Asides

Awesome movie poster mashups - sadly a small list :)

In celebration of Pi Day (3-14), here’s a neat little article on pi, and how it helped Archimedes to develop a method still in use today: Aside from laying the groundwork for calculus, Archimedes taught us the power of approximation and iteration. He bootstrapped a good estimate into a better one, using more and more straight pieces to approximate a curved object with increasing accuracy. More than two millennia later, this strategy matured into the modern field of “numerical analysis.” ...

Holy crap, this is a scary theory - a known structural defect on 777s could have slowly caused decompression that disoriented and then left passengers on MH370 unconscious: A structural failure related to the flaw could not only have led to a slow decompression that left the 239 passengers and crew on the missing flight unconscious, it would also have disabled satellite communications, including the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS), which transmits data of the plane’s location automatically. ...

The scale of the solar system if the moon were a pixel. Lovely and with funny comments littered throughout the journey. This reminds me of the Douglas Adams’ quote about space: “Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.” it goes on from there, but of course I shouldn’t have to tell you how much I love the Hitchhiker’s Guide. ...

However this guy does it, each 6 seconds of Vine video turns into a delight: