Ula-Ula man's island

Influence: A Brief History via @LuciaMarino81

superheroes and supervillains in history

via @peppeliberti

Ernest Everett Just

jtotheizzoe:

Thomas Edison’s To-Do List, 1888

Well, if this doesn’t inspire you to be more productive, what will? What are you doing today?

(via Brain Pickings)

quantumaniac:

Physics Clock

expose-the-light:

Home Sweet Home

Einstein at his home in Princeton, New Jersey.

quantumaniac:

Isaac Newton’s Apple Tree

Located in front of Trinity College, to the right of the Great Gate. Although impossible to prove, this is believed to be where Isaac Newton made his famous realization. 

Andy Warner and a new approach to graphical journalism

Andy Warner is a great cartoonist. Reading the archive of his blog, you can see that he writes and draws some beautiful stories about people and life (Behind the Stars). Recently he started to realize some political comics, the first for his blog, The man who built Beirut, and two others for the Slate about the syrian uprising: the first about the Assad’s family and the second about the 1949 coup (with the probably collaboration of CIA) that it is the origin of the syrian political situation.
In particular with these syrian comics, Andy experiments a particular type of graphic reportage (or graphic journalism), with a story telling near to the Introducing series, with a large use of explenations, and some ballons

Furthermore the comics about the story of the Assad’s family has an infographical structure that is very useful for this type of web comic

Another interesting tool is the timeline embedded in the second syrian comic:

I think that Andy has a good story telling in general, but the use of infographic and timeline in this type of comics could take the graphical journalism in a more interesting era.

(via Il Giornalaio)

Albert Einstein, Rock Star

He made science cool, turned bad hair good—and there’s that tongue photo. by Thomas Levenson

Bob Dylan came up with one way to remember Albert Einstein: “Now you would not think to look at him/But he was famous long ago/For playing the electric violin/On Desolation Row.”

This is the pure distillate of celebrity. Dylan’s folk-rock vision of “Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood” is one in which the original man has disappeared into a symbolic fog where more or less any meaning may be found. Nowadays, such content-less fame has become common, though there aren’t many out there who match Einstein for resonance. But when he first exploded into public view, there were no precedents. No scientist before or since has so completely transcended the role of expert to become a universal emblem of reason.

It is possible to fix almost to the day the moment when Einstein became an icon. On November 6, 1919, he was still a private person. But that night, the Royal Society held a special meeting in London to announce the results of observations that seemed to confirm Einstein’s theory of gravity, the general theory of relativity. As The Times of London reported in a headline the next day, the society concluded that the work amounted to a “Revolution in Science—New Theory of the Universe—Newton’s Ideas Overthrown.” Three days later, The New York Times picked the story up, blaring that there were “Lights All Askew in the Heavens…[the] stars [were] not where they seemed or were calculated to be.” From there the word spread around the globe until, by the turn of the year, Albert Einstein had crossed the point of no return: He was and has remained public property. But that raises questions: Why him, why then, why still?