1. [Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

    To Tug Hearts, Music First Must Tickle the Neurons

    This is why the slight drum change at the 3:40 mark makes the song for me. 

    JEFF the Brotherhood—“Ripper”

    Bonus reading: Jonah Lehrer’s Proust Was a Neuroscientist for related reading on Stravinsky.

  2. How Nike’s Visual Tricks Made Oregon Look Fast (Despite Defeat) →

    “We hear constantly from teams and quarterbacks that having a bit more visual acuity and contrast on the field makes things easier,” says Van Horn. The white jerseys and grey pants, combined with the green accents, allowed the players to stand out vividly against their Auburn opponents.

    Thanks to Phil Knight Nike, Oregon has new uni combos every game. If Nike designers actually take the opposing team’s colors into consideration for every matchup for maximum acuity, we could be witnessing the future of uniform design.

    Then again, Boise State’s blue turf is possibly the worst pairing for their uniforms in terms of contrast.

    via

  3. The big decisions of today are dependent on multiple and complex interacting bureaucracies and stakeholders, in which accurate assessments and painstaking planning may be boring but are critical to success—an evolutionary novelty we are not “designed” for. Political and economic overconfidence are therefore all the more important because they are more likely to be misplaced and yet also to have implications for millions.

    — 

    James Fowler and Dominic Johnson

    On Overconfidence

  4. A 3-D Tour of All the Known Galaxies, In 90 Seconds →

  5. In a just completed study, researchers at Northwestern University found that people were more likely to solve word puzzles with sudden insight when they were amused, having just seen a short comedy routine.

    — Tracing the Spark of Creative Problem-Solving

  6. More LHC goodness. Thanks, Matt.

    More LHC goodness.

    Thanks, Matt.

  7. It's Full of Stars: Expanding on a News Story: Fermi Bubbles →

    itsfullofstars:

    Recently, there’s been a lot of buzz in the astronomy community about the recent discovery of gamma-ray bubbles over the center of our galaxy. Above is an illustration from the press release depicting the bubbles, which were discovered by NASA’s Fermi space telescope. [See the original…

  8. I'll think of a title some other time →

  9. One of the lead-ion collisions at the LHC via

    One of the lead-ion collisions at the LHC

    via

  10. Inside the Minds of Animals →

    Great read