The Astronomy Picture of the Day recently featured a pretty shot of a supercell in Montana taken by photographer Sean Heavey. Enjoy.

Gavin Aung Than, Zen Pencils, with a great comic that details common struggles of people who create things:

Before Zen Pencils, I had been making regular comics for at least five years. I was lucky enough to get a comic strip published in a local paper which required me to do one comic a week, every week of the year, for five years. Around 3 years ago, I got another comic published in a different paper. So for the last 3 years I was making two different comics a week. That’s roughly (52 x 5 = 260) + (52 x 3 = 156) 416 comics in the last five years on top of working my regular job BEFORE I had even thought of Zen Pencils. And I would say at least 200 of those comics are terrible and I would be embarrassed to show them to you.

So the best advice I can give to any young person, no matter what their pursuit: PUT IN THE WORK!

The MIT Technology Review details the quantum internet that has been in use at Los Alamos Lab over the past two years, and its security implications:

The basic idea here is that the act of measuring a quantum object, such as a photon, always changes it. So any attempt to eavesdrop on a quantum message cannot fail to leave telltale signs of snooping that the receiver can detect. That allows anybody to send a “one-time pad” over a quantum network which can then be used for secure communication using conventional classical communication.

Glenn McDonald developed an algorithm to generate a word cloud of musical genres:

I started making pictures of the music-genre space for diagnostic purposes at work. The exercise keeps threatening to take on a life of its own, but then each new thing turns out to have some functional purpose after all. Which leads to some other analytical feature, which leads to yet another interesting by-product.

This latest not-so-analytical version here adds a whole new level, literally. If you hover over, or click, any genre in the main map, you’ll see a » link. Click that to see an artist-level map of that genre, complete with representative audio for each artist and a genre-specific car-radio scanner.

Arik Hesseldahl, AllThingsD:

The image above shows two animated characters in what has been certified by the Guinness Book of World Records as the smallest movie ever made. It’s called “A Boy And His Atom,” and the medium of animation is, you guessed it, atoms.

It lasts all of 60 seconds, and depicts a boy — made up of individual atoms himself — encountering a single atom that he befriends and throws like a ball. He then bounces up and down on a tiny trampoline made up of atoms, then throws the original atom into the sky, where it erupts into a tiny commercial for the company that produced it: IBM.

Robert T. Gonzalez, io9, details an amazing picture of the moon taken by Switzerland-based photographer Philipp Schmidli:

Schmidli writes on his blog that he spent months scouting out the perfect vantage point for this shot, conducting much of his reconnaissance with Google Earth and a handheld GPS.

You’ve surely noticed that the moon illusion is working overtime in Schmidli’s photograph. To achieve this effect, he had to station himself more than 1000 meters away from his friend on the bike, and employ a staggering 1200 mm focal length.

Andrew Dumont recalls his personal experience with burnout, and offers sound advice on how to avoid mental fatigue:

I remember coming home and curling up into a ball. I was so emotionally and physically exhausted, I couldn’t even move. My productivity was cut to nothing. The next day at the office, I found myself just staring into my computer, for hours. No movement, just staring.

I was shot.

[…]

So, how do we avoid it?

Each person has their own limit, and I was completely oblivious to mine. I love to work, so spending countless hours in an office wasn’t crazy, it was normal. But burnout crept up on me, so I had to find a way to avoid it from happening again.

After much trial and error, I did, and here’s how I did it.

David Rumsey:

All the maps contain rich information about the past and represent a sampling of time periods (1680 to 1930), scales, and cartographic oart, resulting in visual history stories that only old maps can tell. Each map has been georeferenced, thus creating unique digital map images that allow the old maps to appear in their correct places on the modern globe.

Some of the maps fit perfectly in their modern spaces, while others (generally earlier period maps) reveal interesting geographical misconceptions of their time and therefore have to be more distorted to fit properly in Google Maps and Earth. Cultural features on the maps can be compared to the modern satellite views using the slider bars to adjust transparency.

Very cool.

If the goal was to be as cool as Geordi La Forge, they failed.

In its favour, if Google Glass didn’t exist, all these Silicon Valley guys would be having affairs or buying unsuitable motorbikes

Mike Butcher, TechCrunch, details his impressions of Google Glass:

So Google Glass for me will be this era’s Segway: hyped as a game changer but ultimately used by warehouse workers and mall cops.