Tell me this has never happened to you waiting for a red light:

Like me, you probably don’t associate the traffic lights on Southampton Row with the end of the world.

But it was while waiting there in 1933 that the Hungarian polymath Leo Szilard conceived the idea of a nuclear chain reaction, and thus the creation of the atomic bomb.

In the Telegraph, Tibor Fischer continues:

The car contains Szilard and his de facto chauffeur, Wigner (only Szilard would use a future Nobel Laureate as his taxi service). They are trying to find Albert Einstein to convince him of the need to urge the US government to start building an atomic bomb before the Nazis do.

When they finally locate Einstein and outline how chain reactions can be achieved, Einstein comments: “Daran habe ich gar nicht gedacht” (I hadn

Interview with Alex Kubalsky, a designer of modern Transformer toys:

What would you like to design that hasn’t been designed yet?

Just an odd object that transforms into another odd object for no reason. Just so because it looks interesting as it transforms. It is not so much about what it is in a and b – but the path itself is c. The transformation itself is the interesting thing!

Whoah.

While we’re at it: original Transformers instruction booklets. For the record, I never used these, and was sooo proud of myself.

Okay, fine, one more thing: You’ve Got the Touch.

My favorite thing in my All-Ett these days is the impossibly tiny Kingmax 2-gb Super Stick. The dimensions? 1.3″ x 0.1″ x 0.5″. Two gigabytes. That’s more capacity than my high school desktop PC. And it’s made of reinforced steel or something, honestly. Best part? It costs $16.

Why hasn’t this device taken over the world yet?

Nothing you can tell me will convince me this is real. Nothing.

This map displays US states renamed as foreign countries with similar GDP. California, for example, is re-christened France (whose GDP is $2.15 tril), Michigan becomes Argentina, and Texas becomes Canada. As the footnotes on the map indicate, it’s not a straightforward comparison, because it doesn’t include population. But it’s a pretty darn interesting visualization nonetheless.

Ha! I bet you thought I was posting an actual link to a site that was, in fact, Threadless for bumper stickers. But if such a thing exists — which it must — I’m not cool enough to know about it. Enlighten me, o ye crowd-wisdom.

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From Elizabeth Kolbert’s lovely article about CERN’s giant Hadron Collider:

It is one of the paradoxes of particle physics that fundamental particles, though pointlike and indivisible, are also generally unstable. In fact, the heavier particles are so short-lived that even to speak of their having an existence seems faintly ludicrous; a top quark, for example, is estimated to last no more than 1

Jarah blogs what may be the best headline of all time, courtesy of Wired’s Malcontents.

(Note: This blog post is essentially Jarah’s blog post, with an additional layer of attribution. I love how recursive blogging can be. I’m trying to think if I’ve ever seen a blog post retain the entire meme trail of an item before. How awesome would it be to see “Wired via Jarah via Matt via” at the end of a post? Can you guys think of anything like that?)

Neglected to post about this: This year, ASME posted all the links for the NMA finalists all on its own. I’d like to take some credit for this.