Pooter!

I don’t wide stance, I tall stance.

jffcrmr:

Finally found the perfect iPad case. (at Toys”R”Us / Babies”R”Us)

Iowa cornfield in winter.

nevver:

Does IBM know that HAL is psychotic? Letters of Note

parislemon:

caro:

I love this. But I’m also hopeful for the day that I see a liquor campaign that uses such hilarious wit to market to women rather than just bros. 

For what it’s worth, the women I know who are whiskey drinkers tend to be affluent, work in fields with a high degree of socialization like advertising and finance (e.g. many opportunities to exhibit their drink preferences around equally affluent colleagues), and are willing to pay up for the good stuff. And there are probably plenty more women out there who are potentially avid whiskey drinkers, but who have never had any reason to think good whiskey is really any better than the stuff poured into a row of a dozen shot glasses at college parties (for example, uh, Jim Beam) or that there’s any reason to drink it for responsible enjoyment rather than getting smashed.

Copy that conveyed a message of “not your little brother’s whiskey” could go a long way. I may be saying this because my 22-year-old brother tried the delicious, piney artisan whiskey I’d bought for post-Thanksgiving dinner and thought it was disgusting and asked if I had any Jågermeister.

On an encouraging note, Sia Scotch hit its goal on Kickstarter.

“And ordered merlot.”

But of course they are living in a science fiction land of ahistoricity. Like, Jesus drank an Imperial Stout at the Last Supper.

(Source: mtrigaux)

dbreunig:

The above timeline of American atomic bomb tests, from a 1975 Scientific American article written by Herbert York and annotated by Alex Wellerstein, excellently communicates the huge difference in destructive power between fission and fusion bombs. Compare Mike, the first fusion bomb, to the hybrid approaches Item and George, which were stellar yields for their day.

Expressing the destructive power of a fusion bomb is a hard task. The average audience has no benchmark experiences with which to compare the yield of a bomb. Additionally, the challenge in telling the story of the fusion bomb is not only to show its hugeness, but to express the unprecedented nature of its size. Mike was an explosion without compare that shocked all involved.

Scientific American’s visualization is good, but my favorite entrant is the following passage from John McPhee’s examination of our nuclear history The Curve of Binding Energy in which he describes the Mike test:

Mike was placed in a building with metal siding which had been constructed for the purpose on an island called Elugelab, in the northern sector of the atoll. After Mike exploded, nothing whatever remained where the island had been but seawater. The island had disappeared from the earth. The yield of the Hiroshima bomb had been thirteen kilotons. The theoretical expectation for Mike was a few thousand kilotons—a few megatons. The fireball spread so far and fast that it terrified observers who had seen many tests before. The explosion, in the words of Ted Taylor, who was not there, “was so huge, so brutal—as if things had gone too far. When the heat reached the observers, it stayed and stayed, not for seconds but for minutes.” The yield of the bomb was ten megatons. It so unnerved Norris Bradbury, the Los Alamos director, that for a brief time he wondered if the people at Eniwetok should somehow try to conceal from their colleagues back in New Mexico the magnitude of what happened.

The scene of weathered nuclear observers, used to a few seconds of heat, holding the breath as the heat washed over them for minutes has always haunted me. At what point do you think they wondered if it would ever stop?

What about Tsar Bomba?

drueisms:

The platypus is believed to be the the earliest relative of modern mammals. Recent research leads scientists to believe early Platypuses initially evolved some 112 million years ago, well before the extinction of the dinosaurs.