• Cobblers in lab coats, or, how it’s made: Louis Vuitton edition.
• Why do I feel like there will be a day when I wish I didn’t know what a nano quadrotor is?
• Star Wars Uncut: A shot-for-shot remake of the entire first Star Wars movie stitched together from hundreds of user-submitted snippets. Hilarious and charming in a hundred different ways.

I am really excited about this 360° image from the Bridge, er, flight deck of the shuttle Discovery. Click for the full, draggable effect. It really looks like the 30-year-old technology that it is, but we’re only two centuries away from galaxy class.

For contemporary comparison, the cockpit of SpaceShip One, the first private sub-orbital spaceplane (“This is my adopted daughter Margot Tenenbaum”), seems to have fewer controls than most airplanes.

The Midwestern United States at night with Aurora Borealis is featured in this image photographed by an Expedition 29 crew member on the International Space Station. [...] Part of the International Space Station appears across the top of the image. This photograph highlights the Chicago, IL, metropolitan area as the largest cluster of lights at center, next to the dark patch of Lake Michigan. The other largest metropolitan areas include St. Louis, MO (lower right), Minneapolis–St. Paul, MN (left) and the Omaha–Council Bluffs region on the Nebraska–Iowa border (lower left).

• An amazing WWII story about Niels Bohr having to dissolve gold Nobel prize medals. Science wins out in the end.
• Studs Terkel talks about radio, his own life and his work process in this interview from 2001. Text and audio available.
• The Scottish Verdict: in the courts of Scotland a criminal verdict can go one of three ways: “proven”, “not proven”, or “not guilty”. Why is a matter of some interesting history.

• A proposed “soda tax” is nothing new, but Mark Bittman gets comprehensive about the potential benefits and the dangers of the status quo.
• What is the best single-page resource for learning about map projections?
  I would posit this page.
• The always entertaining and approachable Neil deGrasse Tyson breaks down the problem with “unidentified” flying objects and what it would take for him to believe an abduction story.

Sometimes PBS shows this hour-long documentary by Richard Proenneke about his time in the Alaskan wilderness, but I’d never caught the whole thing. In it, he builds a log cabin and spends a year alone. And he would spend 30 more there after that. In contrast to Christopher McCandless and Timothy Treadwell, it’s captivating to watch a lifetime of peaceful experience at work.

A photo of Chicago and the southern tip of Lake Michigan taken onboard the ISS (you can see it in the foreground). The photo comes from an In Focus photo collection covering the recent changing of the guard at the ISS. NASA loves documentation, and this video shows the hugs and handshakes when they opened the hatch in February on Discovery’s last trip.

• I really enjoyed this video on how a quartz watch works.
• The Reader published its annual photo issue (with not one but two photos from Brian Bonenberger).
• A good story will involve George S. Kaufman or Groucho Marx. A great story will feature both.

Cook County and the Ohio State University are researching the coyote population in the Chicago area. Among their findings:

Coyotes are common throughout most of the Chicago region, and our radio-tracking data demonstrate that people and coyotes coexist on a daily basis, with people usually unaware of interactions.

That is, until one trots down State Street. The research site even has territory maps and graphs of pet attacks.