of them?

A woman prepares doses of LSD on candy in a scene from the National Geographic Explorer episode called Inside LSD.

The Geek’s Guide To Getting Girls. A little insight into the human mating dance we call "spring break".

Awesome Dogs in Slow Motion

(via Urlesque)

6 Easter Traditions You Might Not Know

The sacred Christian holiday of Easter is celebrated in somewhat similar ways around the world, but there are some traditions from various regions that may be new to you, like fireworks, bonfires, and butter in this article I wrote for mental_floss.

Fun Links

The Top 100 April Fools Pranks and Gadgets. Look through here for inspiration, or maybe a warning!

A man is attacked by a swarm of ...butterflies. Oh, you think that would be nice? Watch and learn.

Arcade Aid is a game with 56 other games hidden in the graphic, and your mission is to identify them all. Expand your window horizontally to see all the possibilities.

As March Madness overlaps Passover, you might find the Ultimate Matzoh Ball Game a worthy distraction. Just click to launch the matzoh ball toward the basket, but be aware that the basket is constantly moving! (via Metafilter)

A Depressed Whale. I was waiting for the "blue whale" joke, but got something much better.

Did someone say cats were afraid of dogs? This cat knows how to put a dog in its place!

Avatar 2: The Sequel. See the trailer for the second film, with a totally original screenplay!

Here's how you say no to socialism.

Good Reads and Information

How the internet can be used to scare everyone even better than campfire stories. If this creeped you out, you're not the only one.

Scientists say they've identified a new human ancestor. The unnamed hominid species roamed as far as Siberia and may have coexisted with Neaderthals and humans. (via Boing Boing)

The Sexual Politics of Toilets. Men might laugh, but equality is not equity in comfort stations, and women get the short end of the stick. (via Metafilter)

Detecting Wine Fraud in the Nuclear Age. Scientists can detect a wine's vintage to within a year using methods to detect traces of radioactive carbon-14 released into the atmosphere by nuclear testing. (via Arbroath)

Art of the Steal: On the Trail of the World’s Most Ingenious Thief. If Hollywood made a movie about Gerald Blanchard, critics would call it "over the top and unbelievable."

Brave New World novelist Aldous Huxley died of cancer in 1963. His widow recounts his last days and the LSD he took to reconcile the knowledge of his coming death.

It turns out that science of fat intake and obesity is a lot more complicated than we thought. It's getting to where I can't even decide whether I want a jelly donut or a burrito.

The Lake Wobegon effect applied to Indian stereotypes. (via Metafilter)

Friday Fun Links

Earth Hour happens tomorrow. To get you into the mood to turn all your lights off for an hour, here's an interactive video controlled by a light switch. Flip it off and see what marvelous thins happen in the dark!

Peek into a nest with Molly the doting mother owl and her babies Max and Pattison on this live webcam. More eggs should be hatching any day!

A plastic bag with the voice of Werner Herzog goes on a quest to find its maker. You have to laugh, and maybe even cry, at the existential angst of an inanimate object with a not-so-subtle environmental message.

Han Solo gets the final piece of the Puzzle. It all makes sense now! Wait, no, it really doesn't.

Another reason you don't want a raccoon for a pet.

Other names people call a vagina. This is reader-generated, which explains the name in the largest font.

Alien vs. Pooh. Silliness ensues when Winnie the Pooh mistakes an alien egg for a honey pot. (via Buzzfeed)

Installing a vanity in ten easy steps. Except that home repairs are never as easy or as quick as it says on the tin.

Confused Lamb

With no sense of direction. (via b3ta)

9 Strange Periodic Tables

Like Venn diagrams and flowcharts, the periodic table of elements gives us a geeky form in which to sort and convey all kinds of information. In what has become a semi-annual series, here are more periodic tables put to interesting, but not necessarily elemental uses, in this list I posted at mental_floss.

Good Reads

25 Historical Photographs. A quick run through of the history of photography, as it were, from 1925 to 1972.

Suspending a student from school seems counterproductive to the mission of education at the least. It gets rid of troublemakers, but denies them the opportunity to become something else. (via Metafilter)

The 5 Creepiest Unsolved Crimes Nobody Can Explain. If this didn't have source links, you'd think these cases were urban legends.

The Most Depressing Children’s Books Ever Written. Some of these seem more like therapy for the authors than teaching aids for children.

KISS (Keep it simple, Stupid!) is more than just a political campaign strategy. Here are 8 Studies Demonstrating the Power of Simplicity covering different things we do every day.

An unemployed D.C. man is giving $10 a day away to different strangers to help foster kindness. Then he writes about the people he meets every day.

A strangely close look at the beep. Not a censored sound, but the beep sound itself.

