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A beautiful informatics poster created by David McCandless and Andy Perkins.

According to informationisbeautiful.net, this visualization generates itself from this Google Doc. So when new research comes out, they can quickly update the data and regenerate the image. Check out the interactive version.

The girl featured in this video was stranded in the Pittsburgh International Airport for 10 hours during Snowpocalypse ‘09. She passed the time by video taping herself. Well done!
Via Boing Boing

If you’re like me, you probably have an external hard drive laying around. Now you can it into a USB drive. This simple tutorial at instructables.com shows you how.

Kate Madison – a super fan of the Lord Of The Rings films – set out to make her very own prequel to the trilogy series with £25,000 of her life savings. She wrote, directed and produced the prequel based on two paragraphs lifted from the appendix in JRR Tolkien’s books. The end result was  an hour long prequel titled “Born Of Hope.”

Gone was the elaborate £200million budget and lush scenery of New Zealand trilogy director Peter Jackson had at his disposal. The film was shot entirely on location around England and took over a year to shoot. Incredibly, Madison convinced more than 400 cast and crew to donate their time for the project. She picked up office temp work and earned an additional £17,000 by posting a trailer on YouTube accepting donations. She also played the part of Elgarain the forest ranger herself.

It’s a remarkable effort and most certainly surpasses the modest budget. View the film in it’s entirety at BornOfHope.com.