The release last week [it was last week when this was written] of a sonar scan showing an anomalous formation on the bottom of the Gulf of Bothnia between Sweden and Finland set off a storm of wild speculation as to what exactly the image means. Most of this speculation centered on the idea that this object (if it is an object or objects …
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via Arts and Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Jean Sibelius’s music – slow, simple, beautiful – was lionised between the world wars. The backlash was as predictable as it was misguided... more
London tube map with distance grids via Boing Boing by Rob Beschizza
London’s famous tube map sacrifices geographical accuracy to make a useful diagram. Though a boon to travellers finding their way around the complex network, it does have drawbacks: for example, the distances between stations are all wrong. This makes it hard to estimate journey times, and easy to make mistakes when travelling overground – one’s mental map of the city starts to resemble the tube diagram more than the real thing. Boing Boing reader Spiregrain created a version of the map where the background is a subtle, distorted grid. Like longitude and latitude lines on a world map projection, they tell the viewer how much geographic distortion is in play in any given region. [ksglp.org.uk]
Brilliant. Read all about it and how it works
Methinks Thou Dost Twitter Too Much
Some evidence suggests it is possible. A study titled “The Wired Unplugged” found that college-aged students suffered symptoms similar to withdrawal from drugs when they were asked to abstain from the Internet for just one day. The majority of participants could not do it. Those who did last 24 hours reported feeling anxious, stressed, and depressed. One student said he “sometimes felt dead”.
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via Arts and Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Temptation’s toll. You spend three or four hours a day resisting desire. The result: terrible decisions…more
A reading retreat via Reading Copy Book Blog by Richard Davies
The Daily Telegraph writes about a reading retreat – a lovely place on the Suffolk coast where you go to do nothing but read.
Original article By Joanne O’Connor
In the Wake of the Humpback: Tracking Whale Migration (Science Up Front) via Britannica Blog by Kara Rogers
A humpback whale breaching the ocean surface near Tofino, B.C., Can. Credit: © Josef78/Shutterstock.com
The turbulent conditions of the open ocean provide ample opportunity to lose one’s way. Yet, somehow, the humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae), whose seasonal migrations can span more than 8,000km of open ocean, finds its way each year to the same polar waters to feed and the same subtropical waters to breed. And now, thanks to a recent study led by University of Canterbury researcher Travis W Horton, scientists are a step closer to understanding how humpbacks perform this remarkable journey.
via Arts and Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
The Teflon icon. An apologist for slavery who fought to destroy the United States becomes an American hero. How did it happen?...more
Cory writes: “Yesterday, I had the delightful experience of attending a fundraiser for Bletchley Park, the birthplace of modern computing and cryptography, where the Allied WWII cipher-breaking effort was headquartered. Cold War paranoia caused Churchill to order Bletchley broken up, its work kept secret, its machines destroyed, and, very slowly, it is being rebuilt.
Earlier this year, the Bletchley Trust acquired Alan Turing’s papers for the collection with a grant from Google.org, and I got this shot of Turing’s awesome hand-drawn Monopoly board – the cryptographers of Bletchley were sequestered from the rest of the world and desperate for distraction, hence this great bit of historical ephemera.
The image is not very clear (you wouldn’t be after 70 years) so why not arrange to go and see the original – and the rest of the amazing stuff at Bletchley Park?What Happens to Your Online Social Self . . . After You Die via The Scholarly Kitchen by Kent Anderson
What happens to your online persona after you die? A surprising number of people are thinking about this. Read more
Information about you can (and probably will) outlive you unless you do something. Perhaps you want to go and look at a site such as Legacy Locker (that one came almost from my memory but then I found a post from Mashable which lists six other resources).
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