A little bit of infoporn to end the weekend. The folks at I Love Charts have a great infographic showing various ways to compare the current living population vs. the total population of every person now deceased. Among the points the chart demos is the fact that the total population of dead people in the earth's history is waaay higher the current living population. That's interesting for a whole lot of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that we the living are going to be in a LOT of trouble during the global zombie war.

One of my all-time best ego feeds happened a few years ago, when I successfully identified the mystery disease on House before Dr. House and his team did(*).

Much of each episode of House deals with the art and science of medical diagnosis. But how realistic is the medical detective work on the show?

Enter Scott Morrison, M.D. Morrison has a family practice in Illinois and a blog called Polite Dissent, where among other things he picks apart each episode of House, explaining what's realistic and what's nonsense. Some typical observations:

I'm suspicious of Thirteen's "bubble test." While there is a bubble test that can be used to find heart defects, it is only used on a relatively small single organ. Thirteen's idea of trying to track microscopic bubbles wherever they may go over the entire body seems fruitless, especially when the overlying gastrointestinal tract is likely to have gas bubbles of its own. Plus this would only work if the cysts were connected.

It's fractures of the long bones (femur, most commonly) that lead to fat emboli. I don't think there's enough fat in a toe bone to cause a fat embolism.

Sequencing the cardiac sodium channel, in a hospital lab, in a day. Right. See me about that property in Arizona. Even with modern equipment, gene sequencing is tricky, time consuming, and a specialized skill.

(*)Leprosy FTW! But then just a few weeks later I missed the diagnosis of xeroderma pigmentosum, even though I had just worked on a documentary about it.

Designers work with just about everything -- form, function, physical materials, visual imagery, shapes, sights, and sounds. But almost no designer ever works with smells. Why is that? Are aromas too ethereal? Too hard to control? Too open to personal interpretation? Too boring?

Parsons The New School for Design(*) in New York City is looking into that issue later this month, when they host a symposium called HeadSpace: On Scent as Design. The one-day event will feature explanations of how smell works, how aroma alters our perceptions, how perfumes are made, how and why our modern environments are becoming devoid of odors, and more.

The event is free, but you have to pre-register. Here are the details and the registration page.

(*)Yes, the place really is called Parsons The New School for Design. I know, it's an odd name. But what 'ya gonna do?

Sure, Godzilla is the oldest and most bad-ass of all kaiju, but that doesn't mean he doesn't have a soul.

The best website I've found in months is devoted to the big guy's inner turmoil. It's called "Godzilla Haiku". I don't know anything about the person or persons behind it, but I know a work of genius when I see one.

So far Godzilla's only laid down a few haiku. Here's hoping for many more!

OK, so I lied a tiny bit in the cause of having a better blog post headline. But while astronomer Paul Davies almost certainly won't be THE first person to receive a message from beings on another planet, he almost certainly IS the first person whoever detects a message from the stars is going to call.

As chairman of the Post-Detection Task Group of the SETI project, Davies will decide what happens next after we discover we are not alone. In an interview in the Guardian newspaper Davies talks about how Seti researchers fight off disappointment after decades of hearing nothing from the stars but static. He also explains how...if an alien transmission is ever detected...he's not going to tell anyone where the message is coming from:

"My strenuous advice," Paul says, "will be that the coordinates of the transmitting entity should be kept confidential until the world community has had a chance to evaluate what it's dealing with. We don't want anybody just turning a radio telescope on the sky and sending their own messages to the source."

Combining his loves of television and modernist posters, Austrian designer Albert Exergian has created a series of posters for some of TV's most memorable shows. (Pictured above, "MacGyver" and "True Blood"). They're available for purchase on the Blanka web site.

Paul Rand might very well have been one of the most influential graphic designer of the 20th Century. He's best known for his logo design... Rand created the iconic logos for ABC, IBM, Westinghouse and UPS.

In the early 1990s Steve Jobs hired Rand to create the logo for his new computer company, NeXT.

The Brain Pickings blog has uncovered a great video of Jobs talking about what it was like working with Rand...a meeting of two great iconoclast perfectionists.

I asked him [Rand] if he would come up with a few options. And he said, 'No, I will solve your problem for you, and you will pay me. And you don't have to use the solution - if you want options, go talk to other people. But I'll solve your problem for you the best way I know how, and you use it or not, that's up to you - you're the client = but you pay me.'

See the video here.

Every skier knows that moguls are small (and sometimes not so small) snow hills made by the cumulative action of skiers. Moguls fields form as more and more skiers turn at the same spots, each turn spraying out a bit more snow that over time grows into larger and larger hills.

But it turns out moguls don't just grow and shrink in size, they also migrate. Uphill.

Writing in Physics Today, three scientists explained that as moguls get larger, skiers are more and more likely to make turns on the downhill side of the pre-existing moguls. Each time they do they dislodge a bit of snow that lands on the uphill size of the mogul below. Thus over time the uphill side of each mogul grows, while the downhill side is abraded away.

A typical mogul moves uphill at a rate of roughly 8 centimeters a day, or about 10 meters a season.

Image by random_matt/flickr.com published under a Creative Commons license.

