Very creepy video (especially if you don’t like stinging insects). Since they evolved in separate locations, European honey bees have no defence against the giant Japanese hornets. Japanese bees, on the other hand:

The Japanese honey bee, on the other hand, has a defense against attacks of this manner. When a hornet approaches the hive to release pheromones, the bee workers emerge from their hive in an angry cloud-formation with some 500 individuals. As they form a tight ball around the hornet, the ball increases in heat to 47 °C (117 °F) from their vibrating wings, forming a convection oven as the heat released by the bees’ bodies is spread over the hornets. Because bees can survive higher temperatures (48 to 50 °C (118 to 122 °F)) than the hornet (44 to 46 °C (111 to 115 °F)), the latter dies.

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Very creative advertising!

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Writing in Vanity Fair, Kurt Andersen argues that there’s been no significant change in popular culture in the West in 20 years – a very strange thing indeed.

The past is a foreign country. Only 20 years ago the World Wide Web was an obscure academic thingamajig. All personal computers were fancy stand-alone typewriters and calculators that showed only text (but no newspapers or magazines), played no video or music, offered no products to buy. E-mail (a new coinage) and cell phones were still novelties. Personal music players required cassettes or CDs. Nobody had seen a computer-animated feature film or computer-generated scenes with live actors, and DVDs didn’t exist. The human genome hadn’t been decoded, genetically modified food didn’t exist, and functional M.R.I. was a brand-new experimental research technique. Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden had never been mentioned in The New York Times.China’s economy was less than one-eighth of its current size. CNN was the only general-interest cable news channel. Moderate Republicans occupied the White House and ran the Senate’s G.O.P. caucus.

Since 1992, as the technological miracles and wonders have propagated and the political economy has transformed, the world has become radically and profoundly new. (And then there’s the miraculous drop in violent crime in the United States, by half.) Here is what’s odd: during these same 20 years, the appearance of the world (computers, TVs, telephones, and music players aside) has changed hardly at all, less than it did during any 20-year period for at least a century. The past is a foreign country, but the recent past—the 00s, the 90s, even a lot of the 80s—looks almost identical to the present. This is the First Great Paradox of Contemporary Cultural History.

Think about it. Picture it. Rewind any other 20-year chunk of 20th-century time. There’s no chance you would mistake a photograph or movie of Americans or an American city from 1972—giant sideburns, collars, and bell-bottoms, leisure suits and cigarettes, AMC Javelins and Matadors and Gremlins alongside Dodge Demons, Swingers, Plymouth Dusters, and Scamps—with images from 1992. Time-travel back another 20 years, before rock ’n’ roll and the Pill and Vietnam, when both sexes wore hats and cars were big and bulbous with late-moderne fenders and fins—again, unmistakably different, 1952 from 1972. You can keep doing it and see that the characteristic surfaces and sounds of each historical moment are absolutely distinct from those of 20 years earlier or later: the clothes, the hair, the cars, the advertising—all of it. It’s even true of the 19th century: practically no respectable American man wore a beard before the 1850s, for instance, but beards were almost obligatory in the 1870s, and then disappeared again by 1900. The modern sensibility has been defined by brief stylistic shelf lives, our minds trained to register the recent past as old-fashioned.

You Say You Want a Devolution?   [Vanity Fair]

Fascinating photographs on the In Focus blog, giving a look inside Iran. It looks like a very different country (not to mention a much more diverse one) than the way it tends to be presented in the West. Case in point:

A View Inside Iran   [In Focus]

(Pardon the language at the beginning)

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Some fascinating answers to a simple question posted on Quora: what’s it like to have a deep understanding of mathematics?

You are comfortable with feeling like you have no deep understanding of the problem you are studying. Indeed, when you do have a deep understanding, you have solved the problem and it is time to do something else. This makes the total time you spend in life reveling in your mastery of something quite brief. One of the main skills of research scientists of any type is knowing how to work comfortably and productively in a state of confusion.

What is it Like to Have an Understanding of Very Advanced Mathematics?   [Quora]

Teh Tarik is a Malaysian beverage, with the name translating as ‘pulled tea’:

The mixture is poured back and forth repeatedly between two vessels from a height, giving it a thick frothy top. This process cools the process fluid (tea) to optimal drinking temperatures, and helps to thoroughly mix the tea with the condensed milk.

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Good thing he warned me not to try this at home, because after seeing how well it worked for him I definitely would have.

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Google’s powerful review of the year that was.

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Bella the dog sits happily in her specially-designed Bailey Chair at mealtimes:

This is our cute dog Bella. She was diagnosed with congenital megaesophagus soon after we found her at 4 months old. Megaesophagus means that her esophagus is enlarged and lacks the muscle mobility to swallow food while horizontal. This is her “Baileys Chair,” which she needs sit in while eating and for 10 minutes after she eats. She eats soft dog food with a little water mixed in. She is now seven months old and doing great!

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