Ocean: An Illustrated Atlas

Underwater Discoveries:

This brown algae and its cousins love coastal waters that are cool or cold. Some form wispy clusters of filaments, while others resemble delicate ribbons or leafy, golden-brown shrubs. One of its relatives forms the kelp forests that thrive off the California coast. It can grow as much as a foot a day, producing what are considered the largest of the sea's photosynthetic organisms.

Photo: Sylvia Earle/National Geographic

Mapping the Sea and Its Mysteries

The Dude's pad

Blueprint for Dude Living

hat tip: growabrain

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Is the US too big to fail? Why are investors rushing to purchase US government securities when the US is the epicentre of the financial crisis? This column attributes the paradox to key emerging market economies’ exchange practices, which require reserves most often invested in US government securities. America’s exorbitant privilege comes with a cost and a responsibility that US policy makers should bear in mind as they handle the crisis. A bit arcane, but worth it, if you can slog through. (via)

A way with words: Lexical wizard Henry Hitchings on the crazy history of our language It's rather nerve-racking, interviewing an acknowledged master of the English language. I tell Henry Hitchings that I feel as though I'll have to take extra care with my choice of words. "Don't," he says briskly, as he ushers me into his book-lined 13th-floor Bermondsey flat. Fortunately, his attitude to language is anything but stuffy, snobbish or prescriptive.

Art sleuth: Museum director also helps nab the bad guys She now routinely goes once a month to The Fortress, the vault where U.S. Customs keeps valuable confiscated goods, ''just to see what they have.'' She reviews photos of artifacts on her computer, and, if she determines more investigation is warranted, she goes to see the items in person. If they are valuable, Damian and the government follow up with an archaeologist from the country to which the artifacts belong. If the case merits prosecution, they contact government authorities as well.

Restaurateur tracks down bill dodgers on Facebook An Australian restaurateur left holding a hefty unpaid bill when five young diners bolted used the popular social network website Facebook to track them down -- and they got their just deserts. (via)

'Mummy, can I phone the pirates?' One of the biggest frustrations facing journalists is being unable to get through to people on the phone. But as Mary Harper discovered, contacting the Somali pirates on the Sirius Star turned out to be child's play. (via)

also:
Shipwreck in Antarctica: Part 1 - Discovering we are sinking (via)
William Friedkin: We're all Dirty Harry now
A Year of Parking Tickets (map of NYC with block-by-block stats - one block had over 10,000) (via)
How to: Transfer Music from One iPod to Another
Quiz: TS Eliot
Patti Smith’s favourite books (via)
Huge glossary of drug slang (via)

viddy:
Lucian Freud on 'Diana and Actaeon'
1964 U.S. anti-China propaganda
Kerouac Scroll Unrolled (via)
Fifty People, One Question: New York (seemed somewhat more superficial and materialistic than the first) (via)
Interesting new synth interface
Orbital to reunite! (plus video of Chime from their farewell set - they are amazing live, more than this video could possibly convey)

Easter Island

POTD

really big version

The map of "blue gold"

Atlas of hidden water may avert future conflict:

They are one of the world's greatest and most precious natural resources, yet are entirely hidden. Now, for the first time, a high-resolution map shows where underground aquifers store vast amounts of water.

via KurzweilAI.net

Carta Marina

Olaus Magnus' Carta Marina:

One of the oldest known maps of the Scandinavian countries and the region around the Baltic Sea is the 1539 Carta Marina (Map of the Sea), a magnificent chart created by Olaus Magnus, an exiled Swedish priest and cartographer living in Italy at the time. The map is filled to every corner with rich, painstakingly detailed drawings of the fantastical beasties that active sailor imaginations populated the seas with: winged fish, sea-dragons, hirsute many-eyed trout, galleon-sized snakes and other monsters worthy of even Hieronymus Bosch.

Full Resolution

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Pirates die strangely after taking Iranian ship A tense standoff has developed in waters off Somalia over an Iranian merchant ship laden with a mysterious cargo that was hijacked by pirates. Somali pirates suffered skin burns, lost hair and fell gravely ill “within days” of boarding the MV Iran Deyanat. Some of them died. Andrew Mwangura, the director of the East African Seafarers’ Assistance Programme, told the Sunday Times: “We don’t know exactly how many, but the information that I am getting is that some of them had died. There is something very wrong about that ship.” (via)

also:
Interview: Matthew Herbert (via)
The International Dialects of English Archive (via)
Carny Lingo (via)

viddy:
Ken Adam talking about the war room set he designed for Dr. Strangelove (via)
Knots - How To Tie A Monkey’s Fist And Heave A Line
Global Air Traffic Simulation (.wmv download; very cool, much better than the YouTube version)
Fridge Monster

blog of the moment: Great Map (always a fun and fascinating journey)

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Life in Somalia's pirate town This is a more elaborate and lucrative operation than you might imagine. Quite the cottage industry they have going on there, complete with a support system and an economy of its own.

