The very clever Wes Anderson Bible graphically displays what the Bible would sound like if Wes Anderson were to write it.

Fascinating opinion piece on The Economist explaining how the humble shipping container, "a simple metal box" has "been more important for globalisation than freer trade."

Containerisation is a testament to the power of process innovation. In the 1950s the world’s ports still did business much as they had for centuries. When ships moored, hordes of longshoremen unloaded “break bulk” cargo crammed into the hold. They then squeezed outbound cargo in as efficiently as possible in a game of maritime Tetris. The process was expensive and slow; most ships spent much more time tied up than plying the seas. And theft was rampant: a dock worker was said to earn “$20 a day and all the Scotch you could carry home.”

Containerisation changed everything. It was the brainchild of Malcom McLean, an American trucking magnate. He reckoned that big savings could be had by packing goods in uniform containers that could easily be moved between lorry and ship. When he

California-based Sculptor Colin Selig has this gallery for his seating sculptures made from propane tanks. I'm in love with the white one complete with red logo you see above.

According to Australia's Herald Sun, coins found in Northern Territory have been proven to be 1000 years old, "opening up the possibility that seafarers from distant countries might have landed in Australia much earlier than what is currently believed."

For a start, if James Cook wasn't the first person to discover Australia, who was?

How did 1000-year-old coins end up on a remote beach on an island off the northern coast of Australia?

Did explorers from distant lands arrive on Australian shores way before the James Cook declared it "terra nullius" and claimed it for the British throne in 1770?

We do know already that Captain Cook wasn't the first white seafarer to step on Australia's shores.

In 1606 a Dutch explorer named Willem Janszoon reached the Cape York peninsula in Queensland, closely followed a few years late by another Dutch seafarer Dirk Hartog.

And the Spaniard Luiz Vaez de Torres discovered the strait between Papua New Guinea and Australia, which was

Fourth grader Zachary Maxwell's documentary, Yuck: A 4th Grader’s Short Documentary About School Lunch, compares the "delicious and nutritious cuisine" menu choices advertised to his parents by the school versus the bizarre obscenities that landed on his plate.

Like many things in the life of a fourth grader, Zachary’s movie started as a dispute with his parents. He told them that he wanted to start packing his own lunch, but they were skeptical. Lunch is free at his school, P.S. 130 Hernando De Soto in Little Italy, and his parents liked the look of the Department of Education’s online menus, which describe delicious meals, full of whole grains and fresh vegetables, some even designed by celebrity chefs.

“I told them that’s not what they were actually serving me,” Zachary said. “But I don’t think they believed me.”

So he smuggled in a camera in his sweatshirt pocket the next day and filmed lunch.

“When

With scientists successfully turning human skin cells into embryonic cells — a type of multi-purpose cell that "could go on to differentiate into heart, nerve, muscle, bone and all the other tissue types that make up a human body" — and despite stopping "well short of creating a human clone," the experiment "may revive the controversy over human cloning."

This technique can yield fresh tissue that is an exact genetic match for the patient for whom it is intended.

The scientists first removed the DNA from an unfertilized human egg, and then inserted a patient's mature skin cell — containing the patient's DNA — into that egg. Next, they prompted a chemical reaction, causing the cells to fuse and begin development.

That led to a blastocyst, a hollow ball of 50 to 100 cells. For a fetus to form, the blastocyst must be implanted in a womb. An inner clump of cells in the blastocyst goes on to form the embryo, while an outer layer goes on to make the

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You've probably read about the scientific seven minute workout, 12 exercises that, when done in sequence over the span of 7 minutes and requiring nothing more than your body and a chair, will provide "the fitness benefits of prolonged endurance training but in much less time." If you were curious in trying but weren't sure what to do and how long to do it for, the 7min website will give you all the steps needed.

On the Edible Geography website, a look into one of the fifteen simulated towns located in the middle of the Mojave Desert that the Department of Defence uses to train its soldiers. Best of all, the simulated town is "populated by 350 civilian role-players, many of Middle Eastern origin." See a video of the town here.

