In a cavern deep below the Earth, Ayn Rand, Paul Ryan, Rand Paul, Ann Druyan, Paul Rudd, Alan Alda, and Duran Duran meet together in the Secret Council of /(\b[plurandy]+\b ?){2}/i.  The joke is an attack on Ayn Rand’s philosophy, which claims to be a completely fair mechanism for distributing resources, but (arguably) inherently favours those who start out with more resources, or are already in a position to acquire the resources.  It also, again arguably, has a strong overarching theme that people that believe in objectivism are inherently better than other people, and thus deserve what extra resources they can get — as with the Ayn Random Number Generator, which claims to be completely fair and balanced, but actually favours some numbers.

The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance.

— Robert R Coveyou
 

Random numbers should not be generated with a method chosen at random.

— Donald Knuth
 

Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin.

— John von Neumann
 

Simply storing the 24-bit colour of each pixel in this image would require 1.62 million bits, but a small computer programme can reproduce these 1.62 million bits using the definition of this Mandelbrot set and the coordinates of the corners of the image.  Thus, the Kolmogorov complexity of the raw file encoding this bitmap is much less than 1.62 million bits.
 

Roughly speaking, the Kolmogorov complexity of a string (of bits, words, symbols, and so forth) is the shortest description that allows an accurate reconstruction — or, in some variants, the length of the smallest programme which will output the original string. Cueball’s method of giving directions is very reminiscent of Kolmogorov’s method of determining complexity. These directions may have minimal Kolmogorov complexity, but they are non-intuitive and are likely not the shortest or quickest way to get there considering that they consist mostly of left turns. The joke is that Cueball just sent his friend to a GPS store to buy a device to give him the correct directions. (His friend gets really grumpy when he realises this.)
 

• This is an artistic view of the solar system showing the relative sizes of the planets against the sun.
• A gigantic but fleeting burst of radio waves has been caught in the act for the first time, helping narrow down the vast array of things that might cause them.  They last about a millisecond but give off as much energy as our sun in a day, seemingly in a tight band.  The source is a mystery, but whatever causes them must be huge, cataclysmic, and up to 5.5 billion light years away.  A top contender is the collapse of an oversized neutron star that should’ave given way to a black hole long ago, but it’s spinning too fast.  Anther possibility is that it’s a flare from a magnetar (an extremely magnetic neutron star).  A total of 9 bursts have been reported since the first was discovered in 2007, but all of them were found weeks or years after the actual event by sifting through old data.  This source was near the constellation Aquarius.  The waves appear to be circularly polarised rather than linearly polarised, which means they vibrate in two planes, rather than one — something nobody’s ever measured before.
• The Capitalist Network That Runs the World: This image represents the 1,318 transnational corporations that form the core of the world economy.  Superconnected companies are red, very connected companies are yellow.  The size of the dot represents revenue.  An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power.  The study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify power networks.  Although they represented 20% of global operating revenues, the 1,318 corporations appear to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world’s large blue chip and manufacturing firms — the “real” economy — representing a further 60% of global revenue, much of it owned by a “super-entity” of 147 tightly-knit companies.  In effect, less than 1% of the companies control 40% of the entire network, most of them financial institutions.  The top 20 include Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Company, and The Goldman Sachs Group.  Such networks are unstable.  We may need global anti-trust rules, which now exist only at national level, to limit such over-connection.

• Self-taught photographer Mikko Lagerstedt often finds himself camped next to his tripod, waiting hours for an exposure of a frozen coastal scene or dark, brooding forest.  This is Meri-Pori, Finland, 2014.
• Many of his images are composites of two photos taken from the same location, a shorter exposure of the sky merged with a significantly longer exposure of the ground, which he then manipulates in Lightroom.  This is Porvoo, Finland, 2014.
• Lagerstedt is extremely open about his process, sharing on his website tutorials and blog posts about how he works.  You can also follow him on Instagram.