Thanks for the advice on Josh I wanted to thank all of you who took the time to email me with your comments on how best to deal with Josh. They were so good, I thought I would share a few of them with everyone. Including the email addresses of those who were bold enough to use real email addresses. Josh realizes his comments were wrong, he understands why people are upset. He knows he has made a mistake, has apologized and will work with us. Beyond that, its a private issue. What about the people who gave me the following advice? Mark Cuban posts some of the emails he received in reference to the Josh Howard situation, complete with addies.

The future of online video The Official Google Blog weighs in. In ten years, we believe that online video broadcasting will be the most ubiquitous and accessible form of communication. The tools for video recording will continue to become smaller and more affordable. Personal media devices will be universal and interconnected. Even more people will have the opportunity to record and share even more video with a small group of friends or everyone around the world. (via)

Journalist retraces the steps of the original 'Zen' author in an engrossing tale Re-enacting the journey from Minneapolis to San Francisco chronicled by Pirsig in his cult classic, "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance," Mark Richardson digs deep to unearth the motives behind his tormented mentor's search for quality while embarking on a search of his own. (via)

Deletionpedia is an archive of about 63,555 pages which have been deleted from the English-language Wikipedia. Deletionpedia is not a wiki: you cannot edit the pages uploaded here. An automated bot uploads pages as they are deleted from Wikipedia.

Frank Deford: Blemish, Anyone? Bets Show Dark Side Of Tennis (audio and text) In the many years I covered tennis, I heard it all: who was pulling the strings, who was double-dealing, who was taking drugs, who was sleeping with whom. But for all the genial corruption, never did I hear — or know anyone else who heard — that some player fixed a match for money, until Internet betting arrived a few years ago. And, I'll bet you didn't know that Humphrey Bogart was the first person to say "Tennis anyone?"

also:
Britain's luckiest man cheated death 14 times
What's new at the Internet Archive
Personality variation by region (USA) (maps) (via)

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US Hands Over Seized Antiquities to Iraq Home to what was once ancient Mesopotamia, Iraq has long been a target of looters and thieves intent on stealing the country's treasure trove of antiquities. But a large cache of priceless artifacts has been returned to Iraq's government, thanks to a multi-year initiative by U.S. customs authorities to intercept items being smuggled into the United States.

Crows may be smarter than apes Researchers found evidence that the birds are able to outsmart people's closest relatives when it comes to finding a way to access food without it falling into a trap.

New face of Canada's lumberjacks African immigrants make up the bulk of the region's forestry workers.

The future of photography Photography entered the digital age in the early 90s and the resulting wave of technical innovation has put cameras everywhere, from satellites to cellphones. But bigger changes in the technology are yet to come.

also:
Cray and Microsoft launch $25,000 'deskside supercomputer'
Top 13 Polar Super Vehicles from Antarctic (via)
A good breakdown of The Statute of Limitations
Marco Polo's Travels on Google Maps (via)

viddy:
The venomous Goliath Tarantula is the largest spider in the world. What should you do if one lands on you?
The Prisoner Video Exclusive - Jim Caviezel Says There's Sand in His Cranium
Leo Kottke - Vaseline Machine Gun (it kicks in around halfway through and it's smokin')
Raga Shivranjani on Bansuri (Indian Bamboo Flute) (beautiful)

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How the Music Business Spent the Summer Killing Itself Labels Pull Albums off iTunes, RIAA Goes After Internet Radio -- When Will They Ever Learn? Idiots. I think this lunacy is driven by lawyers who convince behind-the-times executives that the world is ending in order to fatten their bank accounts with the fees they collect filing cease and desist notices, removing videos from YouTube, and prosecuting their customer base.

The mass graveyard of the blogosphere How many dead blogs do you think exist in the blogosphere today? Take a guess… A couple of million perhaps…? Try again. According to Technorati and PC Mag, in 2007 the number stood at 200 million! Yes, 200 million! Which means blogs are now officially abandoned more often than red headed step children. More research from Perseus on blogging abandonment behaviour found that 66% of blogs hadn’t been updated for two months. So why is it that the blogosphere represents a mass graveyard of unfulfilled intentions? (via)

Clueless smugglers find 'gold' is uranium One thing puzzled them. At night, a report on a local government website said, “they were surprised that, when the lights went out, the treasure sparkled and glittered”. One of the men, identified as Mr Wang, “chipped a piece from it and kept it beside his bed — sometimes playing with it”.... “To prevent the sample being lost or stolen on the way, Mr Wang used tape to stick the unidentified treasure to his body, and it never left him night or day.”