[...] in a city, an army has to deal with an already unusually complex and dangerous spatial situation that is made yet more challenging thanks to its dense concentration of people going about their daily business, against whom the use of force is “constrained, for political, economic, public relations, or humanitarian reasons” (and, one might hopefully add, ethical concerns).

“The crowded bazaar” is, Mr. Grau and Dr. Kipp of the Foreign Military Studies Office conclude, a recipe for “combat in hell.”

And thus it is that the U.S. military hires Afghan-American civilians to pretend to sell plastic bread and meat on

The Junk Culture website has this gallery for a ready-to-brew calendar made entirely from pressed tea leaves. Best part, you can take one of the dates, drop it into hot water and make yourself a cup of tea.

The Open Culture website has this article listing over 500 classic movies -- from Westerns, to Indies all the way to Noir -- that can be watched online, for free.

Where to watch free movies online? Let’s get you started. We have listed here 500+ quality films that you can watch online. The collection is divided into the following categories: Comedy & Drama; Film Noir, Horror & Hitchcock; Westerns & John Wayne; Silent Films; Documentaries, and Animation.

The This Is Colossal website brings to light these wooden pinhole cameras, crafted entirely by hand by Slovenian designer Elvis Halilović, called ONDU.

Forget your camera phone, filters, and “likes,” these tough little lensless film cameras are old school and completely manual, relying on direct exposure of light to film. The cameras come in six different dimensions and film sizes, from the more common Leica 135 format to a 4" x 5: film holder camera, and looking at the examples above they really do seem capable of making some beautiful photos.

You've probably played GeoGuessr when we linked it last week, a game that puts you in a random place using Google Maps' streetview and asks you to guess where you are. Willy Staley of The New York Times has been playing the game and explains "the thrill of visiting Japan... and thinking you're in Ireland."

Here’s how it works: you’re “dropped off” at a random spot within the Street View universe, with no hints about your location but what Google’s cameras have captured. It might be a bustling Brazilian city; it might be the middle of nowhere in Australia; it might be suburban South Africa. You have as much time as you like to explore the area — then you drop a pin on a map to make your guess. Your score is calculated based on the distance between the pin and the actual location. You get five turns.

The most you can hope for, usually, is that you get the country right, because more often than not, you’re dropped off in the middle of nowhere. Road

On The Week, Karina Martinez-Carter explains how the messages in fortune cookies are made and how their existence is -- unsurprisingly -- missing from China. Best of all, that "Fortunes also are tweaked based on client feedback. 'You will meet a tall, dark stranger' was removed from circulation when people complained they found it sinister."

The founders of Wonton Food and Yang's Fortunes both started off focused on other Chinese cuisine products. But each recognized the growing demand for fortune cookies and their baked-in aphorisms, and capitalized on it.

In 2005, The New Yorker profiled Donald Lau, who at the time was vice president of Wonton Food, Inc. and the person writing the fortunes. Lau scribbled off fortunes in between his other duties, gleaning inspiration from wherever he could find it — like signs in the subway, as The New Yorker recounts. Since then, the company has brought on freelance writers to supplement Lau's output of adages.

Lisa Yang, vice

Costing a whopping $27 for a bucket of 12 pieces, and brought into Gaza from Egypt using smuggling tunnels, buckets of KFC chicken and soggy fries make their way to waiting customers wishing to have a taste of the Western world denied to them.

“It’s our right to enjoy that taste the other people all over the world enjoy,” said the entrepreneur, Khalil Efrangi, 31, who started Yamama a few years ago with a fleet of motorbikes ferrying food from Gaza restaurants, the first such delivery service here.

There are no name-brand fast-food franchises on this 140-square-mile coastal strip of 1.7 million Palestinians, where the entry and exit of goods and people remain restricted and the unemployment rate is about 32 percent. Passage into Egypt through the Rafah crossing is limited to about 800 people a day, with men 16 to 40 years old requiring special clearance. Traveling through the Erez crossing into Israel requires a permit and is generally allowed only for medical

Megan Garber of The Atlantic looks at the awesomeness that Canadian astronaut Commander Chris Hadfield has been in promoting the final frontier to a new generation of kids. Above, a revised version of David Bowie's Space Oddity, recorded by Commander Chris Hadfield on board the International Space Station.

