Ralph sent a link to this Discovery Blog article about corn that looks like glass beads. Fancy stuff:

No, this isn’t Photoshop or a gemstone-studded trinket—just an ear of corn. Seedsman Greg Schoen of the Seeds Trust got this “Glass Gems” corn from his “corn-teacher,” a part-Cherokee man in his 80s. He planted the seeds, had a gorgeous harvest last fall, and posted the posts on Seeds Trust’s Facebook page in October. Then last week, the photos of the gem-like corn got picked up on the internet and went viral. Good luck trying to get your hands on any seeds now.

From PetaPixel:

It looks like not even space photography has managed to escape the pixel war, but in the case of the Russian Federal Space Agency’s Elektro-L weather satellite, we’re not complaining. The video you see above is a time lapse put together from 6 days worth of 121-megapixel images taken every 30 minutes by the satellite. The images themselves are not composites of several either, they are just incredibly detailed photos of the entire planet taken from some 22 thousand miles away.

They’re so detailed, in fact, that the resolution comes out to about 1 kilometer per pixel — or in laymen’s terms: this ain’t no camera phone. To add a little bit of color to the proceedings the images are also taken in 4 rather than just 3 wavelengths, yielding that orange color which is actually infrared imaging of vegetation. You can click here to see some higher resolution photos from the Elektro-L.

Quite a battle continues between the Navy and the House GOP over the use of renewable fuels. The Navy wants them; the legislators say not if costs more than oil. The Navy is looking ahead to when a good supply of oil won’t be available; the GOP is looking at…today and tomorrow, I guess. Here are some excerpts from a Wire report:

“I understand that alternative fuels may help our guys in the field, but wouldn’t you agree that the thing they’d be more concerned about is having more ships, more planes, more prepositioned stocks,” Rep. Randy Forbes said during a February hearing with Mabus. “Shouldn’t we refocus our priorities and make those things our priorities instead of advancing a biofuels market?” Then he told Mabus: “You’re not the secretary of the energy. You’re the secretary of the Navy.”

Mabus and his allies countered that the Republicans were taking an overly-simplistic view of things. Of course relatively small batches of a new fuel are going to be expensive — just like the original, 5GB iPod cost $400 and held fewer songs than today’s $129 model, which holds 8 GB. That’s the nature of research and development. With development time and big enough purchases, the costs of biofuels will come down, they argued; already, the price has dropped in half since 2009.

“It’s a false choice to say that we should concentrate on more ships versus a different kind of fuel. If we don’t get a different kind of fuel, if we don’t have a secure domestic supply of energy at an affordable price… the ships and the planes may not be able to be used because we can’t get the fuel,” Mabus told the Senate Subcommittee on Water and Power in March.

Katrina Gulliver discusses the use of Twitter and ends her article with her Ten Commandments:

1. Put up an avatar. It doesn’t really matter what the picture is, but the “egg picture” (the default avatar for new accounts) makes you look like a spammer.

2. Don’t pick a Twitter name that is difficult to spell or remember.

3. Tweet regularly.

4. Don’t ignore people who tweet at you. Set Twitter to send you an e-mail notification when you get a mention or a private message. If you don’t do that, then check your account frequently.

5. Engage in conversation. Don’t just drop in to post your own update and disappear. Twitter is not a “broadcast-only” mechanism; it’s CB radio.

6. Learn the hashtags for your subject field or topics of interest, and use them.

7. Don’t just make statements. Ask questions.

8. Don’t just post links to news articles. I don’t need you to be my aggregator.

9. Do show your personality. Crack some jokes.

10. Have fun.

As of 1945, that is.

Salon’s Steve Kornacki discusses the effects of the Tea Party on the GOP. It’s written in light of Se. Lugar’s primary defeat:

“Bipartisanship,” Mourdock declared last week, “ought to consist of Democrats coming to the Republican point of view.”

This is as concise a distillation of the Tea Party’s governing vision as you’ll find. It’s not really about moving the GOP to the right; the party is already there, and has been for a while. It’s about reflexively opposing the other party on every issue, resisting compromise at all costs, and exploiting every available legislative tool to stymie the other side. This mindset is already pervasive in the House, and as the Times story shows, it’s now making its way into the Senate.

Kornicki sees the change as moving toward a parliamentary style.

Frank Jacobs discusses world maps that plot population distribution:

Did you know that almost 90% of the world’s population lives in the northern hemisphere? And that half of all Earthlings [1] reside north of 27°N? Or that the average human lives at 24 degrees from the equator – either to its north or south? Bill Rankin did. Or at least he found out, while producing this fascinating diptych of world maps, plotting population distribution on axes of longitude and latitude.

These maps have been floating around the internet for a few years now [2]. Like barnacled ships and whales at sea, they show their age by the virtual symbionts with which they are encrusted.

Or in this case, some rather opinionated comments.

Some commenters find fault with these maps: Exactly what information do they display? It is not population density, so much as population distribution that is shown. From either of these infographics alone, the precise locations of the densely inhabited centres of the world are not readily deducable.

But I side with those who fall for the abstract beauty of these graphs. Divorced from direct geographical (let alone historical and sociological) context, and further divided by longitude and latitude [3], they have an intriguing quality, inviting us to decode them all over again.

The online visualization titled “3.1415926535897932384626…” [two-n.com] by design studio TWO-N represents the first 4,000,000 decimals of the number Pi within a single image.

Each unique digit of Pi corresponds to a specific color, and is rendered as a 1×1 pixel dot. The result is a long, random-looking pixel carpet image. Next to a dedicated slider that allows up/down scrolling through the resulting image, one can also search for the first occurrences of any specific decimal combination.

The movie “Welcome to the Anthropocene” [vimeo.com] developed by global education organization Globaia reveals the start of a new geological era dominated by humans, by visualizing its main infrastructure, such as cities, roads, railways, transmissions lines and underwater cables.

A collection of static maps is located here.