[In case it needs to be said: I don't agree with every word of everything I link to. --L.]
- Leonard Nimoy Explains How Science Fiction Has Improved Since The 1950s [Leonard Nimoy]
- Star Trek and Fringe star Leonard Nimoy got his start in the 1952 serial Zombies Of The Stratosphere. We talked to him on a conference call the other day, and he raved about how science fiction has improved since then.
- The Doctor's Cuddliest Companions [Doctor Who]
- While this image, by artist Amy Mebberson, fails to include a few of the Doctor Who girls — like Martha Jones, Donna Noble, and Amy Pond — it's still the cutest representation of spacetime-traveling women you'll see today.
[I've linked this artwork before, but it's always worth a re-look. -L]
- In Soviet Russia, Pint-Sized Cyborgs Dance On Your Piano [Found Footage]
- In this 1946 Soviet animation sequence, a miniature robot sailor prances on a piano with a human piano player. Everything's cute and wholesome…until the lil' mechanical Gene Kelly's skin begins to fall off. Then the weirdness begins.
- The Periodic Table of Superpowers [Chart Porn]
- Have you ever wanted to be able to codify any particular hero's abilities in a short-but-mystifying series of letters? What luck! Mad genius Chris Sims has made it all possible with this Rosetta Stone of superpowers.
- A computer program that can detect sarcasm online [Mad Science]
- Sometimes it's hard to tell when somebody online is complimenting you or being a douche. That's why a group of Israeli researchers invented the "Semi-supervised Algorithm for Sarcasm Identification," a program that recognizes sarcastic statements with 77 percent precision.
[Blink. Blink. -L]
- Ask a Physicist: Would a gravitron work in deep space? [Askaphysicist]
- In this week's "Ask a Physicist" we tackle the question of whether you could spin yourself nauseous if the universe really were empty, and why so many scifi writers get artificial gravity wrong.
- Does Berlin Really Need a Mountain? [Bad Idea Of The Week]
- German architect Jakob Tigges thinks so — and he's designed a 1000-meter artificial peak called the Berg to fill the mountainous hole in his nation's identity.
[...I think they call this overcompensating. -L]
- Bat fellatio causes a scandal in academia [Scandal]
- Dylan Evans, a psychologist at University College Cork in Ireland, has been saddled with a two-year period of intensive monitoring and counselling after discussing a scientific paper with a colleague. The paper? "Fellatio in fruit bats prolongs copulation time".
- Statue built on a glacier spotted drifting through the Arctic ocean [Arctic Art]
- A group of Dutch artists built this gorgeous statue on an iceberg, knowing that the effects of climate change would break its icy pedestal off and send the statue floating through the Arctic. Now they're following it on its journey.
- Photos from an alternate dimension: pedestrian-friendly Los Angeles [Mad Urbanism]
- At the blog Narrow Streets: Los Angeles, self-proclaimed "urban planning geek" David Yoon takes the yawning boulevards of La-La Land and shrinks them to a scale on par with European cities…and manages to create an amazing change in perspective.
[OMG! <b>clicks so hard you hear a whoosh</b> -L]
- Get addicted to zombie action web series "Universal Dead" [Universal Dead]
- The first episode of web series Universal Dead, featuring DB Sweeney, Doug Jones, and Gary Graham, has been posted, and it's pretty damn cool. Watching will make you hunger for more.
[Also, DB Sweeney. -L]
- Thor's Hammer was discovered in 1964…in Quebec [Archaeology]
- In 1964, archaeologist Thomas E. Lee discovered a 10.8-foot tall, 4,000 pound stone cross on the Arnaud River in far northern Quebec. Lee dubbed this sculpture "Thor's Hammer," as he assumed the monolith was of Viking origin.
- An International Space Station-sized blot on the Sun [Space Porn]
- Photographer Thierry Legault captured this picture of the International Space Station and the shuttle Atlantis as their orbit took them in front of the sun — a transit that lasted all of a half a second.
- Old-school space playgrounds were awesome and/or death traps [Architecture]
- We recently posted the greatest intergalactic play-fort of all time. Here are some more spaced-out playplaces, replete with robots, spaceships, tetanus, fractured sternums, and lawsuits waiting to happen.
The Link(s): Wed, May 19th, 11am by Lee Salazar, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at leesalazar.com.