via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow
You might think that when companies impose crappy, abusive terms of service on their customers that the market could sort it out, by creating competition to see who could offer the best terms and thus win the business of people fed up with bad actors.
You’d be wrong.
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via Big Think by Teodora Zareva
Sonham Wangchuk's ice stupas. Photo: Rolex Awards
For Himalayan farmers, living at altitudes of 11,000 feet (3,500m), water availability has become a serious problem. The only sources of water in this arid land are the nearby glaciers, whose melting is essential for sustaining life in the summer. These glaciers, however, have been steadily receding over the last decade, removing the water source further and further away from the villages. The European Geosciences Union predicts that over 70% of glacier volume in the Everest region could be lost by 2100.
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via the Guardian by Hannah Devlin and agencies
The prints indicate enormous animals that were probably around 5.3 to 5.5 metres at the hip. Photograph: Damian Kelly/University of Queensland/EPA
The largest known dinosaur footprints have been discovered in Western Australia, including 1.7 metre prints left by gigantic herbivores.
Until now, the biggest known dinosaur footprint was a 106cm track discovered in the Mongolian desert and reported last year.
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via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
By day, Scott Weaver is a grocery store clerk. When he's not working, he's making elaborate sculptures out of toothpicks and Elmer's Glue. His tool is a nail clipper. His largest work is called "Rolling Through the Bay." It's a 9-foot sculpture of San Francisco. You drop a marble in it at the top, and it will take a rolling tour through Coit Tower, Chinatown, the Golden Gate Bridge, and other landmarks. It took him over 3,000 hours over a 30-year-year period to make it, and it has 105,387 and 1/2 toothpicks.
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via Interesting Literature
A reading of a classic Donne poem
‘Batter my heart, three-person’d God’: a typically blunt and direct opening for a John Donne poem, from a poet who is renowned for his bluff, attention-grabbing opening lines. This poem, written using the Italian or Petrarchan sonnet form, sees Donne calling upon God to take hold of him and consume him, in a collection of images that are at once deeply spiritual and physically arresting.
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via Big Think by Usman Chohan
What’s black, white, and read all over? Pandas read one another’s markings for identification and communication, and they have black-and-white fur patterns to camouflage in shade and snow. (Photo by China Photos/Getty Images).
The Giant Panda’s iconic black-and-white fur makes it exceptionally recognizable in a world where mammals are generally a drab brown or dull grey, and according to a new study in the journal Behavioral Ecology, both camouflage and communication might explain why.
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via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
Colossal has a gallery of Australian designer and illustrator Dan McPharlin's Analogue Miniatures – “a marvel of papercraft. The tiny analogue synthesizers and pieces of recording equipment were pieced together with paper, framing mat board, string, rubber bands and cardboard.”
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via 3 Quarks Daily: Catherine Fletcher at Literary Review
Be Like the Fox tells Machiavelli’s life story. Its title refers to his advice that by being like the fox one can avoid snares. In a rather breathless historical present, Benner organises Machiavelli’s own words into dialogue and commentary as her protagonist makes his way through the religious drama of Savonarola’s regime, encounters with Cesare Borgia, torture and exile, and finally his later years of writing. Machiavelli’s wonderful turns of phrase make for a creative, lively and very readable book with more than a little contemporary resonance. ‘Victories are never so clear’, he writes, ‘that the winner does not have to have some respect, especially for justice.’
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via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz
Adrian Fisher is the master of making hedge mazes. He's designed more than 700 mazes in 40 countries
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Working behind the scenes at Westminster Abbey – in pictures
via the Guardian by Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images
[My personal favourite of the fifteen available here]
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