“GQ profiled master counterfeiter Frank Bourassa. Bourassa made $200 million in nearly flawless fake US twenties in a barn in Canada, got caught, and, you get the feeling pretty early on in the piece, didn’t really do any time for the crime.
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The Spielberg Light
The backlight of a setting sun. A harsh artificial light coming through a window and the air full of dust. A t-rex peering through a car window lit by flashes of lightning. Steven Spielberg is a master of light
“The opening scenes from dozens of movies, including 2001, There Will Be Blood, Lost in Translation, Seven Samurai, and Star Wars.
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8-minute video - gorgeous Antarctica
“The New York Times profiles 29 year old Alex Honnold, who climbs sheer cliffs without using ropes.
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“This is silly and I loved it: someone took the clip from Aladdin when he and Jasmine sing A Whole New World while riding the magic carpet and dubbed realistic audio over it.”
Solving the Mystery of Link Imbalance: A Metastable Failure State at Scale
// interesting problem and problem-solving at FB scale
What happens when you shine world's strongest flashlight at world's brightest paint? Watch.
The Cranberries' searing acoustic version of "Zombie"
“When producing their claymation-style feature films or Wallace and Gromit & Shaun the Sheep animations, Aardman Animations goes through 100s of pounds of modeling clay”
Game Theory for Parents
Just a chicken playing an operatic aria on a piano keyboard
An Instagram feed of fun illustrated facts
Photography: the weird dreamy world of wet ground
Ray Kurzweil's Mind-Boggling Predictions for the Next 25 Years
University band pranks director by playing Mii Channel theme song instead of Bach
Inside Deep Dreams: How Google Made Its Computers Go Crazy
Classic superhero bodies photoshopped for believability
Lost at sea: the man who vanished for 14 months
I Asked 12 Scientists: What Is The One Fact Humanity Needs To Know?
The wonderful sounds of black ice skating
Recently frozen lake ice has some interesting properties: it looks completely black and makes some interesting sounds when you skate over it.
“In a lecture given in 1924, German mathematician David Hilbert introduced the idea of the paradox of the Grand Hotel, which might help you wrap your head around the concept of infinity.”
How The 'Kung Fu Fighting' Melody Came To Represent Asia
What happens to nearby streams and rivers when a tanker passes too quickly
Scientific Instruments of Yore
Stephen Erenburg takes you into his 30-year-long obsession with early scientific instruments
“Scientists have developed a new material that could give future robots shape-shifting capabilities akin to the T-1000 robot in Terminator 2”
43 lessons growing from $0 to $1+ million in revenue, twice
“Vice did a nice little feature on George Lois, the kind of 1960s big-egoed ad man on which Mad Men’s Don Draper was based.
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“RAIDS, a c.1974 Federal law enforcement training film, looks like a pilot for a cop show from that era”
These found-object charts are both quirky and insightful