If you've been following along, various politicians at all levels of the government have basically been kicking the can down the road when it comes to taking responsibility for the water crisis in Flint, MI.
[Michigan Governor Rick] Snyder and [Environmental Protection Administrator Gina] McCarthy were both asked, strongly and repeatedly, to resign. The two officials, for their part, blamed each other: The governor faulted the EPA for its slow and "ineffective" response, while McCarthy took aim at state officials for obfuscating the poor water quality. Both also suggested they weren't fully aware of the problem's scope until far too late.
Dave Pell from Nextdraft says:
This is a common refrain we've heard from national, state and local officials. We've had hearings, debates, and nationally televised town halls. What we don't have is a solution for the people bathing in bottled water. In times of war, we can get running water to the deserts of Iraq. But all we can get to Flint is politics as usual.
Also via Nextdraft, Erin Brockovich wrote about Flint and the other places around the country where similar things are happening.
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Mathematicians have calculated pi out to more than 13 trillion decimal places, a calculation that took 208 days. NASA's Marc Rayman explains that in order to send out probes and slingshot them accurately throughout the solar system, NASA needs to use only 15 decimal places, or 3.141592653589793. How precise are calculations with that number? This precise:
The most distant spacecraft from Earth is Voyager 1. It is about 12.5 billion miles away. Let's say we have a circle with a radius of exactly that size (or 25 billion miles in diameter) and we want to calculate the circumference, which is pi times the radius times 2. Using pi rounded to the 15th decimal, as I gave above, that comes out to a little more than 78 billion miles. We don't need to be concerned here with exactly what the value is (you can multiply it out if you like) but rather what the error in the value is by not using more digits of pi. In other words, by cutting pi off at the 15th decimal point, we would calculate a circumference for that circle that is very slightly off. It turns out that our calculated circumference of the 25 billion mile diameter circle would be wrong by 1.5 inches. Think about that. We have a circle more than 78 billion miles around, and our calculation of that distance would be off by perhaps less than the length of your little finger.
When was humanity's calculation of pi accurate enough for NASA? In 1424, Persian astronomer and mathematician Jamshid al-Kashi calculated pi to 17 digits.
Lomography has a list of the Top Five Iconic Female Photographers. I had never heard of Julia Margaret Cameron before -- you can check out some of her fantastic work here -- but Diane Arbus, Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange, and Vivian Maier are all favorites of mine. Here's a photograph from each:
There are some things that humans don't need to survive anymore still hanging around on our bodies, including unnecessary arm muscles and vestigial tail bones.
If you left the house with a lemon, some copper clips, some zinc nails, some wire, and steel wool but somehow forgot your matches, you can still start a fire. I imagine if you had a large enough lemon and enough wire and metal bits, you could also jumpstart a car or a human heart. (via @kathrynyu)
Curated by Zach Davenport, this Pinterest board features all sorts of different letterforms, from A to Z.
Jenna Close and Jon Held recently shot a short video profile of Bruce Gardner, who practices the Japanese art of hikaru dorodango...making shiny balls out of mud.
Ever since reading about them years ago, I've been making sand versions at the beach. No more excuses...I'm making a mud version this summer.
The PBS Ideas Channel talks to Brooklyn bar owner Ivy Mix about all the different kinds of glassware that cocktails are served in. The most interesting bits are about how factors other than taste influence how people enjoy drinks, as with wine. Men in particular seem to have a difficult time enjoying themselves with certain types of glassware and drink colors.
The latest video from Kurzgesagt is an explainer on antibiotics and superbugs (drug resistant bacteria).
What would you say if we told you that humanity is currently making a collaborative effort to engineer the perfect superbug, a bug that could kill hundreds of millions of people?
Even though I love watching videos of people who make things, you'd got to admit that many of them share an aesthetic that can get a little tiresome.
Nicky Case built a tool for simulating systems with emoji. You populate your world with things (represented by emoji), add a few rules about how those things interact, and boom, you've got yourself a little world. The default simulation is of a forest fire, but others have made simulations of predator/prey cycles, animal skin patterns, and epidemics. Try making your own here.
For the Captured project, prison inmates drew pictures of people they felt should be in jail instead, "the CEOs of companies destroying our environment, economy, and society". All 1000 books have sold out with the proceeds going to Bernie Sanders' campaign.
The common button or white mushroom, the crimini or brown mushroom, and the portobello mushroom are all the same species of mushroom.
Agaricus bisporus has increased in popularity in North America with the introduction of two brown strains, Portabella (sometimes also spelled portobello, portabello, or portobella) and Crimini. The three mushrooms you see to the right are all actually the same species. Portabella is a marketing name the mushroom industry came up with for more flavorful brown strains of Agaricus bisporus that are allowed to open to expose the mature gills with brown spores; crimini is actually the same brown strain that is not allowed to open before it is harvested.
See also the magical Brassica oleracea plant (cabbage, kale, broccoli, brussels sprouts, kohlrabi, collard greens, and cauliflower are all the same species of plant). (via @dunstan)
A team of researchers at Stanford built a small army of tiny robots that pulled a car across a concrete floor.
With careful consideration to robot gait, we demonstrate a team of 6 super strong microTug microrobots weighing 100 grams pulling the author's unmodified 3900lb (1800kg) car on polished concrete.
As any good tug of war team knows, the trick was to ensure that the tiny bots all pulled together at the same time. (via ny times)
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