A huge set of photos from Six Flags New Orleans - 6 years after the flood.

Spongiforma squarepantsii

Confessions of a Nuclear Power Safety Expert
Nuclear engineer Cesare Silvi studied unlikely outside threats to nuclear plants in Italy, which soured him on the energy source and caused him to go solar.

Paul Chojnowski wets and burns wood to create fire drawings.

Dear NYC, ticket the people parking in the bike lanes, not the bikers (slyt)

Yesterday, a huge explosion occurred on the Sun.

Madison Avenue declares American 'Mass Affluence Over


The top 10 percent of American households, the trade journal adds, now account for nearly half of all consumer spending, and a disproportionate share of that spending comes from the top 10’s upper reaches.
“Simply put,” sums up Ad Age’s David Hirschman, “a small plutocracy of wealthy elites drives a larger and larger share of total consumer spending and has outsize purchasing influence — particularly in categories such as technology, financial services, travel, automotive, apparel, and personal care.”

the Crossover

Happy 70th Birthday, Mr. Bob Dylan.
Apparently his site is struggling under the weight of the thousands of well-wishers this morning.

Hiroshima: the lost photographs (designobserver)

Go to China, Young Scientist (Washington Post)
"As public funding for science and technology shrinks, it just isn’t possible for people who want to become scientists in America to actually become scientists. So when a friend of mine who recently received her PhD in molecular biology asked for some career advice, the answer was easy. Go to China, I told her."

"Bad Education" (n+1)
Excellent article from n+1 examines the student loan bubble, in which banks and colleges take advantage of students to an extent never before seen in higher education.

"high and increasing college costs mean students need to take out more loans, more loans mean more securities lenders can package and sell, more selling means lenders can offer more loans with the capital they raise, which means colleges can continue to raise costs. The result is over $800 billion in outstanding student debt, over 30 percent of it securitized, and the federal government directly or indirectly on the hook for almost all of it."

The One-Percenters (by Roger Ebert)
"Day after day I read stories that make me angry. Wanton consumption is glorified. Corruption is rewarded. Ordinary people see their real income dropping, their houses sold out from under them, their pensions plundered, their unions legislated against, their health care still under attack. Yes, people in Wisconsin and Ohio have risen up to protest these realities, but why has there not been more outrage?"

"Don't do it"
the Nation on grad school.
Over the past twenty years, in other words—or really, over the past forty—what has happened in academia is what has happened throughout the American economy. Good, secure, well-paid positions—tenured appointments in the academy, union jobs on the factory floor—are being replaced by temporary, low-wage employment.

The Dying Sea (designobserver)
For decades now the Aral Sea — technically a lake, bordered by Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and once, at 26,000 square miles, the fourth largest on the planet — has been slowly dying; geologists estimate that it is now one-tenth its former size.  

 Star Wars Propaganda Posters

Humans kill more deer, antelope, raccoons, skunks, porcupines, bobcats and coyotes, among others, than any other cause, including predation, starvation, weather, disease and natural causes including age, accident or developmental defects.

What’s more, humans kill more large mammals in North America than all other causes put together.

The Possibilian (NewYorker)
Clocks offer at best a convenient fiction, he says. They imply that time ticks steadily, predictably forward, when our experience shows that it often does the opposite: it stretches and compresses, skips a beat and doubles back.
The brain is a remarkably capable chronometer for most purposes. It can track seconds, minutes, days, and weeks, set off alarms in the morning, at bedtime, on birthdays and anniversaries. Timing is so essential to our survival that it may be the most finely tuned of our senses. In lab tests, people can distinguish between sounds as little as five milliseconds apart, and our involuntary timing is even quicker. If you’re hiking through a jungle and a tiger growls in the underbrush, your brain will instantly home in on the sound by comparing when it reached each of your ears, and triangulating between the three points. The difference can be as little as nine-millionths of a second.

Man Unveils Interactive Toothpick Sculpture of San Francisco That Took 35 Years to Create

Scott Weaver's Rolling through the Bay from Learning Studio on Vimeo.
(vimeo, via thoughtcatalog)

The Management Myth (the Atlantic)