• This thunderstorm exists in an environment with no winds to shear the storm or to blow the anvil in any one direction.  This was taken in Maud, Texas looking east toward the storm located in Arkansas.
• During the late afternoon and early evening of 3 April 2004 this supercell thunderstorm dropped 2-inch-diameter hail over Chaparral, New Mexico, causing widespread damage.
• The setting sun illuminates the top of a classic anvil-shaped thunderstorm cloud in eastern Nebraska, USA.

• Zapping an area deep in our brains turns off consciousness, suggesting this is where perceptions are bound together into a cohesive experience.  Scientists have been probing individual regions of the brain for over a century, exploring function by zapping with electricity, temporarily putting them out of action.  Despite this, they’ve never been able to turn off consciousness – until now.  Although only tested in one person, the discovery suggests a single area – the claustrum (a thin, sheet-like structure hidden deep inside the brain) — might be integral to combining disparate brain activity into a seamless package of thoughts, sensations, and emotions.  Just days before he died in July 2004, neuroscientist Francis Crick was working on a paper suggesting our consciousness needs something akin to an orchestra conductor to bind different external and internal perceptions together.  This conductor would need to rapidly integrate information across distinct regions of the brain and bind together information arriving at different times.  For example, the smell and colour of a rose, its name, and a memory of its relevance can be bound into one conscious experience of being handed a rose on Valentine’s day.  Loss of consciousness is associated with increased synchrony of electrical activity, or brainwaves, in the frontal and parietal regions of the brain that participate in conscious awareness.  Too much synchronisation seems to be bad because then the brain can’t distinguish one aspect from another, thus stopping a cohesive experience from emerging.  Since similar brainwaves occur during an epileptic seizure, low-frequency stimulation of the claustrum could jolt brains back to normal and may even be worth trying for people in minimally conscious states, perhaps helping to push them back into consciousness.
• Maybe because we don’t understand time, we keep trying to measure it more accurately.  But the desire to pin down the elusive ticking of the clock may soon be the undoing of time as we know it: The next generation of clocks won’t tell time in a way that most people understand.  At the heart of the new clock is the element strontium.  Inside a small chamber, the strontium atoms are suspended in a lattice of crisscrossing laser beams.  Researchers give them a little ping, like ringing a bell and the strontium vibrates at an incredibly fast frequency becoming a natural atomic metronome ticking out teeny, teeny fractions of a second.  This new clock can keep perfect time for 5 billion years.  But it’s run into a big problem: the thing we call time doesn’t tick at the same rate everywhere in the universe — or even on our planet.  On the top of Mount Everest, time passes just a little bit faster than in Death Valley.  That’s because the speed at which time passes depends on the strength of gravity.  If you take a clock off the floor and hang it on the wall, time for the clock speeds up by a minuscule amount.  This isn’t some effect of gravity on the clock’s machinery — time itself is flowing more quickly on the wall than on the floor.  The world’s current time is coordinated between atomic clocks all over the planet, but that can’t happen with this new clock.  The only way to keep time in the future may be to send these clocks into space — far from the earth’s surface, they’d be better able to stay in synch.
• The “wave-particle duality” is simply the quantum uncertainty principle in disguise, reducing two mysteries to one.  Wave-particle duality is the idea that a quantum object can behave like a wave, but the wave behaviour disappears when you locate the object.  It’s most simply seen in a double slit experiment, where single particles are fired one by one at a screen containing two narrow slits.  The particles pile up behind the slits not in two heaps as classical objects would, but in a striped pattern like you’d expect for waves interfering with each other.  At least this is what happens until you sneak a look at which slit a particle goes through — do that and the interference pattern vanishes.  The quantum uncertainty principle is the idea that it’s impossible to know certain pairs of things about a quantum particle at once.  For example, the more precisely you know the position of an atom, the less precisely you can know the speed with which it’s moving.  It’s a limit on the fundamental knowability of nature, not a statement on measurement skill.  This new work shows that how much you can learn about the wave-versus-the-particle behaviour of a system is constrained in exactly the same way.

