Reasoned Consideration

I think the Hubble UDF/XDF is probably  one of the most interesting images  in astronomy ... in short, every one of those dots/blobs is an entire galaxy , each with (on average) in the order of hundreds of millions of stars ... and the staggering part is that this image shows only an extremely tiny portion of our sky (much smaller than the visual area the Moon occupies). The implication is that the number of galaxies in our 'observable' sliver of the universe alone is probably in the hundreds of billions. So a crude low-ball estimate of the number of stars in the observable universe would probably then be ~15,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, give or take (and based on observations of our own galaxy so far from the Kepler observatory, if our galaxy is representative, it's probable that a large percentage of these stars have planets, though that is 'scientifically speculative'). So when you look at the night sky, consider that in each roughly Moon-sized a...

Hmm, which seems more likely - Apple's decision to disallow multi-level folder hierarchies for their new integrated cloud service*: (A) constitutes some sort of visionary forward-thinking insight into how the human brain processes information , or (B) is because difficulties inherent in implementing automatic change-tracking and conflict resolution across arbitrary folder hierarchies on that scale (and for a user base with many non-technically-literate users) might otherwise have become an implementation and user/support nightmare, and they probably just didn't have enough time to get a solid working implementation ready for "version 1". ("You want it to do what by when !?") I'm guessing it'll eventually be added in a subsequent version. * It's not actually a "new filesystem".

I like fossil fuels as much as the next guy, but: http://planetsave.com/2011/12/10/newest-epa-report-confirms-fracking-fluids-contaminating-pavillion-wyoming-water-supply/ ... the Environmental Protection Agency published a 120 page report today concluding that the process known as ‘fracking’ does indeed cause contamination of water supply ... In an initial sampling in 2008, EPA scientists found traces of hydrocarbons and other contaminants associated with frcking fluids. A second analysis in 2010 by federal health officials and the EPA confirmed these results, and residents were urged not to drink their water and to ventilate their homes while showering to prevent explosions from released methane gas. ... "The evidence keeps on coming in The government findings are sure to ignite more debate amongst Congress, but they are part of a mounting body of evidence that fracking is a source of chemical contamination for local water supplies. A previous study of fracking wel...

http://ideasillustrated.com/blog/2012/04/01/visualizing-english-word-origins/

(For the benefit of foreign readers: "Ek is tog 'n Bloubul" means to be a supporter of the 'Blue Bulls', a local provincial rugby team.)

The language selector from hell

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/mar/16/escape-north-korea-prison-camp His first memory is an execution. He walked with his mother to a wheat field, where guards had rounded up several thousand prisoners. The boy crawled between legs to the front row, where he saw guards tying a man  to a wooden pole. Shin In Geun was four years old, too young to understand the speech that came before that killing. At dozens of executions in years to come, he would listen to a guard telling the crowd that the prisoner about to die had been offered "redemption" through hard labour, but had rejected the generosity of the North Korean government. Guards stuffed pebbles into the prisoner's mouth, covered his head with a hood and shot him. In Camp 14, a prison for the political enemies of North Korea, assemblies of more than two inmates were forbidden, except for executions. Everyone had to attend them. The South Korean government estimates there are about 154,000 prisoners in North Kore...