One More Detour on the Writing Road

Courtesy of Anne Laurie over at Balloon Juice.

I very much want to see this film.

This is really interesting. Gacked from DKOs:

The bin Laden tracking idea began as a project in an undergraduate class on remote sensing that Gillespie, whose expertise is using remote sensing data from satellites to study ecosystems, taught in 2009. Based on information from satellites and other remote sensing systems, and reports on his movements since his last known location, the students created a probabilistic model of where he was likely to be. Their prediction of a town was based on a geographical theory called “island biogeography”: basically, that a species on a large island is much less likely to go extinct following a catastrophic event than a species on a small one.

“The theory was basically that if you’re going to try and survive, you’re going to a region with a low extinction rate: a large town,” Gillespie says. “We hypothesized he wouldn’t be in a small town where people could report on him.”

Geographers Had Calculated 81% Chance That Osama Was in Abbottabad - ScienceInsider

It's been a few days since I posted. Nothing much to say. It hasn't rained for the last few days, which is a goodness. Today was sunny, but cool.

Here's something cool, courtesy of Amy Sheldon: Sea urchins use their entire body as an eye.

Tonight was take-a-break night. Caught the first two eps of the new Dr Who. My fave parts? The scary search through the orphanage--for me, the best Drs contain a healthy dose of horror--and the chemistry between Alex Kingston and Matt Smith.

Bulls lost. Cubs losing. Sleepy. G'night.

Literally:

A manuscript dated back to 1293 from Italy was sent to the Istituto Centrale per il Restauro e la Conservazione del Patrimonio Archivistico e Librario (ICPAL) in Rome for restoration [7]. The volume is composed of 222 sheets divided into six gatherings with a binding made of parchment. It was written on Arabic paper made of linen and was characterized by a singular and never described deterioration phenomenon that gave the paper a dramatically felted aspect, especially in the margins.

The article goes on to describe how the beasts in the paper were identified.

I will add that there is something very Discworld/Hitchhiker's Guide about an ecosystem colonizing an ancient manuscript. Do they have wars? Elections? Football matches? A national anthem?

The latest Hyperbole and a Half has just the teeniest sociopathic horror edge:

What Benny did not know was that we were incredibly serious about the realistic aspects of "wolf pack." In our wildly vivid imaginations, we were actually wolves and Benny was actually a deer.

...a very cool commercial:

Swiped from casacorona:

...given that I was born five years behind the style curve and have been losing ground ever since.

But anyway.