Brilliant low budget avengers group video, using a swimming pool and a racket.

Nature has famously inspired martial arts schools. It is a pity it did not inspire dance schools as much, or at least that nature themed dance fights have not become popular.

If you wanted to start your own school, this would be a good starting material.

Current Biology has made available the column that Sydney Brenner kept as a pdf

It was an interesting read and gave an idea of science in the pre-genomics era. It was great to get a glimpse into how a great mind works.

In particular the following essays stood out for me (pages refer to pdf)

Big news this week. You may have seen the image. It looks like a hole. But it is 2.6 times larger than the actual object, and there is much more information contained in the image than a quick glance without much thinking reveals.

It is wonderfully explained here.

And the same channel produced a follow up video on the day of the announcement.

I recently came across the channel of Gerald Undone who has very succinct but detailed explanations of complex technical issues in photography. If you don’t understand them after watching his videos, you are probably beyond salvation.

I have selected some, and there are probably more in his channel.

I was particularly intrigued by the depth of field explanation, which says that it is the same regardless of focal length, but the bokeh looks more pleasing in high focal length lenses because they also magnify the out of focus area in the photo, along with the subject.

Have you wondered why Youtube videos automatically start playing a new one, once the one you have been watching ends?

It is because many online services compete for our attention. For example, they are interested in which news timeline would grab your attention the most. If you ask yourself, in the end of the day, what sort of news timeline you would consider time well spent, it will probably be a very different timeline than the one served to you.

Here Tristan Harris argues that what teenagers do on social media is different than what they did on the phone in the 70s. The reason is that in the 70s there was no arms race for using the phone more, even though there was still an economic incentive to use the phone.