A huge list of movies that are available to watch for free, online.
(openculture)

A billion stars revealed
Astronomers have today released a picture containing more than one billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy. It combines data from two near-infrared¹ telescopes – the UK Infrared Telescope (UKIRT) in Hawaii and the VISTA telescope in Chile ... The full image contains 150 billion pixels, and the detail it contains is only revealed by the three zoom levels, centred on G305, a large and complex star-formation region: the innermost zoom covers a tiny fraction of the full image, but still contains more than ten thousand stars.

America, you should be mad as hell about this (businessinsider)
An intuitive, statistical look at us and them.

The Hobbit production video blog

To conclude, the best way to mitigate interventionism is to ration the supply of information, as naturalistically as possible. This is hard to accept in the age of the internet. It has been very hard for me to explain that the more data you get, the less you know what’s going on, and the more iatrogenics you will cause.
from Nassim Taleb's forthcoming book about the diminishing value, and eventual harm, of too much information.

InstaCRT is brilliant
Take a digital photo, it gets sent to Stockholm to be photographed off of a CRT screen, and sent back to you.
youtube of how it works

Peter Brings the Shadows to Life 
A beautiful little piece of skateboard film.

 115MPH Superbus is just plain ridiculous

Slinky on a treadmill.  That is all.

A Brief History of John Baldessari, narrated by Tom Waits

Martin Grover's paintings of old 45s (via thingsmagazine)

Making a handmade cigar

Bricolo mechanical music system (w/vid)

A Russian satellite has taken the most detailed picture of earth ever captured, at 121 Megapixels

Recursive Drawing - a very cool in-browser drawing app that allows you to construct fairly complex fractals by recursively building on basic shapes.  Video tutorial is recommended.

Outer Limits Trading Cards are pretty great, and the very brief captions make the pictures even better.
And here is an interview with the circa 1964 editor of Topps who was responsible for releasing them.

Paul Gravett interviews R. Crumb
It was only later that I discovered bit by bit first the world of old-time illustration, I am very interested in that. And only fringely interested in most fine art. I got to liking those German guys like Dix and Grosz and I liked Salvador Dalí and other surrealist stuff like that. I like a lot of Outsider Art, primitive and strange stuff by crazy people. The thing about the fine art world is they have this pyramid, this hierarchy, and it’s very rigid. It’s breaking down a little bit but it’s according to how much money you can get for something. I don’t buy into that. I had zero interest in abstract expressionism, starting with the post-war American artists.

A Nation of Spoiled Brats (Foreign Policy Review)
Well, there are two types of decline. The first is relative economic decline, and I think this should be uncontroversial. Funnily enough, it isn't yet fully uncontroversial, but it should be: namely, that America's share of the global economy is diluting. In 2000, America had about 31 percent of the global economy, so just under a third. And by 2010 it was down to 23.5 percent, just under a quarter. That is a remarkable shift. So relative economic decline shouldn't be something we debate too much because it's happening and it's going to continue to happen. And I think the U.S. share would be likely to fall to a little more than a sixth in the next decade or so, unless there are dramatic changes in the pattern and distribution of global growth.

The US standard of Living has fallen more than 50% since 40 years ago. (the street)
"On several occasions, I have glibly referred to how it now takes two spouses working to equal the wages of a one-income family of 40 years ago. Unfortunately, that is now an understatement. In fact, Western wages have plummeted so low that a two-income family is now (on average) 15% poorer than a one-income family of 40 years ago."

World population density visualizer