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Australian floods lowered global sea levels (Wired UK)
“The vast amounts of rain that fell during the Australian floods in 2010 and 2011 caused the world’s sea levels to drop by as much as 7mm, according to oceanographers.
In 2010, sea levels mysteriously dropped by 7mm and stayed lower than expected for a year and a half. Oceanographers attempted to work out where the water had gone; they found it in Australia.
In most places on the globe, rain falls on mountains, runs into rivers and flows out into the sea. But in Australia, something different tends to happen. Rain that falls in the outback never makes it to the coast — it tends to collect in shallow inland seas and evaporate instead.”
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A New Era of Biological Warfare › ScienceZest
“Dilger’s footmen and allies used liquid bacterial cultures of B. mallei to infect equines just before they were shipped to European ports. This was no easy task. Glanders can be transmitted to humans and a number of men with boils all over their faces would not only be suspicious, it would also reduce the flow of volunteers. The deadly bacteria had to be packed so that an untrained man could handle them safely, pour them into fodder, or jab a horse without infecting himself. Dilger and his men even developed a box of sugar cubes; entirely harmless to the onlooker, but deadly to any horse that would bite down on the tiny ampoule hidden inside the sweet thing, filled with anthrax or glanders germs.”
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During the course of the Great War, the British bought nearly three quarters of a million horses from North America.
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I love this series.
“If you could teleport to a random place of the surface of the Earth, what are the odds that you’ll see signs of intelligent life?”
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skrollr – parallax scrolling for the masses
I’m going to make a story with parallax scrolling simply because I think it’d be interesting to do.
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MOOC Busting: Personal Googalytics… | OUseful.Info, the blog…
Is the reverse of a domain of one’s own? Fits in well with the MOOC madness- centralized scoring with the ability to pick and choose courses from a variety of providers.
“are there any services out there that allow you aggregate dossier material from different games to provide a more rounded picture of your performance as a gamer, or maybe services that homologate dossiers from different games to give overall rankings?
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“Leisure, not doing, is so terrifying in our culture that we cut it up into small, manageable chunks throughout our working year in case an excess of it will drive us mad, and leave the greatest amount of it to the very end, in the half-conscious hope that we might be saved from its horrors by an early death.”
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Leisure, not doing, is so terrifying in our culture that we cut it up into small, manageable chunks throughout our working year in case an excess of it will drive us mad, and leave the greatest amount of it to the very end, in the half-conscious hope that we might be saved from its horrors by an early death.
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Kosara wants to rescue infographics – Junk Charts
“When did information graphics turn into ‘infographics,’ and when did we lose the meticulous, well-researched, information-rich graphics for the sad waste of pixels that calls itself infographic today?
I think one of the key missing pieces is analytics. Most of today’s infographics seemingly are a result of treating data as flowers to be arranged. There is little analytical thinking behind what the data mean. Incidentally, that is why the new NYU certificate is not called Certificate in Data Visualization–we wanted to emphasize the importance of analytics next to datavis.
Also, we have an elective designed for people interested in content marketing. The Livermoore Lab project would fall into this category. So do annual reports for corporations, fundraising prospectuses for non-profit organizations, magazines whether commercial or membership, content for web marketing, etc.
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The other problem is a kind of perversion of measurement. Because so much of this stuff is online, so many pieces are judged by click rates or bounce rates or time on page. The problem with click rates is well known. Headlines of so many online articles are written solely to create clicks. It’s gotten to the point that we feel duped by the headlines.” -
Education Outrage: Measurement in pre-school? Measure this! Ten things to measure
“You want something to measure? Measure what schools really do:
Is my kid being kept safe so I can work (or play)?
Is my kid learning to control his impulses and sit still for long periods of time?
Is my my kid being fed lunch?
Is my kid being properly indoctrinated to be a model citizen who can say why the US is a great country?
Can my kid defend himself from the bullies?
Does my kid have the right clothing so that other kids won’t make fun of him?
Is my kid being taught enough meaningless stuff to memorize so that he doesn’t look foolish when asked who George Washington or Abraham Lincoln was?
Are they making sure that my kid is really afraid to express an outlandish thought that no one he knows agrees with?
Are they making sure that if there is something my kid really wants to do that it will be designated an “after school activity?”
Are they making sure that my kid believes that only losers don’t go to college?
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When Pigs Fly, Crayfish Whistle, and It Snows Red Snowflakes – Facts So Romantic – Nautilus
“Russia
????? ??? ?? ???? ???????? (kogdá rak na goré svístnet) — “When the crawfish whistles on the mountain”.”
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Abundance of Elements | Visual.ly
Where all those elements hang out . . .