• Vespa mandarinia is the world’s largest hornet, about the size of a human adult’s thumb, yellow and black in colour and highly venomous.  Its 6-millimetre-long stingers carry a venom potent enough to dissolve human tissue.  Victims may die of kidney failure or anaphylactic shock.  These hornets are found in northwest China’s Shaanxi province.  They don’t typically attack unless they feel their nest is threatened, but when they do, they can be fierce and fast – flying at 25 miles per hour — and the more you try to run, the more they chase you.  They make their homes in tree stumps or underground so their nests are extremely difficult to detect.  The region has also been overrun by the Asian hornet, Vespa velutina, a slightly smaller species, but equally dangerous.  Hundreds, even thousands, of hornets inhabit a nest, which typically hangs from a high place.  Two other cities in Shaanxi (Hanzhong and Shangluo) are also being besieged by hornets, though death tolls there are lower.  Fears are growing in Britain that the giant Asian hornets are headed their way — the species is 4 times the size of native honeybees and has already decimated the bee population in France where they are thought to have arrived in a delivery of Chinese pottery in late 2004.  These insects have colonised huge swathes of French waterways.  With a few hornets capable of destroying 30,000 bees in a couple of hours, honey production has plummeted.
• Flamingoes huddle in the bathroom of the Miami-Metro Zoo as Hurricane Floyd approaches in 1992.  The staff at the zoo waited till the very last minute to move the flamingos because it’s stressful for the birds — when frightened and struggling they can easily break a leg.  Staff wanted to be as certain as possible that the storm was actually going to hit.  All the flamingos in the bathroom survived unharmed, but the zoo’s aviary folded like a house of cards killing almost 100 birds.
• The fennec (Vulpes zerda) is a surprisingly easy-to-domesticate animal.  However, having one as a pet is illegal in many areas of its range.  The fennec is the soul of the desert, whose main threat is illegal trafficking by the unscrupulous who capture them as novelties for the wealthy.  The fennec has a lifespan of up to 14 years in captivity.  They normally in deserts like this little guy who lives in the Sahara.  Families of fennecs dig out dens in sand, which can be as large as 120 square metres (1,292 square feet) and adjoin dens of other fennec families.

• Unlike any other life on Earth, these extraordinary bacteria use energy in its purest form — they eat and breathe electrons and are to be found everywhere.  Stick an electrode in the ground, pump electrons down it, and here they come.  Biologists can entice them out of rocks and marine mud by tempting them with a bit of electrical juice.  Electrons must flow in order for energy to be gained.  This is why when someone suffocates another person they are dead within minutes — the supply of oxygen has been stopped so electrons can no longer flow.  Electric bacteria probe fundamental questions about life, such as the bare minimum of energy needed to maintain it.  It may be possible to vary the voltage applied to electrodes, putting an energetic squeeze on cells to the point at which they just do the absolute minimum to stay alive.  In this state, cells may not be able to reproduce or grow, but can still run repairs on cell machinery — in other words, making bonsai bacteria.
• This is a basket star, a type of echinoderm.  This particular one is a Haeckel Ophiodea 70 Gorgonocephalidae (in case you were interested).  They generally live in deep sea habitats.  In the wild they can live up to 35 years and weigh up to 5 kilograms (11 pounds).  Like other echinoderms, basket stars lack blood and achieve gas exchange via their water vascular system.
• One commenter on Flickr shouts “fake!”  Maybe so.  Or maybe it doesn’t even matter.  Note that the original photo clearly shows that the bikinis were painted on (it’s even obvious in this photo once you look closely).

Vancouver is one of the most ethnically and linguistically diverse cities in Canada: 52% of its residents have a first language other than English.  Its population density of about 5,250 people per square kilometre (13,590 per square mile) makes it the most densely populated Canadian municipality and the 4th most densely populated city over 250,000 residents in North America (behind New York City, San Francisco, and Mexico City).  The original settlement, named Gastown, grew up on clear-cuts on the west edge of the Hastings Mill property, where a makeshift tavern had been set up on a plank between two stumps in 1867.  Other stores and some hotels quickly followed and Gastown, now formally laid out as a registered townsite, was renamed Granville but was re-renamed Vancouver and incorporated shortly thereafter (in 1886).  The transcontinental railway extended to the city to take advantage of its large natural seaport, which soon became a vital link in a trade route between the Orient, Eastern Canada, and Europe.  Today, its port is the busiest and largest in Canada and the most diversified port in North America.  Forestry remains Vancouver’s largest industry followed by tourism.  Major film production studios have turned Metro Vancouver into one of the largest film production centres in North America, earning it the nickname Hollywood North.  It is consistently named as one of the top 5 worldwide cities for livability and quality of life.
 

