Understanding art for geeks. I didn't want to laugh at these, but I couldn't help it. I guess that also describes the entire lolcats experience.

You know how your voice sounds different to you than it does to others? I think it'd be neat to have a device that would let you hear how someone's internal voice sounds.

The flight traffic above North America is so dense that you can see the shape of the continent just by looking at the airplanes. The video comes from Aaron Koblin, whose homepage, along with other sites like Flight Explorer, shows just how congested the skies have become. In fact, there are so many planes flying around that their contrails are having a significant effect on global weather. Interestingly, scientists have theorized about this for a long time, but it wasn't until 9-11 that they actually got a chance to make direct observations.

I took one of those arbitrary job tests in high school, and it told me that I should be an air traffic controller (or a park ranger). Anyhow, I used to think that air traffic was like juggling flaming chainsaws - a sort of organized chaos like you see in the oft-linked video of FedEx planes dealing with a thunderstorm. So it was interesting to see that, at least across the Atlantic, there's actually a huge virtual highway, complete with eastbound and westbound lanes. After taking the job test, one of my classmates was basically told, "you are impatient with stupid people - you should be an engineer." I'm not sure why that's stuck with me for so long, but ever since then I've been trying to convince myself that that's not the reason I became an engineer.