NHS Choices: Behind the Headlines is a newsfeed that looks at medical science with no hype or agenda. Find out how the research was done and what the actual findings were before they were blown out of proportion. (via Metafilter)

The Blood Done Sign My Name

By the Beals Creek Baptist Church Choir. (via Everlasting Blort)

Fun Links

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was tailor-made for film adaptation, although Carroll had no way of knowing that in the 19th century! Here are ten film versions at which you can take a peek.

20 Moments In Strange Pet Walking. Even hyenas need their daily constitutional.

Programming Language Inventor or Serial Killer? Good luck if you think you can tell the difference.

Great Movies About Farting. Well, let's say they're great movie scenes, and they're only better with farts added.

"Weird" Al Yankovic's Home Movies, with appropriate narration. Funny, his childhood seems a bit "weirder" than mine.

What has this cat seen? Apparently something amazing that cannot be unseen.

Geeky Variations of "Dogs Playing Poker". It's hard to believe anyone could improve on the original, but any of these would look right at home in my office. (via Neatorama)

The Virtual Choir, composed of 185 singers who never sang together. All recorded separately but blended together in a YouTube video. (via Metafilter)

Turtle Treadmill

(via Arbroath)

Nuclear Quotes: The Crew of the Enola Gay

On August 6, 1945 the nuclear age began as the B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, Japan. Twelve men were on that flight. After the war, some chose to keep a low profile and others spoke out about their place in history. Almost all had something to say after the war, as you'll see in this article I wrote for mental_floss.

Good Reads and Information

Here's why it costs so much to eat foods that are good for us.

The Upside of Depression. The condition is so prevalent that its evolutionary benefit must outweigh the dysfunction, or at least that was so sometime in our history. (via Metafilter)

The ScienceBlogs Pi Day Bake-Off received 35 pie entries, which have been narrowed down to ten finalists. Not only are these "pi pies" decorated in a mathematically clever way, they look scrumptious!

The hardest logic puzzle ever. Here's a hint. (via Neatorama)

Top 10 Anti-Gay Activists Caught Being Gay. We don't care about your sex life, it's the hypocrisy that puts you in the spotlight. (via Gorilla Mask)

For years, Viacom paid some people to upload its entertainment material to YouTube and paid other people to get it taken down for copyright violation. This behavior might jeopardize Viacom's lawsuit against YouTube.

How to make potato chips in a microwave. Or if you are British, you can make potato crisps.

What do zombies mean? Maybe the fear of an out-of-control world, a metaphor for the oppressor-of-the-day, or maybe we just like to be scared by gross things.

High Flight

I loved hearing this when the TV station signed off in my childhood. I didn't get to stay up that late very often.

Fun and Funny Links

Tarzan learns to swing.

Headline of the week: Naked Swiss brothel fire man speaks of bum anonymity fear.

If World War II were fought on Facebook. It's the Cliff Notes version with 21st century slang. Whatever works.

This is not how you throw a bowling ball. In fact, this is the complete opposite of how you should bowl.

Manly Slang from the 19th Century. Shut your bone box, you saucebox, or my bunch of fives will give you a fizzing blinker. (via Boing Boing)

Go ahead and order from the menu -it's in English. I'll have the cowboy meat and a rurality salad, thank you.

This pianist improvises songs for and about the people he sees on Chatroulette. Brief NSFW language.

Once upon a time, astronauts were as famous as movie stars. NASA apparently wants to bring back those days with cinematic mission posters.

Alfred Hitchcock Cameos

He appeared in all of his films, although often in such a small role that he was hard to find. (via Neatorama)

Magnet Skills

Someone has obviously spent a lot of time playing with Buckyballs. Now everyone who has them will spend a lot of time trying to recreate the mad skills in this video. (via J-Walk Blog)

Baby Polar Bears

Polar bear cubs at the Munich Zoo get their first bath, in 1958. (via Arbroath)

Links for Fun

My Mom's on Facebook. A heavy metal song lamenting the privacy of the original students-only social networking site.

Christoph Neimann draws maps that illustrate concepts that aren't maps. It works so well, you know he had these in the back of his brain for some time.

The Icelandic Tattúínárdœla Saga (the Saga of the People of the Tattooine River Valley). In English, the story is better known as Star Wars. (via Metafilter)

7 Celebrities Who Had Badass Careers You Didn't Know About. I knew about Newton, but Chevy Chase and Tigger surprised me.

Franglais is the term for what happens when English speaker attempt to speak French when they don’t know it. Its rules are simple. Insert as many French words as you know into the sentence, fill in the rest with English, then speak it with absolute conviction. Made famous by Miles Kington. Try out a lesson yourself.

Forty-four years after he recorded the song we've come to know as Trolololo, Eduard Khil is offering to sing the song again, this time with lyrics!

Neil deGrasse Tyson receives hate mail from third graders. He may well deserve it, as the public face of the demotion of Pluto from a planet to a lesser body. (via Metafilter)

Can you really fit your whole body inside a giant balloon? Or rather, can you pull off the stunt the way it's supposed to be done?