Ever since I read Twyla Tharp's book about the practice of creativity, I've realized that NOTHING is more important to achieving artistic success than putting in the hours upon hours of practice. (Take THAT, people who think talent is God given).

That fact is driven home again in this essay by chef Shuna Fish Lydon laying out just what it takes to make it in a kitchen...

Memorize your station, and the station next to you. Inventory, taste EVERY PIECE OF YOUR MIS EN PLACE EVERY DAY, every night, every service. Even if you are the only one on your station. Even if you don't want to. Some ingredients/components just take a few hours to go off. If you serve bad food it's on you. Have INTEGRITY. And if you hate your job/menu/chef so much that you don't care to taste your m.e.p., leave. Please. You have no time to waste

While there are traffic signs for most of the actions we perform with our motor vehicles (turning, stopping, speeding up, slowing down, etc.) Gary Lauder thinks there's room for one more.

Speaking at this year's TED conference, Gary Lauder unveiled his design for a traffic sign for the traffic maneuver that more than any other brings out the best and worst in people -- the alternate merge.

While an explicit instruction telling people to be nice to each other is never out of place, not everyone is happy with the sign. Some call it ugly, others confusing. And there's an argument to be made that the last thing the world needs is more traffic signs.

A new study has highlighted interesting differences in the ways Europeans and American surf the Net. It turns out that a large percentage of Americans keep surfing until 11 PM or so, while in Europe the percentage more quickly drops off starting at around 7 or so local time.

So what's going on? The report's authors suggest that perhaps Europeans enjoy evenings more filled with face to face social interaction...hanging in cafes, talking with friends, eating better food, etc.

I'd be curious to see if these differences diminish as the seasons change. Northern Europe is at a higher latitude than most of America, a contributing factor to those wonderful long European summer twilights and early evenings. In the winter of course, the situation is reversed. Do Net users in Amsterdam, Paris, and Copenhagen surf later into the evening in February?

BTW, there's also a writeup of the report on Ars Technica.

The coolest store in Los Angeles is a small storefront on Sunset Blvd. called The Echo Park Time Travel Mart. The Mart is fully stocked with all of those sundries that your well-equipped time skipper covets...robot milk, caveman translation books, 10,000 year calendars, you name it.

Their latest addition is a great series of time travel posters...among them the one excerpted above that reminds us that fire is both good AND bad. I'm also partial to a great poster on unintended consequences with the adage "Let's work together to keep the future INEVITABLE!"

You can see (and order) all of the posters here.

And if you're in the neighborhood, drop in. But remember, like it says on the door, if you were born on this day after 7,021, they won't sell you fire-generating products. You know why.

OK, no middle of the road on this one, you're either gonna love it or you're gonna hate it.

San Francisco artist Justine Lai is in the midst of creating a series of oil paintings called "Join or Die". The series consists of self-portraits of Lai imagining herself having sex with each of the US Presidents, in chronological order. (Pictured above is Lai's tryst with the 6th President of the United States, John Quincy Adams).

Lai says she hopes the paintings will help humanize the presidency, and that the images will be seen as "playful and tender and maybe a little ambiguous".

You can judge for yourself on her website, where her first 18 paintings (Washington to Grant) are on view. (NOTE: Many of the images are not safe for work).

Sir Ken Robinson's life work is telling anyone who will listen how traditional educational systems all too often stifle creativity and personal growth, and how we can change that.

It's a message that resonates with a huge number of people (the video of Robinson's talk a few years ago at the TED conference is hugely popular). Recently users of the online community reddit.com had the opportunity to put questions to Sir Ken Robinson. Here's the transcript of the ten most popular questions, with his answers.

As always, Robinson's insights are profound, and his suggestions are both audacious and inspiring:

The real place to focus, initially, is on the work you do yourself. I'm always keen to say this: Education doesn't happen in the committee rooms of Washington, or London, or Paris or Berlin. It doesn't happen in government buildings. It happens in the minds of students and learners. It happens in the classroom.

If you've got a child, education then is not what's happening in the Beltway; it's what's happening in their head and body, today, in their classroom, or wherever they're being held to learn. So what I would say to teachers is: Change your own practice, today. The education your children are getting is a result of what you're doing with them.

Here's a tiny bit of astonishing beauty to get you to the weekend. British sculpture Willard Wigan has creates of works of art that are so astonishingly small that they defy belief. To Wigan, the head of a pin is a full-sized pediment, and one of his works has not one, but nine, meticulously crafted camels passing through the eye of a needle.

Wigan works with tiny hand made knives, fly hair paint brushes, and microscopes for his tools, and pieces of fluff plucked out of the air, tiny shards of glass and plastic, and spiders webbing for his materials. He typically spends weeks...sometimes months...crafting each piece, working in the space between heartbeats when his hand is steadier, and holding his breath lest he accidentally inhale one of his creations.

In a surprisingly moving talk at a TED conference this summer, Wigan recounts the difficulties he had in school, how he began spending his time making tiny houses for the ants in his yard, and how that led him to a realization of the infinite possibility of the infinitesimally small. Here's a video of his TED talk.

There's almost certainly no way you could afford one of Wigan's sculptures (he can only make a few a year, and the waiting list is a mile long) but his website does offer beautiful prints of his works for sale, such as the statue of David perched on a pin (with an aphid fly for scale).