I think ice skating at Rockefeller during the holidays looks more professional than this. But hey it was Lake Placid, NY, USA in 1932 and it was only the third Winter Olympics and what they were doing was probably groundbreaking stuff. There were only 4 sports! 14 events! 17 countries! 252 athletes! It’s like going up to the mountains with your friends.
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This is fun. NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover driving over dunes in Mars. Check out the view from the back, after going through all that sand.
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They are home to your favorite stories, your favorite songs, your favorite characters. You know so much about the Disney movies that you grew up with and the Pixar movies you love now but do you know where they’re all located? No worries, this map by artist Eowyn Smith will show you. England sure gets a lot of Disney love.
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Meet 007. Not Bond but the bird. But they might just be as smart as one another because the crow can use tools to figure out complex puzzles just as well as a spy. Here’s a crow taking one of the most complex tests for the animal mind ever created. If he succeeds, the BBC says it’ll be a world’s first. Spoiler: he figures it out.
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Master swordsmith Tony Swatton—who has crafted swords for about 200 feature films—has made the Halo Energy Sword. The end result is pretty damn neat, but my favorite thing about Swatton’s videos is the process.
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To be fair, if you put together every second of any movie in one image, that image would almost always look like the skin and scales of dinosaurs but I swear my mind is making me believe it even more for Jurassic Park. It also kind of looks like a Magic Eye picture and I half expect T-Rex to pop out and chase after me.
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Yeah, I can totally see it! How can you miss that? It’s right there. Clear eyes, full Earth, can’t miss. Wait, really? No of course not. Anyone who tells you that is either a liar or a hawk. Earth looks incredibly tiny up in that Martian sky. Sure, if you squint hard enough and fake it long enough, you’ll spot it the dot but it’s not unlike looking for dust on a wall.
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It’s a little unfair that giant states with tiny populations get so much room for such few people. I mean, especially since states on the east coast are living on top of each other in cramped borders. So let’s change that with a fun little thought exercise and a spin on how to look at the map of United States: what if we gave the biggest states by physical size to the states with the biggest population? New York would be the new California, Alaska is in New Jersey, Hawaii is part of the contiguous 48 and Texas stays Texas forever.
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This image by the Advanced Land Imager on NASA’s Earth Observing-1 shows the current state of the MetLife Stadium, in the Meadowlands, the site for the Super Bowl XLVIII: "A crust of snow, ice, and salt make the surrounding parking lots appear gray."
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We’ve really come a long, long way when it comes to special effects in movies. It makes sense that today’s movies look great because of all our computer whiz processing power animation software. Back in the old days though? We had to rely on the magic of the movies. Seriously. Turning scale models that look like toys that kids wouldn’t even want into gorgeous, timeless movie sequences takes real magic to pull off.
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This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
