http://blogs.howstuffworks.com/category/stuff-you-should-know/

Top 5 Stuff You Should Know Podcasts: (at least for me so far…and from the podcasts I’ve heard)

1. What is a hangover, really?

2. How Breathalyzers Work: Really, Really Complicated

3. How Flamethrowers Work

4. What Exactly is Fascism?

5. How Near-Death Experiences Work

Here’s a short video of the guys issuing a challenge to Stephen Colbert to help raise money for Kiva.org -

The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken in 1990 by Voyager 1. By request of CarlSagan, in command of theNASA spacecraft, having completed its primary mission and now leaving the Solar System, a mere 3,762,136,324 miles from Earth, to turn its camera around and to take a photograph of Earth across a great expanse of space. This narrow-angle color image of the Earth, dubbed ’Pale Blue Dot’, is a part of the first ever ‘portrait’ of the solar system taken by Voyager 1. NASA acquired a total of 60 frames for a mosaic of the solar system from a distance of more than 4 billion miles from Earth. From Voyager’s great distance Earth is a mere point of light, less than the size of a picture element even in the narrow-angle camera! Earth was a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size. Coincidentally, Earth lies right in the center of one of the scattered light rays resulting from taking the image so close to the sun.

This blown-up image of the Earth was taken throughthree color filters — violet, blue and green — and recombined to produce the

color image. The background features in the image are artifacts resulting from the magnification

Subsequently, the title of the photograph was used by Sagan as the primary title of his 1994 book. He reads an excerpt of that book set to clips from some of histories most popular films (one of our most dramatic, diverse, and popular mediums of human artistic expression) set to the atmospheric music of Mogwai –  perfect for this sort of philosophic theme. (a film by David Fu – www.palebluefilms.com)

What power just a single image can have!

NASA's image of the plume of ash and steam rising from the Iceland's Eyjafjallajökull Volcano reached five to six kilometers (17,000 to 20,000 feet)

So tomorrow myself and my videographing partner Ismael will be headed on our trip to Leicester, England to shoot a wedding in the lovely English country side. Along the way, we will be stopping for a few days in both New York City and Reykjavik, Iceland for some time off (at least out of the office) and time to explore some interesting people and landscapes.

Of course we will be carrying along all of our equipment for some Icelandic volcano footage as well as some NYC broll shots for a project we’re currently working on. This reminds me of the very best broll commercial of all time – from a company called We Got That BRoll. I just hope that saying doesn’t become the theme of the trip!

So hopefully we can get out and meet some cool people and see some great sights – and our flights dont get disrupted by

@theashcloud haha! Check back soon for updates, photos, and hopefully some totally rad broll!

Shaun White pushing the crowd at the Winter X Games '10 in Aspen, Co

More photos from the the X Games to come….check out last year’s images while your at it – http://www.mikenyff.com/photography/event/xgames/