Following his retirement, Oklahoma’s preeminent television meteorologist Gary England appeared on The Colbert Report. It was fun seeing someone I’ve watched since childhood, and who in part led to my interest in meteorology, on such a cool show.

To commemorate the interview, I made a couple of fun websites: Sleet Thunderslush and Windy Rains. You’ll have to watch the video to understand the context.

I would also suggest you read this great New York Times article that details the “Weather God of Oklahoma”.

Maia Weinstock, writing for Scientific American, on LEGO’s recently unveiled minifig, Professor C. Bodin:

She is the first female lab scientist in LEGO minifig form, although her specialty is deliberately vague. She might look like a chemist, but reading her official bio, one gets the sense she could equally be a biologist, biophysicist, materials engineer, theoretical physicist, or roboticist

Weinstock details LEGO’s historical stereotypes surrounding their female minifigs, and why releasing a female scientist continues a positive trend from the company.

WeatherBell’s Joe Bastardi, formerly of AccuWeather, made an ass of himself this past weekend. Bastardi decided to tweet following the announcement that the May 31 tornado in El Reno, Oklahoma was downgraded from an EF-5 to an EF-3:

Regardless of what intensity the National Weather Service assigned to the tornado, there were over 20 fatalities¹ that resulted from the storm - including children. Bastardi showed that he cared more about making a self-congratulatory, non-scientific, political opinion than he did about the victims. That makes him the Jerk of the Week.

As a meteorologist, I’m embarrassed that he has any association with our field.

Stefan Washietl:

this post is about another, more subtle happy moment in the lifecycle of a paper: it’s that email you get, when the production team sends you a PDF and you first see your paper in its typeset form. This the final form with which your work will enter the scientific record. And, it’s beautiful!

We believe that a scientific paper can be a thing of beauty in its own right. Which is why for our inaugural post, I opened the archives and took a closer look at the design trends and beautiful papers from the past 350 years.

There is nothing like seeing your work in its final form. As Washietl details, the typography and layout of that work yield a form that is gorgeous.

The Oatmeal nails it again.

Laura Northrup, Consumerist:

Sure, you can drink beer. If you encase it in dough, you can even deep-fry it. Until now, though, we’ve been unable to spread beer on other foods, having to content ourselves with delicious but non-alcoholic substances like butter or Nutella. No longer.

Dip your pretzels in spreadable beer. Two birds. One stone.

Alan Taylor, The Atlantic, with photos from the 2013 Red Bull Illume contest:

The winners have just been announced in the 3rd edition of the Red Bull Illume Image Quest photo competition. The overall winner, top 10 category winners and top 50 finalists were unveiled at a ceremony in Hong Kong earlier today. The contest invited photographers to submit images of the world of action and adventure sports in one of 10 categories, including Energy, Illumination, Sequence, and Experimental (where digital manipulation is allowed).

Some of these are really great. I’m particularly fond of the surfing photos.

A very handy directory that provides links so that you can more easily delete accounts from various online services.

Justine Sharrock, BuzzFeed, asked prisoners at California’s San Quentin State Prison about the internet - something most of them haven’t ever used:

It is illegal in the United States for federal prisoners to go on the internet. Most prisoners who have been serving long sentences in prison have never been online. Some inmates have managed to go online through illegally smuggled cell phones. But most of them haven’t tried out smartphones, apps, or instant messaging. Facebook, Twitter, and Yelp are vague concepts. The idea that apps can know where you are or remember your information sounds like sci-fi. They hear about these things from friends, television, and magazines, but it’s hard to conceive what they are and how they have transformed the world.

As we commemorate the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have A Dream” speech today, here is an interesting tidbit about someone you might not think of as a civil rights activist. Ken Gewertz, in a 2007 piece for the Harvard Gazette, shares several anecdotes about Albert Einstein and his push for racial equality:

Here’s something you probably don’t know about Albert Einstein.

In 1946, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist traveled to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, the alma mater of Langston Hughes and Thurgood Marshall and the first school in America to grant college degrees to blacks. At Lincoln, Einstein gave a speech in which he called racism “a disease of white people,” and added, “I do not intend to be quiet about it.” He also received an honorary degree and gave a lecture on relativity to Lincoln students.