• An unnamed New York City subway worker attempts to squeeze one more person onto a train car, 5 May 1943.
• Note the smartphone at the upper right, which was found again using the Find My iPhone app and it still worked.
• This photograph was taken on the roof of Marceau’s Studio, 5th Avenue, New York City (that’s across from St Patrick’s Cathedral), in December 1920.  Holding one side of the camera with his right hand is Joseph Byron, while Ben Falk holds the other side with his left hand.  The remaining 3 people in the photo are Pirie MacDonald, Colonel Marceau and Pop Core (in case you care).

• The entire 12,000-strong workforce of the Ford Motor Company plant at Highland Park, Michigan were photographed in 1913 when the world’s first fully-fledged assembly line was installed there.  Fittingly for a company whose axiom was “Time equals money”, the photo cost them thousands of dollars.  In 1913, Ford paid $2.34 a day — minimum wage then was $1 — and employed them for a 9-hour working day.  (The next year, he doubled the pay to $5 a day and reduced the daily work hours to 8.)  Assuming a working day lost because of the photo, Ford would have paid out $28,080 in daily wages – almost equal to amount of seed money he used to found his company in 1903.  He would’ve lost out on making 600 cars that day (in 1913, Ford produced 250,000 cars annually), each of which would have sold for $600 — millions in today’s dollars.
• Dr Tony Perry, a pioneer in cloning, has announced precise DNA editing at the moment of conception in mice.  He said huge advances in the past 2 years mean “designer babies” are no longer fiction.  Other leading scientists and bioethicists argue that it’s time for serious public debate on this issue.  Designer babies — genetically modified for beauty, intelligence or to be free of disease — have long been a topic of science fiction.  The director of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics says the field raises questions about social justice around techniques that will be available only to the rich, about what constitutes identity, and about “issues of governance and regulation” in the industry.
• The use of complex medical devices is exploding.  Last year, Intuitive’s da Vinci robotic surgery system alone helped doctors perform more than 350,000 surgeries in US hospitals.  Yet patients whose lives depend on the proper use of increasingly complex high-tech medical equipment often aren’t given a complete picture of potential problems.  While a US database collects reports of deaths and injuries sent to the Food and Drug Administration, the agency has no authority to force doctors to contribute.  Hospitals are required to report, though they often don’t.  Indeed, a review of reports for operations with Intuitive’s robotic system found dozens of injuries that’ve gone unreported for years.  Meanwhile, details of patient problems involving robotic surgery that are cited in legal papers or patient interviews are noted to be entirely unreported, including one woman who spent 4 months in the hospital after a robot poked a hole in her intestine during a hysterectomy.  Unidentified surgeons say the device leads to fewer complications and shorter recoveries overall, though there are incidents in which robot arms collide or miss a mark.  Learning how to use the system seems to be the biggest challenge.  Diana Zuckerman, president of the National Research Center for Women & Families in Washington, said, “There’s generally at least a 10-year wait, once a device is on the market, to have a sense whether it’s safe or effective — and by then the device may have changed 5 times.”  Better feedback could help.

• While Miss Robb looks ferociously eager, she does look real.  The hair is V-Ray hair material and the detail is courtesy ZBrush.
• This is Bruce Oreck, the US Ambassador to Finland.  Oreck holds a Bachelor of Arts from Johns Hopkins University, a Juris Doctorate from Louisiana State University, and a Masters of Law in Taxation from New York University.  Oreck’s enthusiasm for the outdoors has resulted in his camping all over America, throughout Europe, and in much of East Africa.  He also worked as a boatman rowing wooden dories down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon for nearly 10 years.  His interest in athletics broadened to include body building, allowing him to win the Colorado state men’s masters body-building championship several years in a row.  His Christmas cards are sometimes a bit controversial (and I’m not sure his tattoos are actually permanent).
• The US Supreme Court handed down a unanimous decision in Holt v Hobbs, establishing that a Muslim inmate may grow a half-inch beard “in accordance with his religious beliefs,” despite a prison policy prohibiting facial hair.  Justice Ginsburg explains, “accommodating the petitioner’s religious belief in this case would not detrimentally affect others who do not share petitioner’s belief.  On that understanding, I join the Court’s opinion.”

