Timelapse Montage from Mike Flores on Vimeo.

There are plenty of amazing time lapse videos. This is one. But when you see it paired with Hans Zimmer’s “Dream is collapsing”—from Inception’s soundtrack—it goes from amazingto holy-fuck-the-Universe-is-about-to-collapse-and-we-are-all-gonna-die amazing. Play the HD full screen. Use headphones.

This makes both my jaw drop and and fills me with envy – I wanted to make this but they beat me to it (next time!). [Via Gizmodo.]

On the other hand, you elected a black dude, proved the Internet as an incredibly powerful tool for freedom and democracy, birthed the private spaceflight industry, gave us the Large Hadron Collider, the Mars rovers, iPhones, Avatar*, and you killed Robert Novak.

What are the high and low moments for the naughts, in your opinion?

* I mention Avatar only because I expect it will get the credit for moving 3D into the mainstream.

This completely insane diagram details the metabolic processes that are happening at any given moment in your body. It’s what makes you work. (Via Reddit, where you’ll find a 50MB TIF version.)

Ever wanted X-ray specs or super-human vision? Chromoscope lets you explore our Galaxy (the Milky Way) and the distant Universe in a range of wavelengths from X-rays to the longest radio waves.

Your puny human visual sensors can detect only a small sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum. Use the handy Chromoscope slide-bar to see what you’re missing, and view the Universe as god does (or satellites, whatever).

And haven’t been for a decade.

Thursday marks the show’s two-decade anniversary – an event that serves as a reminder not only of the show’s extraordinary staying power, but also the extent to which it’s disappeared from the cultural conversation. While “The Family Guy” and “South Park” have kicked up controversy – tackling subjects like Scientology and abortion – “The Simpsons” seems to have aged from envelope-pushing misfit to grandfatherly institution. But as John Ortved argues in “The Simpsons: An Uncensored, Unauthorized History,” an oral history of the show’s tumultuous rise and creative demise, the “Simpsons’” legacy continues to be felt everywhere from ”Wall-E” to Barack Obama’s speechwriting.

Another year has come and gone, and as always, we’re taking a moment to look back at the happenings of 2009—the people, events and memories that made this year unique. Each year, we examine the billions of queries that people around the world have typed into Google search to discover the zeitgeist—the spirit of the times. As we welcome the new year, we hope you enjoy this glimpse at the past.

Lots of great list and chart porn inside.

Bread, wine, brains. (Clusterflock via Daring Fireball.)

The pace was intense, and I loved it. Finally, someone was challenging me – keeping me in over my head – encouraging and expecting me to pull myself up, quickly.  I was learning so fast, it had the adrenaline of sports or a video game.  A two-way game of catch, he tossed every fact back at me and made me prove I got it.

In our three-hour lesson that morning, he taught me a full semester of Berklee’s harmony courses.  In our next four lessons, he taught me the next four semesters of harmony and arranging requirements.

[...]

Kimo’s high expectations set a new pace for me.  He taught me “the standard pace is for chumps” – that the system is designed so anyone can keep up.  If you’re more driven than “just anyone” – you can do so much more than anyone expects.  And this applies to ALL of life – not just school.

(Via Hacker News.)

“Michael Steele was a good attempt at finding a new kind of face for the party. So was Bobby Jindal. But in the end they just didn’t represent the Republican ideals as well as a 100-year-old dead man.”