Interactive Fourier series visualized in d3.js http://bl.ocks.org/jinroh/7524988
Tilt Shift photography of galaxies and nebula: http://imgur.com/a/yZcOB/layout/horizontal#0
Note: "Look at the eleventh pic, for example (NGC 3621). Many of the specks of light to the left and right are other galaxies millions of lightyears away. If this were truly tilt-shift, those galaxies wouldn't be in focus." from this comment.
lunchbreak reader feed notes:
The Wikipedia article on Homer pretty drat awful... This comment thread illustrates why this page is really a mess, from a historian's viewpoint. Taking everything with a grain of salt, but it seems that wikipedia has some policies that do not agree with what is commonly viewed as good academic practice. The particular article on Homer gets ~ 100k views a week, so this is a problem.
Will the social sciences ever become hard science? (very likely no, and with good reason.)
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2014/04/will-social-sciences-ever-become-hard.html
The poetry that moves men to tears The comments of this article are full of thoughtful, insightful poems.
Anthony Holden's new anthology celebrates the poems that move men – with revealing contributions from the likes of Ian McEwan, Jonathan Franz...
From the comments section (which is just as fascinating as the article itself):
Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden
Those Winter Sundays
Sundays too my father got up earlyand put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,then with cracked hands that achedfrom labor in the weekday weather madebanked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I`d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.When the rooms were warm, he`d call,and slowly I would rise and dress,fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,who had driven out the coldand polished my good shoes as well.What did I know, what did I knowof love`s austere and lonely offices?
The problem is simple, the researchers are disproving always false null hypotheses and taking this disproof as near proof that their theory is correct.
Beautifully graphs with clear explanations and interpretations are one of my favorite things. This blog post by the 538 blog is a prime example of just that.
While discussing counterexamples with a student today I mentioned the Weierstrass function. Here is an great blog post which gives some backstory to the development of and reaction to the function that is everywhere continuous and nowhere differentiable. A thumb on the nose to Newton.