The first subway line in NYC opened 27 October 1904 — about 35 years after the first elevated train line.  These early subway lines were owned and run by private companies that also started elevated train lines in Brooklyn.  In 1913, NYC built and improved some subway lines to lease to these companies.  In 1932 the first line owned and operated by NYC was established — the Independent Subway System (IND).  NYC bought the two private systems and closed some elevated train lines the the goal of speeding things up so that more people could be transported more places.  Passengers liked the system because it was faster and cheaper and not affected by bad weather underground.  Today, the NYC subway system serves hundreds of thousands of people daily.

• This is an interior view of the new 8th Avenue subway car, NYC, May 1937.
• This subway car of the future was displayed at the Chambers Street Station by the Independent Division, NYC, 9 July 1947.  It had 56 seats, 14 adjustable exhaust ventilators, eight 10-inch fans, was painted blue and grey, and had an off-white ceiling.
• This car has patterned asbestos tile flooring, increased and improved fluorescent lighting, illuminated route and destination signs, double roofs, electronically controlled heat / ventilation, improved brakes, better door controls, and foam and vinyl seats.  These major changes were intended for passenger comfort and greater operational and maintenance efficiency, 26 October 1954.

Imagine leaning out the open door of a helicopter at 7,500 feet over NYC on a very dark and chilly night to see views like these.  The photographer feels that from high altitudes the streets of NYC at night look like brain synapses.  He says that helicopters vibrate pretty significantly and you have to be able to shoot at a relatively high shutter speed (even with tools like a gyroscope); that makes it incredibly difficult to shoot after sunset.  The flight required extensive planning and special clearances as they flew above airline traffic landing at Kennedy, LaGuardia, and Newark airports.  Sadly, there’s no mention of how the intensely beautiful colours were achieved (I assume they enhanced in some way — perhaps it’s a trade secret? — or maybe it really looks just like that).  Photographer Vincent Laforet also took the last photo above, though perhaps not during the same helicopter ride.
 

• “From undead cats to particles popping up out of nowhere, from watched pots not boiling — sometimes — to ghostly influences at a distance, quantum physics demolishes intuitions about how the world works…”  This design was chosen by New Scientist to represent all that.  Does it?  Sure, why not?  The header says there are 7 wonders of the quantum world: 4 are mentioned while 8 articles actually follow the header.  But who’s counting?  The artist has done some remarkable graphics, though I couldn’t find this particular example anywhere on his site.
• Graphic designer Daniel Siering and art director Mario Schuster wrapped part of a tree trunk with plastic sheeting and made an amazingly detailed and realistic spray-painting of the surrounding landscape on it.  The result is an illusion that the tree has been sawed through and floats in mid-air over its stump.  The two co-workers at Art-EFX in Potsdam, Germany had the idea after spray painting many transformer stations for their customers.
• Nature is a master at adapting because she has all the time in the world.  Trees are combating concrete and stone in streets, on walls — just about anywhere.  You can cut down a tree or it can die of natural causes, but others come in its wake — and persistence wins in the end.

