If you haven't already, spend a moment with Timelapse. It takes decades of government satellite images and turns them into short movies that show you what we've been doing to the planet recently.

In addition to watching the Columbia Glacier recede, you can watch coal seams being opened up in Wyoming! And sprawl sprawling in Las Vegas! And rainforest disappearing in Brazil! And, if you use the search function, Seattle densifying!

Check out this combo of the Turkish Stud, Hamster Dance, and Gonads and Strife, you guys!!!

Third in a very special series, with thanks to AirBuddy!

"I am admittedly very high right now," Slog tipper Taylor wrote at 1:13 AM, "but I think someone at the Stranger will find this video amusing enough to post it on Slog. I don't know if amusing is even the right word. Watch for yourselves."

The most honest piece to be published from Google's I/O Conference this week is a brief, satirical piece of science fiction published in Wired.

“Hello.”

The soft, froggy voice startled me. I turned around to face an approaching figure. It was Larry Page, naked, save for a pair of eyeglasses.

“Welcome to Google Island. I hope my nudity doesn’t bother you. We’re completely committed to openness here. Search history. Health data. Your genetic blueprint. One way to express this is by removing clothes to foster experimentation. It’s something I learned at Burning Man,” he said. “Here, drink this. You’re slightly dehydrated, and your blood sugar is low. This is a blend of water, electrolytes, and glucose.”

Go read the whole thing.

The Atlantic Cities on the evolution of Twitter, the nervous system of the emerging global consciousness...

We wrote in late 2011 about some early research suggesting that many Twitter users in fact follow other people located within their same city, evidence, Richard Florida wrote, that the Internet is reinforcing the value of place instead of eliminating it.

But now that Twitter is a few years older – and considerably more global – Leetaru and several colleagues have conducted a massive new analysis of the site that suggests the opposite: "In effect," Leetrau says, "location plays a much lesser role now in terms of who we talk to, what we talk about, and where we get our information."

"In reality on Twitter, even though you may be following a lot of people, you’re probably paying attention more to some than others. But there’s no way of recording that," Leetaru says. "What we can do is say 'well, here are the people you’re talking to. Here are the people you thought were interesting enough to retweet.'"

What it's coming down to is this...

• NASA

"Where there’s power, there’s Twitter," Leetaru says. "The more power, the more Twitter. That tells us that quite literally even in the most remote areas of Africa, if there’s power there, chances are there’s Twitter there at a relative density of power."

There are a few exceptions: Iran and China show fewer tweets than we’d expect given the electricity levels there because Twitter is censored. But for the most part, once we realize Twitter is nearly everywhere electricity will allow it to go, that picture allows us to examine how (and if) all of these people, all over the world, are interacting with each other.

"Two anythings, one cup" isn't permitted. That goes double when you're in the business of selling people big cups of sweet brown sludge.

TechCrunch has the story of Social Roulette, which launched on Saturday. Like indicated by its name, Social Roulette claims that by playing it, you have "a 1 in 6 chance of deleting your account, and a 5 in 6 chance that it just posts 'I played Social Roulette and survived' to your timeline." From the site:

Everyone thinks about deleting their account at some point, it's a completely normal reaction to the overwhelming nature of digital culture. Is it time to consider a new development in your life? Are you looking for the opportunity to start fresh? Or are you just seeking cheap thrills at the expense of your social network? Maybe it's time for you to play Social Roulette.

No word on whether or not it was supposed to post anything shortly before it deleted your account. And, sadly but unsurprisingly, Facebook has already blocked it.

My brother deleted his Facebook account last year and recently rejoined, vowing to "be friends with less classmates from high school." I think about deleting my account every day, and Social Roulette might just have been the ultimate way to do it. Instead I've just been checking it less, and since I'm someone who considers myself "a writer," I justify its continued existence by saying that it's "a platform," because I read somewhere that publishers like a writer to have that sort of thing.

Have you deleted your Facebook account? Have you deleted your Facebook account and then gone back? What say you, Slog?