Do No Harm To Humans: Real-life Robots Obey Asimov’s Laws European researchers have developed technology enabling robots to obey Asimov’s golden rules of robotics: to do no harm to humans and to obey them.

Shadow analysis could spot terrorists by their walk By analysing the movements of human shadows in aerial and satellite footage, JPL engineer Adrian Stoica says it should be possible to identify people from the way they walk - a technique called gait analysis, whose power lies in the fact that a person's walking style is very hard to disguise. (via)

Dairy farmers: True IT pioneers The dairy industry was an early adopter of information technology, and dairy farms have been among the most aggressive businesses in the agricultural industry at applying IT. Dairy IT got its start in the 1950s, when an IBM mainframe was used to develop the first dairy records management system and a genetics database...

also:
Nazi-era photos surface in Bolivia
The Global Album Cover Map (via)
Psychic investigator looks into spooky painting (via)
Finding a new position as a mature job hunter
John Titor weighs in on the LHC (entertaining) (via)

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Slow news day today, but we have a few items to mull.

More Miss Marple than 007: the true face of British espionage Like 007, they were licensed to kill, but they would never have dreamt of carrying a gun. “Obviously if your back was to the wall you would have done what was necessary,” Lady Ramsay says. “But we weren't like Rosa Klebb, we didn't have special shoes with poisoned daggers.” Her own firearms training was not a success. “The instructor told me, ‘You're not supposed to close your eyes every time you pull the trigger'.” Lady Park kept her gun in the safe. “In the Congo, I frightened an unwanted visitor away by pretending I was a witch. I shouted out of the window, ‘If you do not go away, your feet will fall off'. That was far more effective than a gun.” Much cooler than the mythology.

also:
Mark Twain's travels in India (via)
New Milky Way Map Reveals A Complicated Outer Galaxy
Canada seeks historic shipwrecks
The Fauxmaxion Map an interactive interpretation of Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion World Map. (read more) (via)
How To Hot Wire Your Car

viddy:
Phillip Glass composition for Sesame Street
Sesame Street - How Crayons Are Made
The Daredevils Who Chase One of the Sky's Greatest Mysteries
Romanian Gypsies (photomontage)

Bill Evans was born on this day in 1929. Bela Lugosi died on this day in 1956.

Map of the countries that do not use the metric system

Map of the world where red represents countries which do not use the metric system.

Wow. I have to admit that I have no conception of measure in terms of the metric system. I can do the conversions, but in my head it's inches, feet, miles, pounds, ounces and gallons.

From Wikimedia Commons
via backscratchings

The first map of the Internet

The first node on the ARPANET.

read more at Next Nature

63 years ago today....

Hiroshima and Nagasaki Remembered

Let it be the last.

ht: this isn't happiness

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Instant-Messagers Really Are About Six Degrees from Kevin Bacon Big Microsoft Study Supports Small World Theory.

New Bargains on Old Furniture Some antique furniture is going for a quarter of what it fetched a year ago as people gravitate toward contemporary styles. On top of that, struggling consumers have been liquidating their collections of vintage pieces, flooding the market. Even high-end auctioneers such as Sotheby's have seen some disappointing sales of all but the rarest pieces. Time to buy low. The pendulum will swing. (via)

also:
The 85 Weirdest Storytellers of the Past 85 Years!
Tom Waits writes about his 20 most cherished albums of all time (good taste) (via)
Philip Toledano - Days with My Father (touching photo essay) (via)
Digital Archive of Toyo Bunko Rare Books The digital archive of basic references on Silk Road, including 92 rare books (29 authors : 19,242 pages) by the digitization of whole books from cover to cover. (beautiful) (via)
Interactive Map of Early Modern London (via)
Ten Great Examples of Science Fiction World Building (via)
August is World Building Month
We Are What We Do a new movement inspiring people to use their everyday actions to change the world. (via) (via)

viddy:
Ray Bradbury on Literature and Love (via)
Today I Googled "Biggest Regret" (thx)
They don't nag and they don't eat much (bizarre sex life)
Play With Your Food (vegetable symphony)

William Gropper's America: Its Folklore, c1946

People Are My Landscape: Social Struggle in the Art of William Gropper:

Cartoonist, painter, lithographer, and muralist William Gropper was born on the Lower East Side of New York City into a working-class Jewish family that labored in the sweatshops of the garment industry. Like many of his peers–such as Philip Evergood, Joseph Hirsch, Louis Lozowick, and Anton Refregier–Gropper rebelled against the formal theories of art that were prevalent at the time. Preferring to depict the harsh reality of social injustices as they were played out in everyday life, Gropper became a defender of the working class. He was best known for his satirical portrayals of the elite and powerful and the effects of capitalism and war on American life.

via coisas do arco da velha

Cytherea (Blue Venus)

Evil Dr. Ganymede:

Here's how I constructed this map: I rendered a global topography map of Venus as a heightfield object viewed from high above with a shadowless light source behind the camera, and a blue plane (the water) set at a water_level of 3 km. I then projected my Earth cloudmap over it (still rendering onto a planar surface) to create the final map. Note that the land colours aren't real, they're just a POV texture (Rusty_Iron) added for a bit of variety.

see also: Blue Mars
via Kenneth Hite

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All Streets All of the streets in the lower 48 United States: an image of 26 million individual road segments. (via)

also:
The Bureau of the Centre for the Study of Surrealism and its Legacy
Sweden's Underground Naval Base at Muskö
Musicovery Mood Music (via)

viddy:
Dog Years Ben 39, Leo, castrated mongrel needs love, G.S.O.H essential. (via)
Orson Scott Card Interview Ender's Game is fine and dandy, but Speaker for the Dead is one of the greatest novels ever written. I have a hard time getting my non-sci-fi friends to read it because I have to get them to read Ender's Game first. (via)
Tesla Coil Guitar Amp
Spoilsbury Toast Boy 2 Warning: Do not watch this if you are easily depressed, easily offended, moderately easy to offend, at work, or a kid. Truly some of the most bizarre shit I've ever witnessed. Spoilsbury Toast Boy 1 (they run in reverse order) Spoilsbury Toast Boy (I loved it.) (via)

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Ebola-like virus returns to Europe after 40 years Marburg is back. (via)

Why Microwave Auditory Effect Crowd-Control Gun Won't Work Experts say you'd fry before you heard anything (via)

Look At the State You’re In: Absaroka In its short-lived attempt at existence, the US state of Absaroka (pronounced ab-SOR-ka) managed to acquire quite a few trappings of statehood: a governor and capital were selected, Absarokan car license plates issued, and there even was a Miss Absaroka 1939 (the first and only one).

Exit Unusual methods adopted by suicide victims, compiled by George Kennan for a report in McClure's Magazine, 1908. Hugging red-hot stoves? You will certainly twist and shout your way through this list from the incredible Futility Closet.

also:
Savannah River Site Eyeball
Interesting Tricks of the Body
Unnecessary Knowledge

viddy:
Epic 2015 The state of the online world in 2015. (via)
In hiding for exposing Tanzania witchdoctors I am living in hiding after I received threats because of my undercover work exposing the threat from witchdoctors to albinos living in Tanzania. (via)
Late George Carlin Interview Good. Don't miss it.
bleep vs blorf. 4 out of 5 children can’t tell bleep from blorf. (via)

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Arctic has 90bn barrels of crude The Arctic holds as much as 90bn barrels of undiscovered oil and has as much undiscovered gas as all the reserves known to exist in Russia, US government scientists have said in the first governmental assessment of the region’s resources.

The Top Ten Myths in FBI History Well, according to the FBI, anyway. (via)

In Africa, No Coke Can Mean No Stability (audio) Coke is a big business all around the world. But in Africa, the soda is so pervasive that it acts like a key indicator of political stability. In other words, if you can't get a Coke somewhere, you might want to get out of the country — fast. Alex Cohen talks with Jonathan Ledgard from The Economist about this unusual political indicator.

CalTech: Intelligent space robots will explore universe by 2020 Before the year 2020, scientists are expected to launch intelligent space robots that will venture out to explore the universe for us.

Counterfeit Chic A periodic collection of news about counterfeits, fakes, knockoffs, replicas, imitations, and the culture of copying in general around the globe. (via)

also:
Reclaim Your Time: 20 Great Ways to Find More Free Time (via)
It takes us two days, nine hours and 25 minutes to fully relax on holiday
The &%£§$‡@?!!-ing grawlix (via)
Fantasy Cartography is a blog that posts maps from science fiction and fantasy books. (via)
Mike Patton interview
Anecdotage Anecdotes from Gates to Yeats. We'll start you off with a good one about Steve Martin (via)
Japanese sitting etiquette at a Japanese home

viddy:
Tiny Blue Dot Mind-blowing cosmic perspectives. You think our sun is big?
The Shining (With Robots)
If I want a female to go away, I play this track. It works every time.

Word Spy: DWT abbr. Driving while texting; driving a car while reading or sending text messages. —DWTer n.