• A train goes through snow in Glacier National Park, British Columbia (BC), Canada, 24 January 2014.  Glacier National Park is one of 7 in BC and is part of a system of 43 parks and reserves across Canada.  Established in 1886, the park encompasses 1,349 square kilometres (521 square miles) and includes a portion of the Columbia Mountains.  The park’s history is closely tied to two primary Canadian transportation routes, the Canadian Pacific Railway completed in 1885, and the Trans Canada Highway completed in 1963.
• Here is 20 metres of snowfall in Japan.  Some sites say this is Hokkaido while others say it’s the Tateyama Kurobe Alpine Route — apparently they both get insane amounts of snow.  The northern portion of Hokkaido falls into the taiga biome, with significant snowfall, which can reach 11 metres (400 inches) on the mountains adjacent to the Sea of Japan; Murodo-daira of Tateyama has one of the heaviest snows in the world, reaching about 7 metres (23 feet) on average.  In particular, the snow mantle at Otani, a 5-minute walk from Murodo Station, sometimes gets more than 20 metres (65.6 feet) because of snowdrifts.  The famous “Snow Walls” are formed by expelling this heavy snow with specialised machinery.  The 500-metre-long area of the steepest snow walls is open to sightseers from mid-April to late May.
• A fierce storm whipped these monster waves into a frenzy of whitewater which subsequently froze in sub-zero temperatures.  This area is renowned for its dramatic coastal cliffs and landscapes.

• A huge wave crashes into the seawall at Ilfracombe on the North Devon coast.  Such storms are a fairly regular occurrence.
• A waterspout over Bateman’s Bay, as seen from Maloney’s Beach, New South Wales in May 2014.  Waterspouts occur on the coast when cool, humid air is warmed as it passes over warm waters and rises.  In the right conditions, such as during stormy weather, the vigorously rising air can converge and tighten into a jaw-dropping spinning column.  The photographer, Shorty Westlin from Canberra, said: “Everyone else had a view of it on the water, but from where I was, it looked like it was on land and coming in.”  While waterspouts are not generally as violent as tornadoes and usually break down soon after crossing the coast, they can be a serious threat to boaters.
• The waters off the coast of Brittany are among the most dangerous in Europe, claiming over 30 ships between 1888 and 1904 when construction of a lighthouse finally began.  It took 7 years to finish it due to harsh storms.  On 21 December 1989, Jean Guichard travelled to this lighthouse in a helicopter at the beginning of such a storm.  Lighthouse keeper Théodore Malgorn, waiting to be rescued, thought the photographer’s helicopter was the one coming for him so he hurried downstairs and opened the door — a moment which coincided with a giant wave the enveloped the lighthouse.  Malgorn rushed back inside and managed to close the door, while Guichard took a series of 7 photos that became instantly famous, selling over a million posters and earning him the World Press Photo award.  Two years later, automation arrived and the keeper was retired 1991.

• Levant cloud forming against the eastern cliffs of the Rock of Gibraltar, 17 July 2010.  The Rock of Gibraltar was one of the Pillars of Hercules, known to the Romans as Mons Calpe.  (The other pillar, on the African side of the strait, was Mons Abyla.)  In ancient times the two points marked the limit to the known world.
• Presumably this occurred somewhere over the Ukraine in 2011.  For such an excellent photographer, there’s very little personal information about him online.
• Apparently this is a digital image, though some sites claim it’s a real photograph taken from a house with a Cape Cod view.  Whatever — it’s nicely done.

Except for the upper photo on the right, these are from a series entitled Amazing Worlds within our Worlds by artist Pyanek:

• This alien looking structure is in fact a kitchen sponge.  The shot is of the sponge’s curved edge, so detail in the forefront goes out of focus in the back, providing depth.
• The pages of a novel may appear to be smooth as you turn them, but this image of an old book reveals its true, fibrous character.
• Scientists have extensively studied genes and proteins involved in the development and progression of human tumours.  A relatively new field of metabolomics takes a different approach, focusing on the products of chemical reactions throughout the body, called metabolites.  Metabolomics captures snapshots of the body’s physiological state at given points in time, providing researchers insights into chemical pathways involved in diseases.  The metabolomic profiles enable them to distinguish between benign prostate tissue, clinically localised prostate cancers, and metastatic prostate cancers.  They’ve identified 60 metabolites in prostate tumours not present in benign prostate tissue.  The levels of 6 of these metabolites increase with progression from benign tissue to localised cancer to metastatic disease.

• This X key of a computer keyboard has an artificially rough surface.
• A single grain of sugar looks a bit like an uncut diamond.
• Bubbles in soap foam have a geodesic look.