• Today it would be created with computers, but the opening sequence of Blade Runner was all done with miniatures. This video shows the considerable work that went into that tiny dystopian world.
• It’s not going to win any beauty contests, but this site for learning to tie useful knots is dead simple.
• This week in Wikipedia lists: military figures by nickname. Don’t mess with the “Swamp Fox,” the “Electric Brain,” or the “Black Swallow of Death,” but what about “Uncle Wiggly Wings?”

A human-powered machine with bird-like wings was one of our earliest conceptions of flight. University of Toronto engineering students revived this design with modern materials and an assisted take-off. It’s a beautiful thing to watch, but the flight doesn’t touch the record set by MIT’s Daedalus.

• The Royal Observatory in Greenwich awards the Astronomy Photographer of the Year each year for a number of different categories. In an audio slideshow, Dr Marek Kukula, one of the judges, explains this year’s winning photographs.
• Gunung Mulu is a cave system that extends for hundreds of miles under the island of Borneo. Much of it remains unexplored, but National Geographic collects some pictures of its interesting formations and chambers.
• The BBC put little video cameras on the backs of some of the fastest birds in the world: the Peregrine Falcon and the Goshawk. Look at that thing weave through the trees!

William Gibson, author of Neuromancer and other science fiction classics, thinks about cyberspace, artificial intelligence, and Google.

We have yet to take Google’s measure. We’ve seen nothing like it before, and we already perceive much of our world through it. We would all very much like to be sagely and reliably advised by our own private genie; we would like the genie to make the world more transparent, more easily navigable. Google does that for us: it makes everything in the world accessible to everyone, and everyone accessible to the world. But we see everyone looking in, and blame Google.

Read the full piece at the NYT.