The Periodic Table of Beer Styles
Color, but minimally annotated
B&W but with detail
One important thing about the graphics is that they are laid out as actual periodic tables, which the wannabes miss — that a column’s elements should be related somehow. Here we have columns such as Wheat beers and Brown Ales and Bocks, and they generally get darker as you move down the column. Not haphazard groupings.
I’ve not managed to capture a ladybug in slo-mo. Pretty cool.
Tales From the World Before Yesterday: A Conversation with Jared Diamond
[A]s I got more experienced in New Guinea, I realized, every night I sleep out in New Guinea forest. At some time during the night, I hear the sound of a tree crashing down. And, you see tree falls in New Guinea forest, and I started to do the numbers. Suppose the chances of a dead tree crashing down on you the particular night that you sleep under it is only one in 1,000. But suppose you’re a New Guinean, who’s going to sleep every night in the forest, or spend 100 nights a year sleeping out in the forest. In the course of 10 years, you will have spent a thousand nights in the forest, and if you camp under dead trees, and each dead tree has a one in 1,000 chance of falling on you and killing you, you’re not going to die the first night, but in the course of 10 years, the odds are that you are going to die from sleeping under dead trees. If you’re going to do something repeatedly that each time has a very low chance of bringing disaster. But if you’re going to do it repeatedly, it will eventually catch up with you.
That incident affected me more than anything else, because I realized that in life, we encounter risks that each time the risk is very slight. But if you’re going to do it repeatedly, it will catch up with you.
He has a new book out, The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? which, given his prior work, I will probably read at some point.
Enjoy a hypnotic time-lapse video of a spider weaving its circular web
(also check out the video under the article body. It’s frikkin’ hilarious)
What Porcupines Can Teach Engineers
It doesn’t seem to make sense that a barbed quill would go in more easily than a smooth one. But Karp and his colleagues discovered that the barbs work just like the bumps on a serrated knife. The knife’s wavy blade concentrates force at the tips of the teeth, requiring less power overall to cut soft foods like tomatoes or bread.
Knife makers have known that for a long time. Now it turns out that North American porcupines know it, too.
Bristlecone pines, dendrochronology, and climate change.
The chronology tells a familiar tale about what is happening to the Earth’s climate. In 2005, a researcher from Arizona’s tree-ring lab named Matthew Salzer noticed an unusual trend in the most recent stretch of bristlecone tree rings. Over the past half century, bristlecones near the tree line have grown faster than in any 50-year period of the past 3,700 years, a shift that portends ‘an environmental change unprecedented in millennia,’ according to Salzer. As temperatures along the peaks warm, the bristlecones are fattening up, adding thick rings in every spring season. Initially there was hope that the trend was local to the White Mountains, but Salzer and his colleagues have found the same string of fat rings — the same warming — in three separate bristlecone habitats in the western US. This might sound like good news for the trees, but it most assuredly is not. Indeed, the thick new rings might be a prophecy of sorts, a foretelling of the trees’ extinction.
A periodic table of the elements redrawn according to the Google search popularity of each element. Poor Californium.
Forget apps and useless startups: These four African girls have created a pee-powered generator
14-year-olds Duro-Aina Adebola, Akindele Abiola, Faleke Oluwatoyin, and 15-year-old Bello Eniola have created a urine powered generator.
Synaesthesia and savant syndrome: are we all superhuman?
“There are numerous different kinds of synaesthesia,” Professor Brogaard began. “One of the most common forms is grapheme-colour synaesthesia, which is where letters or numbers give rise to specific colours. There are people who have so-called mirror-touch synaesthesia who experience the feeling of being touched when they see other people being touched. There are others who see colours when they taste something and some people even see colours when they feel fear.”