Over the course of 144 days spent on the International Space Station (encompassing 2,336 orbits of the Earth and covering nearly 62 million miles), Hadfield didn't merely do his day job -- conducting more than 130 scientific experiments testing the effects of microgravity on masses of various types. He also helped to change our concept of what it means to be an astronaut in the first place. Hadfield is a space explorer in the Gagarin/Glenn/Armstrong model, but he is something else, too: just a guy. A guy who happens to be in space. Hadfield, availing himself of new technologies that are just beginning to be widely adopted, made space travel seem accessible. He made it seem

A quantum internet, a sophisticated work of fiction that kept security experts daydreaming because of the perfect secure communication it can provide, not only already exists but a U.S. government laboratory, the Los Alamos National Lab, has been running it for two years.

The basic idea here is that the act of measuring a quantum object, such as a photon, always changes it. So any attempt to eavesdrop on a quantum message cannot fail to leave telltale signs of snooping that the receiver can detect. That allows anybody to send a “one-time pad” over a quantum network which can then be used for secure communication using conventional classical communication.

That sets things up nicely for perfectly secure messaging known as quantum cryptography and this is actually a fairly straightforward technique for any half decent quantum optics lab. Indeed, a company called ID Quantique sells an off-the-shelf system that has begun to attract banks and other organisations

That sweet limited-edition pixelated LP you see above is from the League of Space Pirates, a group of "mild-mannered rock-n-rollers playing gigs across the galaxy" who may also be "a band of scallywags fighting against their sworn enemy Übercorp." Everything about them is beautiful: the music, the artwork, even their website is pure eye-candy. Check them out.

From the twisted mind of artist Noah Scalin, creator of Skull-A-Day, comes a new history of the future, in the form of a band of badass anti-corporate space pirates who fight The Man while Kicking out The Jams! Lead by Captain Orlok and his gang of merry thieves: Chroma, Mungo, Parrot & Rusty Sheilds, the League of Space Pirates is the bastard child of Doctor Who and Depeche Mode.

Created by Anton Wallén, GeoGuessr throws you in a random place in the world using Google Maps and asks you to figure out where you are. Harder than you'd think.

Vickie Elmer of Quartz magazine, reports on the findings of a study by The Ladders, a job matching site, which states that "every extra letter in a person’s first name may reduce her annual salary by $3,600."

“I don’t think you can pick a name to get more money, but you can pick a name to get less money,” he said. Unusual names such as Apple or Moonbeam and names that sound African American such as Tyronne, Jamal and Latoya were not viewed as positively in the Marquette professors research compared to more common names like John and Susan.

In 2011, LinkedIn reported that American CEOs do often have short names, or nicknames like Peter, Jack or Tony. Elsewhere longer names landed the power position and paychecks: in Europe Wolfgang, Xavier and Charles were among top CEO names and Roberto and Rajiv made the final decisions in Brazil and India. TheLadders’ research is based on US members, though many of them come from all over the world, a

According to one French and one Israeli study, women find a man more attractive if he's holding a guitar in his hands, which seems to indicate that "male musicians are viewed as promising mating material."

Together, these results provide evidence supporting the sexual selection theory of music — the notion that music grew out of early courtship rituals, and is thus strongly related to mating. (For an alternate theory of why humans started keeping time and humming tunes, see here.) But they don’t answer the question of precisely why a musical instrument would increase a man’s attractiveness.

The French researchers offer some theories. Playing music “is perhaps associated with physical and intellectual abilities,” they write — good qualities in a prospective mate. It also implies a work ethic, or at least a willingness to practice. In addition, the image of a guitar (or its case) may bring to mind the image of successful musical stars, and

Gizmodo's Andrew Liszewski brings to attention a piece of advertising that's designed to deliver one message to adults and, thanks to its clever design, another message for children. And it's for a good cause:

The secret behind the ad's wizardry is a lenticular top layer, which shows different images at varying angles. So when an adult — or anyone taller than four feet, five inches — looks at it they only see the image of a sad child and the message: "sometimes, child abuse is only visible to the child suffering it." But when a child looks at the ad, they see bruises on the boy's face and a different message: "if somebody hurts you, phone us and we’ll help you" alongside the foundation's phone number.