Finally, a wireless broadband technology that can stream movies fast enough to keep up with Paul's ability to consume them:

Samsung on Sunday announced that it had developed a core component of its 5G network by solving a problem that has stymied the wireless industry, Yonhap News reported. Using the 28GHz waveband, Samsung says it has achieved download and upload speeds of tens of gigabits per second (Gbps). Current 4G LTE networks top out at around 75 megabits (Mbps).

In practice, that speed would allow wireless users to download a full HD movie in seconds.

Unfortunately, it would also allow wireless customers to use up their entire monthly data cap in seconds.

YouTube's new paid content service has gone live, and it features fitness channels, a couple of movie distribution companies (including mockbuster manufacturer The Asylum), a Cuban channel, and something called "Fix My Hog Premium," among others. Deadline explains:

Sesame Street and Young Turks are among 30 YouTube services that, beginning today, will offer content to people who pay a subscription fee following a 14-day free trial period. They’ll cost an average of $2.99 a month, payable via credit card or Google Wallet, and some will go for as little as 99 cents...

I don't know. Besides Sesame Street—which is not currently on the list of pay channels, by the way—I'm not sure that anyone would be willing to spend any money on these channels. Maybe this is the beginning of the end of free video on the internet, but as long as the free videos on YouTube are there to discourage people from paying for, well, the paid videos on YouTube, I just can't see this taking off.

CNET says:

President Obama has picked Nicole Wong, Twitter's legal director, to be the White House's first chief privacy officer, CNET has learned.

Wong previously was a vice president and deputy general counsel at Google at its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters, where she managed a team of lawyers that worked with the company's engineers to review products before they launched. The reviews included privacy, copyright, and removal requests, which earned her a nickname of "The Decider" — as recounted in a 2008 New York Times Magazine article.

This seems like good news to me; the fact that Wong worked at Twitter, which is the most privacy-friendly of the social networks, seems like a sign that she'll take our privacy seriously. If Obama chose someone from, say, Facebook, that would be a real cause for concern.

...and it is American. What's more, there has been a secret quantum network established at Los Alamos labs for two and a half years, according to the MIT Technology Review.

One of the dreams for security experts is the creation of a quantum internet that allows perfectly secure communication based on the powerful laws of quantum mechanics.

The basic idea here is that the act of measuring a quantum object, such as a photon, always changes it. So any attempt to eavesdrop on a quantum message cannot fail to leave telltale signs of snooping that the receiver can detect. That allows anybody to send a “one-time pad” over a quantum network which can then be used for secure communication using conventional classical communication...Today, Richard Hughes and pals at Los Alamos National Labs in New Mexico reveal an alternative quantum internet, which they say they’ve been running for two and half years.

I'm nowhere near smart enough to understand the implications of all this, but I can tell you that it's a really goddamned big deal.

1. Build a totally unconvincing social media profile for a nonexistent woman.

2. Send a single text message to all the men who approach that aforementioned profile.

There's gotta be some way to make money off this.

Or was it? (But really, it probably was.)

The Syrian Electronic Army has apparently hacked The Onion’s twitter account, exposing the groups seriously morbid sense of “humor”. “UN retracts report of Syrian chemical weapon use: “Lab tests confirm it is Jihadi body odor”, went one tweet.

Twitter has got to do something about this hacking problem; the TechCrunch article says that two-step verification is in the works, but a few more of these public embarrassments will damage the entire service's credibility. (Also, politicians should take note: Now is probably the best time to say something horrible on Twitter. If even The Onion is getting hacked, accountability for your internet words has got to be at an all-time low.)

UPDATE 1:13 PM: The Onion has responded to the hacking with two new stories.

Remember when Microsoft purchased Hotmail for $400 million (in 1998 dollars) in order to turn up the competitive heat on arch-rival America Online?

It's official: Hotmail is dead.

The company announced it has completed the transition from the email service to the new Outlook.com, which now boasts more than 400 million accounts.

On the bright side, Microsoft's Internet strategy turned out a helluva lot better than AOL's, so I guess it has that going for it.