links, annotations:

Having been pointed at All Yesterdays, I've moved the link to Darren Naish's Tetrapod Zoology blog up into the list of things I check regularly. This may be a misguided time-sink, but it often involves learning fascinating things about glass frogs and elephant vs crocodile events and newly discovered pterosaurs. Relevant to the latter, a recent entry made me go in search of what Mark Witton has been up to, as it was his very cool Flikr stream some years back that made me aware of TetZoo in the first place. In the mysterious ways of the internet, I ended up reading a long break-down of proposed dragon tail-structure by a guest blogger on pterosaur.net (prompted by The Hobbit part 1) and thence proceeded to skeletaldrawing.com which recently pimped a new ABC Dinosaur board book. I have quite a few picture books involving dinosaurs, but they're all from 25-30 years ago. Clearly it is time to start scouting out new things with feathers and more modern reconstructions.

In much more recent excavations, I was impressed with the intro video the University of Leicester has on their Richard III dig site, particularly the bit about how these bones were found "a few centimeters" away from Victorian foundations.

More on the Chernobyl exclusion zone (also with a depressing example of people who suit their research to the conclusions they want to draw, but anyway.) I'm currently reading the Wormwood Forest book, and aside from a few moments of my brain being too tired to process her radioactivity explanations (darnit, I used to know all this!) I'm finding it pretty interesting. Also bonus points for a nonfiction author who understands the proper use of past tense. Relatedly, I'm always surprised by how recent the Chernobyl disaster actually was (and I'm quite sure I hadn't previously known that they kept running the other reactors up through about 2000.) I think this is because-- unlike Challenger, which I always thought of as my generation's equivalent of the Kennedy assassination (ie, you remember right where you were when you heard about it... and one of the first things I thought, learning about the 9/11 stuff, was "Challenger has been eclipsed.")-- while I may well have heard bits and bobs of the early reporting, it wasn't enough of a moment-in-time event in the news to distinguish itself from all the things adults talk about that happened in the indeterminate past, and so I tend to mentally class it with slightly pre-Ann history. As opposed to the bit about Rushdie having to hide out after the publication of Satanic Verses, which I was quite surprised to learn (looking at the publication date on my copy a decade later) that I heard about more or less at the time, but thought was an older story. Further meditations on how children perceive time and history redacted in the interests of finishing this entry someday.

Pretty pictures: dwarf women concept art, Fantasy of Color (tumblr of fantasy art with non-white characters), and a gorgeous if slightly scary photoshoot wherein a Russian diver portrays a ghost in a huge underwater cave system.

*historical science: spider silk harvested for astronomy.

*and a couple months old, but discovery of the palace that went with the creation of the terracotta army. Unfortunately, either there's very little info available in the English-speaking world, or people are more interested in telling us about the army than the new things. But one takes what one can get.

There's more, but I think that's enough for now.

links, annotations:

Having been pointed at All Yesterdays, I've moved the link to Darren Naish's Tetrapod Zoology blog up into the list of things I check regularly. This may be a misguided time-sink, but it often involves learning fascinating things about glass frogs and elephant vs crocodile events and newly discovered pterosaurs. Relevant to the latter, a recent entry made me go in search of what Mark Witton has been up to, as it was his very cool Flikr stream some years back that made me aware of TetZoo in the first place. In the mysterious ways of the internet, I ended up reading a long break-down of proposed dragon tail-structure by a guest blogger on pterosaur.net (prompted by The Hobbit part 1) and thence proceeded to skeletaldrawing.com which recently pimped a new ABC Dinosaur board book. I have quite a few picture books involving dinosaurs, but they're all from 25-30 years ago. Clearly it is time to start scouting out new things with feathers and more modern reconstructions.

In much more recent excavations, I was impressed with the intro video the University of Leicester has on their Richard III dig site, particularly the bit about how these bones were found "a few centimeters" away from Victorian foundations.

More on the Chernobyl exclusion zone (also with a depressing example of people who suit their research to the conclusions they want to draw, but anyway.) I'm currently reading the Wormwood Forest book, and aside from a few moments of my brain being too tired to process her radioactivity explanations (darnit, I used to know all this!) I'm finding it pretty interesting. Also bonus points for a nonfiction author who understands the proper use of past tense. Relatedly, I'm always surprised by how recent the Chernobyl disaster actually was (and I'm quite sure I hadn't previously known that they kept running the other reactors up through about 2000.) I think this is because-- unlike Challenger, which I always thought of as my generation's equivalent of the Kennedy assassination (ie, you remember right where you were when you heard about it... and one of the first things I thought, learning about the 9/11 stuff, was "Challenger has been eclipsed.")-- while I may well have heard bits and bobs of the early reporting, it wasn't enough of a moment-in-time event in the news to distinguish itself from all the things adults talk about that happened in the indeterminate past, and so I tend to mentally class it with slightly pre-Ann history. As opposed to the bit about Rushdie having to hide out after the publication of Satanic Verses, which I was quite surprised to learn (looking at the publication date on my copy a decade later) that I heard about more or less at the time, but thought was an older story. Further meditations on how children perceive time and history redacted in the interests of finishing this entry someday.

Pretty pictures: dwarf women concept art, Fantasy of Color (tumblr of fantasy art with non-white characters), and a gorgeous if slightly scary photoshoot wherein a Russian diver portrays a ghost in a huge underwater cave system.

*historical science: spider silk harvested for astronomy.

*and a couple months old, but discovery of the palace that went with the creation of the terracotta army. Unfortunately, either there's very little info available in the English-speaking world, or people are more interested in telling us about the army than the new things. But one takes what one can get.

There's more, but I think that's enough for now.

Xposty from dreamwidth.