Andrew Higgins, a 10th-level mechanical engineering wizard, looked at the iconic eagle logo of the US Postal Service. He calculated that the physical properties of eagle in flight indicate an air speed of Mach 4.9, which is 3,760 miles per hour.

The Twitter thread continues with Higgins discussing the issue with other mages who have delved into the gnostic arcana of mathematics and physics. I assume that it's an intelligent discussion.

-via Super Punch

The only webcomic I am sure to read every day is Jeph Jacques's Questionable Content. In today's episode, the ladies discuss how to spice up sports in extreme ways. I like Claire's idea for golf: everyone has to play at the same time and as quickly as possible. I suggest adding body checking to the rules.

Maldha Mohamed, an artist who lives in The Maldives, has a moving portfolio of ethereal human subjects. Her entire Instagram feed is worth examining, but what caught my attention was her focused efforts on the human eye. Within a few life-size inches of human flesh, she can meticulously depict emotional intensity and realism. Mohamed talked to My Modern Met about her work:

Although the 22-year-old artist assigns titles to each completed piece, such as Lust and Desire, she says that many of her viewers find different interpretations of the artworks. When seeing one eye “cropped,” the imagination can muse on the rest of the human face and project different expressions.

“It excites me to paint (the eyes), as I try to make them as raw as possible, to give them depth and life,” the artist says. Maldha uses a variety of brushstrokes and textures on the wooden panels, adding dimension to the small portraits. In many of the pieces, this thick application of paint “swirls” around the picture like an emotional current.

Which classic novel would you like to read? Penguin Books makes many classics cheaply available with its iconic covers. You can make your own cover with Nicholas Love's easy web tool.

You can see many funny results in this Twitter thread. Now if you'll excuse me, I have an urgent need to find photos of my co-workers.

-via Aelfred the Great

Redditor gippy44 is a master of his craft. It takes a special genius to so perfectly remake an object so terrible as the spice rack that Homer made in The Simpsons episode "Itchy & Scratchy & Marge." He insists that he was just lucky that the knot in the back board was in the right place.

Yehuda Devir (left) and his wife Maya (center) are the happy parents of Ariel (right) a growing baby. Yehuda and Maya are both artists and, appropriately, illustrate their adventures together in an ongoing comic series titled One of These Days. In it, the parents address the joys, anxieties, and tribulations of raising a baby.

You can follow their labors on Instagram or view a roundup of their babycare-related cartoons at My Modern Met.

Adam Hillman is an artist, but more humbly refers to himself as an "object arranger". Lately, the objects that he has been arranging into mosaics are colored paperclips. Here is his recreation of Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night.

Japanese artist Marina Fujiwara busies herself with "wasted creations" -- inventions that serve little to no practical purpose. For example, she made a pair of nunchaku that, when flipped into one armpit, take her body temperature.

For those of you working from home, she also has tools that will let you fake a Zoom loading error or, nonetheless, motivate you to keep working.

You can view more of Fujiwara's work on YouTube and Instagram.

-via Core77

There's a special surprise inside this cheesecake prepared by redditor cookingwithkatie: whole raspberry cream puffs! It's a dessert inside a dessert, so it's nearly a turducken version of cheesecake. This is apparently a no-bake cheesecake, which helps explain how the cream puffs stayed together so well.

Sora News 24 reports that Japanese-language Twitter is circulating a photo of a page from an English language textbook. The humorous practice dialogue features a heartless wife who's hungry and doesn't care what her supper costs her beleaguered husband. She has inspired fan art that will hopefully be placed in the next edition of the book.

Jim Bachor is a Chicago-based mosaic artist who often fills ugly potholes with his art. He writes that:

In the ancient world, mosaics were used to capture images of everyday life. These colorful pieces of stone or glass set in mortar were the photographs of empires long past. 

Appropriately, he recently filled several potholes in one street with images of supplies that have become especially important while in lockdown. You can view more at Colossal.

Graphic designer Josh Berta set to work digitally altering classic book covers for the Covid-19 era. Here, Earnest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises tells of a different lost generation.

Andy Murdock, the editor of The Statesider travel blog, has been fascinated by fonts since he first got a Macintosh computer in 1984 that offered different fonts, many of them named for places.

Bored while in quarantine, Murdock decided to find out how many fonts were named for places in the US. He stopped at 222, although he admits that he could have kept searching for more, and placed them at their correct locations on a map. You can view his zoomable image here.

In addition to the map, he provides a list of fonts by state. West Virginia has only 1, but California has 23. Miss Cellania's home state of Kentucky has 3, including the deliciously named Kentuckyfried.

-via Marilyn Terrell

It looks just like a tiny zen rock garden! This is the work of Japanese artist and designer Manami Sasaki, who has lately been sculpting slices of toast into elaborate works of art. In this case, the sand substitute is sour cream carefully raked with a fork.

There has been a mill on the site of the Sturminster Newton Mill in Dorset, UK since 1016. The current structure dates back to the 18th Century. It continued to operate until 1970, when it was turned into a museum.

Since then, the old equipment operated sporadically for the amusement of tourists. During the current pandemic, that has turned into a very good thing indeed. The mill has now re-opened to mill flour for local stores. The BBC talked to its operator, Pete Loosmore:

Mr Loosmore said the mill usually gets through a tonne of grain during the tourist season but this increased when local shops started reporting shortages of flour.

"This year we have got through the whole of that tonne in two to three weeks and we're still chasing more and more grain," he said.

"It's been nice to bring the place truly back to life and back into something like it used to be when it was working six days a week."

-via Marginal Revolution | Photo: Marilyn Peddle