Mad Quickies: Vintage Holiday Weirdness; Star Wars Snowflakes; Colossal Bests; Blue Morpho and More!
You guys! Put down that cookie sheet/stocking/dreidel/gift wrap and pour yourself a tasty glühwein/hot cider/Irish coffee/Mad Elf and take five to surf and recharge with this little list of links. HAPPY HOLIDAYS with the merry and the jolly, everyone!
- As an undergrad history student, Greg Jenner decided to do his dissertation on Weird Victorian Xmas Cards. What you see here is culled from 800 Christmas cards in York’s Castle Museum Archive. {hat tip to Iszi}
- If you get a kick out of random data viz like I do, then dig this: The Most-Searched Artists in the US, According to eBay. [thanks to Brian G.}
- Holy awesome overload, Batman! This delicious, chock-full-of-info-and-image goodness is sur to make you late for whatever get together you’ve to planned. And you won’t care. It’s A Colossal Year: The Top 12 Articles on Colossal in 2014.
- Make your own ‘Star Wars’ snowflakes. Downloadable templates for each of the seven designs, natch. {via Daniela}
- Magician Adam Wilber shows you how to shoot great balls of fire from your hands.
- Maria Popova curated her list of the 14 best books of 2014, describing the grouping: “From the origin of the universe to the unusual stories behind people’s tattoos, by way of secular spirituality, the hummingbird effect, and Werner Herzog.
- Your mind-blowing moment for the day: Researchers Create Shapes In The Air Using Ultrasound.
- Seasonal Pinterest find: Weird vintage Christmas.
- GINGERBREAD ENTERPRISE!
- BONUS: Finally a forecast page that is easy to read! Minimalist weather site.
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From Deep Look/KQED…
What Gives the Morpho Butterfly Its Magnificent Blue?
{via Anne S.}
from the page
What does it mean to be blue? The wings of a Morpho butterfly are some of the most brilliant structures in nature, and yet they contain no blue pigment — they harness the physics of light at the nanoscale. Learn more about these butterflies at KQED.
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You may ask yourself:
What happens when you saw a rubber ball in half?
{via Kim R.}
from the page
Why start filming halfway through? – You might not expect it, but sawing through that thing was hard! To begin with, I was the one sawing through it and it took about 10-15 minutes to get it to that stage. After cool stuff started happening, my father took over with the saw and I decided to go get a camera to film it, although we had no idea what was actually about to happen.
Why cut it in half? – We’d built this elastic band ball together over the course of about a year, buying big bags of elastic bands every so often and just slowly adding them all onto the ball. Eventually, we got bored of it and it was also getting quite difficult to find elastic bands that could still make it all the way round so we stopped expanding it and it got left under a table for about a year. After a while, the elastic on the outer layers got frayed and started snapping by itself, so every day there’d be a few more snapped elastic bands on the floor. We decided to get rid of it, and I suggested cutting it in half somehow.
Why are you wearing a glove on the wrong hand? – To be honest with you, we filmed this almost a year and a half ago and I don’t actually remember why. We probably had a good reason.
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Featured image is by Arthur Thiele.
Featured mouse is by Gemma Correll.
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