Love this tumblr post from the outstanding outreach crew of NASA: http://nasa.tumblr.com/post/136762377389/7-facts-that-will-make-you-feel-very-small
Author archives: J.Starr
A guide to local government in NZ
A useful guide to how councils and other local government bodies work in New Zealand. Aimed at journalists but readable for anyone interested. Created by Local Government NZ. LGNZ publishes the guide under the following copyright policy: “This site provides users with easy access to publicly held information. You may copy, print or download any …
Cyborg beetles in action
Fascinating (and a bit creepy). Researchers in Singapore control the leg movements and flight of large ‘cyborg’ beetles. This video from Motherboard.
Map of New Zealand’s Māori iwi in 1869
This 1869 map of New Zealand’s North Island shows Māori iwi (tribal) boundaries, confiscated land, location of armed police and military bases, and where gold was found. It’s fascinating in many ways, not least because it shows the staggering amount of land confiscated in the Waikato – more than 1.2 million acres. The confiscations were made under the …
Interactive map of global shipping routes
Kiln and the UCL Energy Institute have created shipmap.org, a fascinating interactive map that tracks global shipping for a year (2012). Here’s how it works: The merchant fleet is divided into five categories, each of which has a filter and a CO2 and freight counter for the hour shown on the clock: Container (e.g. manufactured goods): …
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On the acceptance of ideas over time
Many who before regarded legislation on the subject as chimerical, will now fancy that it is only dangerous, or perhaps not more than difficult. And so in time it will come to be looked on as among the things possible, then among the things probable;–and so at last it will be ranged in the list …
Aquanauts test space tools under water
A group of NASA aquanauts headed under water for 16 days to carry out research during a simulated space mission. The NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations (NEEMO) 21 mission began on July 21, 2016, as an international crew of aquanauts splashed down to the undersea Aquarius Reef Base, located 62 feet below the surface of the …
Juno reaches Jupiter’s magnetosphere
NASA’s Juno spacecraft entered Jupiter’s magnetosphere and recorded what it sounds like: Juno’s Waves instrument recorded the encounter with the “bow shock” over the course of about two hours on June 24, 2016. “Bow shock” is where the supersonic solar wind is heated and slowed by Jupiter’s magnetosphere. It is analogous to a sonic boom on …
“Innovation is about saying no to 1,000 things”
I came across this Steve Jobs quote in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s tremendously entertaining book, Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, and it struck a chord. I notice it’s a fairly popular quote on Goodreads too, as are quite a few from Taleb’s book. People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. …
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The governance gaps that armed insurgents fill
A brief but interesting TED talk by policy analyst Benedetta Berti about when and why armed groups (insurgents, militias, terrorists) get involved in politics and start providing social services. She notes that war has changed: it less often involves a state fighting a state. “Of the 216 peace agreements signed between 1975 and 2011, 196 of them were between …
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