Beautifully done: Nature by Numbers.

The Big Picture’s 2010 Winter Paralympics photos are great.

Gary Lauder’s TED talk, in which he proposes a “take turns” traffic sign, is worth it for the cost analysis of how much a three-way stop costs alone. It’s also very short, even for TED, clocking in at 4:27:

The trailer for Predators is up. It will be nice to put all that vs. Aliens nonsense behind us. Good cast, good director. Guardedly optimistic.

This video of a fellow doing piano improv for random strangers on Chat Roulette made me happy. (via waxy)

This is great, Adam Savage (Mythbusters) on his passion for objects, and his making of two replicas, a dodo skeleton and the Maltese Falcon.

Absolutely hang in there for the whole thing, because the bit about the Chinese newspaper at the end really hammers home his dedication (not that you wouldn't be convinced of that earlier). I love watching people who love what they do.

Academy Award Winning Movie Trailer is deservedly making the rounds, but just in case you haven’t seen it yet:

Harmony is a fun sketching toy. No Flash, so it will work on your iPhone.

I hate burpees. Even at my fastest clip I do them pretty slowly (10 in about 25 seconds), and in no time at all I feel like quitting from exhaustion and misery. About two-and-a-half years ago I managed 100 in just under 10 minutes, and the experience so scarred me that I’ve only worked them half-heartedly and sporadically since.

So, in the spirit of working on your weaknesses, I resolved to make them a staple of my regime, and just managed to get my time back under 10:00. My approach was pretty simple: do 100 burpees every Tuesday and Thursday. For the first workout, set the Gymboss (cool, new 2009 version of an already-great timer!) to 2 minute intervals and do 10 burpees at the top of each interval, resting during the leftover time (yes, that’s a lot of rest!). Every workout, subtract 5 seconds from the intervals. So 1:55 intervals the next workout, then 1:50, etc. Once you get down to 1:00 intervals, and you do 10 at the top of each, you will get your 100 in under 10 minutes.

Here’s how it went for me (date, interval time, total time):

pre.. 1/14 2:00 18:40
1/19 1:55 17:11
1/21 1:50 16:21
1/26 1:45 15:12
1/28 1:40 14:44
2/02 1:35 14:10
2/04 1:30 13:55
2/09 1:25 13:06
2/11 1:20 12:25
2/16 1:15 QUIT (pulled shoulder at 17, bailed at 50)
2/23 1:15 12:06
2/25 1:10 11:02
3/04 1:05 QUIT (chickened out at 67)
3/05 1:05 10:15 (needed revenge)
3/09 1:00 09:51

This feels pretty close to my wall. The final 30 burpees of that set were ugly, ugly, ugly. Practically staggering to my feet to manage a 1-inch jump. Ugh. But I’ll take it. Not sure what I’ll do at my next workout. Shaving off another 5 seconds each round doesn’t sound like much, but it’d actually represent improving my time by more than 8 percent!

P.S. I know 10:00 isn’t an earth-shaking time. Remember this guy, who cranks out 100 in 5:00 and change Unreal.

Steven Strogatz’s series on math started off great and keeps getting better and better. His is the first explanation of imaginary numbers that I can fully relate to and understand. And not just on an abstract level; this is also the first time the real-world application has been apparent to me.

Maciej Cegłowski delves deeply into a fascinating question: if scurvy was solved in 1747, why did it plague Robert Falcon Scott’s 1911 expedition to the South Pole?

…in the second half of the nineteenth century, the cure for scurvy was lost. The story of how this happened is a striking demonstration of the problem of induction, and how progress in one field of study can lead to unintended steps backward in another.

An unfortunate series of accidents conspired with advances in technology to discredit the cure for scurvy. What had been a simple dietary deficiency became a subtle and unpredictable disease that could strike without warning. Over the course of fifty years, scurvy would return to torment not just Polar explorers, but thousands of infants born into wealthy European and American homes. And it would only be through blind luck that the actual cause of scurvy would be rediscovered, and vitamin C finally isolated, in 1932.

Watching a master at work is never boring. Even if said master is ironing a shirt: