Totally insane: we might be living in a giant cosmic hologram. Staggering. Read the whole thing. And I thought the discovery of the quantum physics underlying photosynthesis was mind-blowing.

If Filmmakers Directed the Super Bowl. QT’s is the one I’d most want to watch.

Love this powerful seatbelt commercial from the Sussex Safer Roads Partnership. (thx alec)

The discredited 1998 paper linking the MMR vaccine and autism has been retracted by The Lancet. Lead author Andrew Wakefield sounds like a winner on so many levels:

On another occasion, at his own son’s birthday party in 1999, he took blood from children who were there as guests and paid them each £5 for agreeing to this. He was accused by the panel of showing “callous disregard for the distress and pain that you knew, or ought to have known, the children would suffer.”

Update: Why it won’t help.

Richard Feynman on “why” (and magnetism, and why ice is slippery, and more). I could watch Feynman videos all day. (via kottke)

Terry Pratchett is hoping he can die on his own terms:

And so I have vowed that rather than let Alzheimer’s take me, I would take it. I would live my life as ever to the full and die, before the disease mounted its last attack, in my own home, in a chair on the lawn, with a brandy in my hand to wash down whatever modern version of the Brompton Cocktail some helpful medic could supply. And with Thomas Tallis on my iPod, I would shake hands with Death.

I hope for his sake that he can. Everybody should be allowed to opt out early, stigma-free, legal-entanglement-free.

Really looking forward to watching Steven Strogatz’s math series unfold:

Crazy as it sounds, over the next several weeks I’m going to try to do something close to that. I’ll be writing about the elements of mathematics, from pre-school to grad school, for anyone out there who’d like to have a second chance at the subject — but this time from an adult perspective. It’s not intended to be remedial. The goal is to give you a better feeling for what math is all about and why it’s so enthralling to those who get it.

So, let’s begin with pre-school…

He then cites a Sesame Street video. Good man.

P.S. If you want to subscribe to just Strogatz’s stuff, I couldn’t find a separate author feed at the NYT, so I created a Yahoo pipe of his posts.

Oh what the hell, everybody else is writing about it. Here are the best iPad pieces I’ve read:

• Why the iPad may be just what we need for Digital Inclusion
• Is the iPad the harbinger of doom for personal computing?
• Old World vs. New World Computing
• Stephen Fry’s total over-the-top infectious rave

Lost meets 24: the crash of flight 815 in realtime:

Harvey Weinstein tells Errol Morris he’s boring. I’d excerpt it, but I think that would detract from a full read-through. I guess there’s no harm in putting up the opening paragraph: “Dear Errol: Heard your NPR interview and you were boring. You couldn’t have dragged me to see THE THIN BLUE LINE if my life depended on it.”

Readability gets even better, adding Typekit support. I like Style=Athelas, Size=Medium, Margin=Wide.

Love the Gorilla Productions Muhammad Ali Tribute:

(via ross)

Who better to review Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind than Garry Kasparov? I found his thoughts on human/computer “partnership” matches particularly fascinating.

Wow, I’d love to have the skills to pull off something like this: how to make a $170 sewing machine totally awesome.

So far my two favorite charts from FlowingData’s Data Underload category are Little Things and Bed Head.

Had to post this for the Deadwood connection: Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency letterhead.

Christopher Hitchens on the word “like.” Geoffrey Nunberg beat him to the bunch by like nine years.

Here’s a great Slowpoke strip from 2006 that is painfully relevant today.

This is the Only Level. Totally fantastic. It doesn’t look like much, but so addictive. It took me 18 minutes and 14 seconds to complete, with 122 deaths. Don’t read any instructions, just see if you can figure it out.

The parkour Flash game: Mirror’s Edge 2D. Great body motion and physics.