The 50 U.S. states as a heart. The 50 U.S states as a skull. They should get together and make a t-shirt with one on the front and the other on the back.

Fascinating examination of some Victoria’s Secret photoshopping. This follow-up comment provides even more information.

This one might be the graphic of the year for me. National Geographic has a brilliant visualization of healthcare spending, life expectancy, and doctor visits per country. Here’s a taste, but you gotta click through to the full version to find the US on there (the red line below should give you some idea):

Sigh!

Update: Here’s Andrew Gelman’s version.

Ooh, check the Shutter Island trailer! Martin Scorsese directs a horror movie with Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Emily Mortimer, and Max von Sydow.

Alma is a terrific short film by Pixar animator Rodrigo Blaas, available on Vimeo for a limited time (I don’t know how long, catch it now). (via waxy)

Just in case you were being productive in the holiday run-up: Pulsus.

I use Remember the Milk to manage my to-do lists. It rocks, and includes great keyboard shortcuts. Two odd ones though (from a Windows perspective) are “r” to rename, and CTRL-SHIFT-slash to “Find.” I want to use F2 to rename, and CTRL-F to find (it’s okay that this would overrides Firefox’s built-in find shortcut, because when I’m on the RTM site, I want to do an RTM find).

Enter AutoHotkey. Here’s a simple script that does a remapping, just for RTM windows:

pre.. #IfWinActive Remember The Milk
F2::r
^f::^+/

Love AHK (and RTM).

Richard Dawkins has a new evolution article up at New Statesman, Accidents of Life. I always enjoy his retina riffs:

Historical accidents of this sort are rife, contrasting with the illusion of good design to provide some of our most convincing evidence that evolution happened. Sometimes the legacy of history goes beyond arbitrary accidents, and spills over into downright poor design. The vertebrate retina is installed backwards, facing away from the light, which perforce has to pass through a carpet of nerves on their way to the “blind spot” where they dive through the retina, bound for the brain. In spite of this we see tolerably well, because natural selection is good at cleaning up after its bodges. But an engineer who produced such a travesty of design would be fired instantly. The retina is a legacy of remote history.

The COP15 logo (United Nations Climate Change Conference) is terrific. It was built with a program that adds “dynamic, real-time movement to the logo and takes the rigid grid of the logo and animates it with a series of parameters like flocking and flow fields.” I’d embed it, but the videos look better in context.

My kids will love some of these. Top 10 quirky science tricks for Christmas parties:

We've done the candle one before, use a candle snuffer. You can get a good six-inch jump if there's no turbulence and you get a nice smooth stream of smoke off the extinguished candle.

Big trailer day! New ones up for Iron Man 2 (can’t wait, despite almost guaranteed sequelitis), Clash of the Titans (really, remake? and check the terrible beard on Liam Neeson), and Alice in Wonderland (ahh, not a straight retelling, very interesting). (via twitch)

Oh man, I wish I could do my cooking life over, with this knowledge in hand: whether or not the food sticks to your stainless steel pan is a matter of proper preheating. Bonus: you will learn how water can roll around on a hot pan without vaporizing instantly.