As it turns out, there are 108 Taoist Heavens, 108 beads on a Catholic Rosary and 108 beads on a Buddhist Mala. Also, 108 is said to be the number that somehow unlocks the Zodiac calendar. The kicker, though, is this: there are 108 stitches on a baseball.
The Church Of Baseball By David Larson
In the American Embassy in the Soviet Union, installed in the Great Seal of the United States, was a secret, analogue bug that transmitted sound from inside the embassy without any electronics or batteries. Oh, and the it was invented by the same guy that made the Theremin instrument, Leon Theremin. Amazing.
The Thing, designed by Léon Theremin,[2] was very simple by today’s standards. It consisted of a tiny capacitive membrane connected to a small quarter-wavelength antenna; it had no power supply or active electronic components. The device, a passive cavity resonator, became active only when a radio signal of the correct frequency was sent to the device from an external transmitter. Sound waves caused the membrane to vibrate, which varied the capacitance “seen” by the antenna, which in turn modulated the radio waves that struck and were retransmitted by The Thing. A receiver demodulated the signal so that sound picked up by the microphone could be heard, just as an ordinary radio receiver demodulates radio signals and outputs sound.
Lets say you’ve got this awesome wordpress blog, and you’ve tuned the hell out of it, even though no one visits. You’re using w3-total-cache, nginx with fastcgi caching, the works. Unless your cache is primed, it’s just not as fast as it could be. This sucks on multiple levels, but mostly insofar as the googlebot ranks on performance and is most likely the first thing to load any given page on your site. How do you solve this problem?
Prime your cache.
Optimus Cache Prime is a tremendously handy little script that reads your sitemap.xml and will regularly prime your cache, loading each page in your sitemap.xml, keeping your cache hot and your blog speedy.
Octopus are truly the closest thing to alien intelligences that exists on this planet. If we ever do meet creatures from another world, the experience will be less like trying to communicate with someone from another country or even like trying to communicate with an elephant or a dolphin, and much more like trying to get inside the squishy, gelatinous head of an octopus.
from Scientist from an excellent discussion of Octopi.
The 2012 discretionary federal budget, in handy infographic format. Perfect when someone wants to shut down NPR to balance the budget, and you wonder, wait a second, would that even matter? The answer is no. No it wouldn’t.
Time Lapseof the Snowy Range Perseids Meteor Shower. by David Kingham.
You really get the sense that earth is hurtling through space at incredible speeds.
(Actually velocity of the earth through space is somewhere around 1 kilometer per second)
Hands down, Backwpup wins.
Supports WordPress network, backs up to multiple different endpoints (dropbox, s3, rackspace, ftp, filesystem, email), and most importantly backs up everything, files, uploads, themes and the whole database.
So full of win.
Fabian Oefner creates these arresting images by combining ferrofluids with watercolors. Magnetizing the ferrofluid forms channels along the magnetic field lines, pooling the colors in patterns that look much like psychedelic brains. Find out more about the project at itsnicethat.com.
FF Chartwell is a tool for easily creating graphs, disguised as a font. It utilizes OpenType to interpret and visualize the data. The data also remains editable, allowing for painless updates.
Unfortunately, webfonts are not supported. Aside from that, this is absolutely brilliant.
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