If I were to make one addendum to my best albums of 2011 list Africa Hitech’s 93 Million Miles would be on it. I’ve been listening to it non-stop for months.

My favorite track is ‘Don’t Fight It’. Absolutely incredible.

No one does covers like Greg Dulli. I can’t wait to see the reunited Afghan Whigs this fall.

Mark Bittman for Marketplace:

The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization has estimated almost 20 percent of greenhouse gases are attributable to the raising of animals for food. Some researchers claim the real number is more like 50 percent.

Biz Stone:

“My first reaction was, if I was given this in a restaurant, I’d get the waiter to come over and ask if he’d accidentally given us real chicken,” says Biz Stone, one of the founders of Twitter, who has been vegan for more than a decade. “It has a plumpness to it, what they call a ‘mouthfeel,’ like a kind of fattiness. When you eat other leading meat analogues, they’re delicious, but you kind of know they’re not real. They’re missing something that’s hard to identify. This has a very realistic, meaty, delicious quality.”

Can’t wait to try this out.

Megafaun isn’t my cup of tea, but this Moog-ified version of “Hope You Know” performed at the Moog Sound Lab after last years Moogfest is really beautiful.

I agree with @dylannau in the comments. It would be really interesting to see Megafaun move in a more electronic direction.

Angelo Badalamenti describes composing ‘Love Theme’ while sharing a piano stool with David Lynch. Amazing.

Man of his word.

Apple’s new process of permanently gluing the battery and display to the case of their new Retina MacBook Pro makes recycling virtually impossible and is therefore ineligible for the EPEAT certification. Rather than work around the problem they withdrew.

Is this really good design in 2012? Extremely disappointing.

A great collection of articles and videos (including one by Santa) explaining the Higgs for non-physicists.

A monumental day for human understanding, but I think Stephen Hawking just lost $100 bucks.

Today is Alan Turing's 100th birthday. Take a minute to listen to Radiolab's excellent piece about his life. Truly a beautiful mind.

Patagonia have released a new book chronicling their 40 years of experience starting, running, and growing a responsible company. I really enjoyed Yvon Chouinard’s 2006 book Let My People Go Surfing and I’m anxious to read this.

It’s very odd that Patagonia, a company very well known for environmental activism, would publish a book in 2012 without a day one digital option. I’ll wait for that version.

This week’s Jam of the Week has been out for a year or so, but was just officially released on Instrumental Mixtape 2 last week.

‘I’m God’ was written for Lil B, but I’d skip his version if I were you. The original is much better.

GigaOm:

The policy was that only after the car was officially on sale and the price had been set could anybody reserve a Model S. They were about to open the meeting, so without saying a word I whip out my wallet, where I always keep one check, fill it out for the full price of the car, and then toss it across the table. Everyone was stunned.

Keeping a single check in your wallet is a really good idea.

If you’re not following Steve Jurvetson’s Flickr blog you should be.

High-Def Digest:

In an early announcement to retailers, the Criterion Collection has slated ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’ for Blu-ray on August 14.

I can’t believe it’s taken this long. Can’t wait.

Steve Lohr on Ken Thompson in his book “Go To”:

He has called programming an addiction of sorts, and it was in the Berkeley computer center that he got hooked. Sitting in the Bell Labs offices years later, he described the appeal as having all the craftsman’s satisfactions of making things, without the cost and trouble of procuring all the materials. “It’s like building something where you don’t have to order the cement,” Thompson said. “You create a world of your own, your own environment, and you never leave this room.”

This is exactly how I felt when I stopped building physical things and learned to program. Now if I only had 1% of Ken’s ability.

Only four entities have put a space capsule in orbit and brought it back: the United States, Russia, China – and Elon Musk. It is Musk’s company, SpaceX, that launched that capsule to the space station today.

What an incredible achievement.