The Flavorwire website has this fabulous gallery of little LEGO figurines covered in hand-drawn tattoos. That's one steady hand with one finely tipped pen.

The mad men behind Pilot Extra-Fine ball-pens (aka Barcelona’s Grey agency) have created a great viral marketing featuring LEGOS with drawn on “badass” tattoos. Straight out of your mother’s nightmares, these LEGOS have dedications to Harley Davidson, lots of angry skulls, and in one instance, a rather racy tramp stamp.

According David Brown of The Washington Post, although a word has a "shelf-life" of 8,000 to 9,000 years, linguists have identified about two dozen words we still use today that are 15,000 years old. This is the part that blows my mind:

It’s an odd little speech. But if you went back 15,000 years and spoke these words to hunter-gatherers in Asia in any one of hundreds of modern languages, there is a chance they would understand at least some of what you were saying.

That’s because all of the nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs in the four sentences are words that have descended largely unchanged from a language that died out as the glaciers retreated at the end of the last Ice Age. Those few words mean the same thing, and sound almost the same, as they did then.

On the Pacific Standard magazine, Rick Paulas looks into the mistery behind John Titor, self proclaimed time-traveller who started posting on the Internet claiming to be from the future -- even predicting the end of the world -- until, one day, he disappeared. Hoax or Time Traveller?

In late 2000, that person signed onto the Internet.

A poster going by the screennames “TimeTravel_0” and “John Titor” on a variety of message boards, beginning with the forum at the Time Travel Institute, claimed he was a soldier sent from 2036, the year the computer virus wiped the world. His mission was to head back to 1975 in order to snatch-and-grab an IBM 5100 computer, which had the necessary equipment to fight the future virus. (His detour to the year 2000 was simply to get a little R&R while visiting his three-year-old self, ignoring every fabric-of-time paradox rule from time-travel stories.) Over the next four months, Titor responded to every question

The Camera Lucida was a 19th-century drawing device to help artists draw. The device worked by making "an optical superimposition of the subject being viewed upon the surface upon which the artist is drawing." Jump to the 21st-century and a KickStarter project and you get the NeoLucida, a modern, ultra-portable device that let's you draw what appears superimposed on the paper in front of you.

The NeoLucida is a drawing aid that allows you to trace what you see. Our device is the first portable, authentic camera lucida to be manufactured in nearly a century — but we like to think of it as a disruption to widespread assumptions about art-making and art history. Our design is lightweight (9oz., or 0.25kg), sturdy, compact enough to fit in a handbag, highly adjustable, totally non-electronic, and released with a liberal open-source hardware license. It's also the least-expensive camera lucida ever manufactured. If you enjoy drawing from life, or if you're

If you're old enough to remember playing with Micro Machines, you'll appreciate the painstaking work that went behind creating this stop-motion video featuring a duel between a truck and a car. The video was created by Stoopid Buddy Stoodios.

Buckle your safety belts and check out this lil’ short we cooked up!!

(warning: mild clay violence)

According to Wired magazine, the National Security Agency (NSA) is currently building a fortress-like structure "in the shadow of Utah’s Wasatch Range to the east and the Oquirrh Mountains to the west" called Utah Data Centre and designed to "intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world’s communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks."

He explains that the agency could have installed its tapping gear at the nation’s cable landing stations — the more than two dozen sites on the periphery of the US where fiber-optic cables come ashore. If it had taken that route, the NSA would have been able to limit its eavesdropping to just international communications, which at the time was all that was allowed under US law. Instead it chose to put the wiretapping rooms at key junction points throughout the country — large, windowless

I was bitching to a friend of mine about one of the worst of these changes. Ear hair. He has a theory that since as you age you get shorter, all the extra ear (and nose) hair must be your actual bones being slowly extruded through larger pores in your head. Just stands to reason. But I digress.