A very cool graphic posted on Silodrome:

This beautiful, historical infographic-of-sorts was designed by NASA in 1967 to give the general public a better idea of what the Apollo 11 mission was actually going to do, from lift off, to lunar landing, to splash down in the Pacific.

Prominent technology blogger Om Malik writes about his experiences as an immigrant to the United States and what it felt like to become a citizen:

On a globe, America is a landmass, a country. In an immigrant’s heart it is a belief that future is almost always better. It may not be perfect and it is certainly not equal, but it still is one of a kind — the only place where an absolute stranger with a funny name and a funny accent with no friends or contacts can show up, work hard and actually get to do what he was destined to do.

That America is the place, I can now officially call home.

Today, in a ceremony at the Paramount Theater in Oakland, California, I was sworn in along with 1224 others and we became Americans. I am still memorizing the Star Spangled Banner and trying to imprint the oath of allegiance on my heart, but I have always known that I was an American.

(via: Zac Flamig)

Marc Santora, writing for The New York Times:

It was immediately hailed as positively futuristic and yet dismissed as a fantasy.

In the search to find a better way to move people from one place to another, a wealthy inventor proposed packing passengers into a container that would hurtle through a tube, propelled by little more than a gust of air and gravity.

It is not the “Hyperloop” proposed this week by the technology mogul Elon Musk, which attracted some buzz by offering the possibility of whisking passengers from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 35 minutes.

This idea came more than 140 years ago, when pneumatic pressure for mass transit was first tested beneath the streets of New York City.

What’s old is new again.

TwistedSifter posted 40 really awesome maps of the world:

If you’re a visual learner like myself, then you know maps, charts and infographics can really help bring data and information to life. Maps can make a point resonate with readers and this collection aims to do just that.

Hopefully some of these maps will surprise you and you’ll learn something new. A few are important to know, some interpret and display data in a beautiful or creative way, and a few may even make you chuckle or shake your head.

There are many great things in which the U.S. should be proud to stand out from the rest of the world. Maps #2 and #6 are not such examples.

(via: Gordon Carrie)

Rebecca Onion, writing for Slate’s The Vault blog:

This “Histomap,” created by John B. Sparks, was first printed by Rand McNally in 1931.

This giant, ambitious chart fit neatly with a trend in nonfiction book publishing of the 1920s and 1930s: the “outline,” in which large subjects (the history of the world! every school of philosophy! all of modern physics!) were distilled into a form comprehensible to the most uneducated layman.

This is pretty cool. It visually depicts the march of civilization.

You can also grab the high-resolution version.

Elon Musk details his ambitious plans for high-speed travel:

The Hyperloop (or something similar) is, in my opinion, the right solution for the specific case of high traffic city pairs that are less than about 1500 km or 900 miles apart. Around that inflection point, I suspect that supersonic air travel ends up being faster and cheaper. With a high enough altitude and the right geometry, the sonic boom noise on the ground would be no louder than current airliners, so that isn’t a showstopper. Also, a quiet supersonic plane immediately solves every long distance city pair without the need for a vast new worldwide infrastructure.

However, for a sub several hundred mile journey, having a supersonic plane is rather pointless, as you would spend almost all your time slowly ascending and descending and very little time at cruise speed. In order to go fast, you need to be at high altitude where the air density drops exponentially, as air at sea level becomes as thick as molasses (not literally, but you get the picture) as you approach sonic velocity.

According to Musk, the Hyperloop could theoretically transport passengers from San Francisco to Los Angeles, a distance of nearly 400 miles, in only 35 minutes.

You can read the complete description in this pdf.

A very gripping documentary on the perils of texting while driving. The short film was directed by Werner Herzog for the It Can Wait campaign.

Marc Scott, with an extremely thoughtful article on the prevailing myth that all young people are technology wizards:

Not really knowing how to use a computer is deemed acceptable if you’re twenty-five or over. It’s something that some people are even perversely proud of, but the prevailing wisdom is that all under eighteens are technical wizards, and this is simply not true. They can use some software, particularly web-apps. They know how to use Facebook and Twitter. They can use YouTube and Pinterest. They even know how to use Word and PowerPoint and Excel. Ask them to reinstall an operating system and they’re lost. Ask them to upgrade their hard-drive or their RAM and they break out in a cold sweat. Ask them what https means and why it is important and they’ll look at you as if you’re speaking Klingon.

They click ‘OK’ in dialogue boxes without reading the message. They choose passwords like qwerty1234. They shut-down by holding in the power button until the monitor goes black. They’ll leave themselves logged in on a computer and walk out of the room. If a program is unresponsive, they’ll click the same button repeatedly until it crashes altogether.

How the hell did we get to this situation? How can a generation with access to so much technology, not know how to use it?

In one way, parents perpetuate the myth because their children use technology more than they do. The perception is that the kids must then be advanced. However, using something and understanding how it works are two very different things.

A lot of people aren’t familiar with meteorology beyond what they see on television. The truth is, our field is essentially a branch of applied physics. Computers and programming are quickly becoming essential tools. From my own experience as a graduate student, and now post-doc, our field suffers the same problems that Scott describes.

Often, incoming graduate students and faculty enter the field without so much as a working knowledge of operating systems and simple scripting. Many write papers and share tons of pretty figures about numerical model results without so much as a clue how to install the code, how their tool functions, and what the various physical schemes contained within actually represent. It’s frankly embarrassing. Yet, they are viewed by many as savvy. Why? Because they use the technology more than the preceding generation. Such false praise only further skews these people’s internal gauge of success.

Now, ignorance of a subject isn’t something to condemn - however, it always irked me when people are not self-motivated when presented with their own shortcomings. I’ve been in classes where programming was required and the students with limited computer skills just mooched off of someone else. It speaks to a larger problem where hard things are simply passed off to others. It’s a discouraging problem and I like Scott’s suggestions to improve the situation.

Craig Hockenberry offers usability improvements for the AMBER Alert implementation on mobile devices:

But I was also seeing a lot of people on Twitter whose response to the confusion was to ask how to turn the damn thing off. And since AMBER Alerts aren’t affected by the “Do Not Disturb” settings, a lot of people went to Settings > Notification Center so they wouldn’t get woken again in the future.

That’s exactly what you don’t want to happen when a child is abducted.

I agree with many of Hockenberry’s suggestions. However, I think a lot of those complaining are the type of people who value The Bachelor over an abducted child. Honestly, I think people should get the hell over themselves. “Oh, I was so inconvenienced because my expensive phone beeped late at night.” Give me a break.

Jesse David Fox and Linsey Fields, Vulture, present some pretty great infographics:

We have been spending a lot of time analyzing Breaking Bad as we walk up to the final episodes (which begin Sunday night), but now it is time to break down the show in a scientific way that Walter White would approve of: through infographics. Below, through line graphs, bar charts, and Venn diagrams, we measure Walt’s face over the show’s run, Gus’s face before and after his last meeting with Hector Salamanca, what Mike will do to Lydia depending on how she acts on her call to Hank, and much more.

This is a great way to whet your appetite if, like me, you are eagerly awaiting the final episodes of Breaking Bad to resume on Sunday.