Gleanings of the Week Ending October 26, 2013

The items below are ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Genome Digest - A summary from The Scientist of recent research findings. I like these summaries both for their specific content and the ‘overview’ comparison they sometimes stimulate. Did you know that chimpanzees/bonobos have 2.9 billion base pairs; a cyanobacteria has 4.7 million base pairs; cucumber has 245 million base pairs?

Did You Forget to Have Fun? - How long has it been since you actually did whatever your answer is to “If you had all the time in the world, and weren’t always working, what would you do for fun?”

Driverless Cars Are Further Away Than You Think - Read the comments as well as the story. Time will tell as always. This is a technology that I am really looking forward to so I hope this naysayer is wrong.

The Gorgeous Fjordlands of West Norway - Beautiful wild places

How Are Open Access Publishing and Massive Open Online Courses Disrupting the Academic Community? - So far - is appears that MOOCs have been more disruptive than OA.

Mountain Lion Facts - Did you know that baby mountain lions have spots and blue eyes?

Ancient tattoos may have been used as medicine - Tattoos on Otzi the Iceman

Winners of the Landscape Photographer of the Year 2013 - More feasts for the eyes…UK landscapes.

Why Abraham Lincoln Loved Infographics - A map that showed the density of slavery was well used by Lincoln (it ‘bore the marks of much service’). This article also highlights William Playfair’s role in the development of data visualization; he was the inventor of pie charts and bar graphs in his “Commercial and Political Atlas which he published in 1786.

Improving Weather Forecasts - Forecast accuracy…and how the forecast is presented and interpreted. There’s always room for improvement.

Gleanings of the Week Ending July 13, 2013

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Authentic Happiness - Start with the home page of the Director of the Positive Psychology Center at University of Pennsylvania and then look through the site for information and do some or all of the well-being questionnaires.

Urban Observatory - Compare various aspects (like population density, senior population, traffic, etc.) of three large cities (16 of the largest cities in the world to select from) by looking at them side by side.

Powerful African Wildlife Bursts out of lively Landscapes - Enjoy the art of Karen Laurence-Rowe from Kenya.

The Joy of Old Age (No Kidding) - Read Dr. Oliver Sacks thoughts on becoming 80 years old - his mercury (element 80) year.

Technology Foresight - Think about the ‘Futuresaurus’ timelines coming out of Imperial College technology foresight event and posted by Richard Watson on his blog. I was intrigues by the items projected to disappear.

Watch North American City Skylines Sprout In 3-D Video, From 1850 To Today - Cube Cities combined commercial real estate data with Google Earth to provide these videos of midtown Manhattan, Chicago, San Francisco, Calgary, Downtown Los Angeles, and Toronto,

A View from The Overlook: A Virginia Farmer - I could not resist adding this post about Mount Vernon from National Parks Traveler to this week’s gleanings. I enjoyed my visit to the place a few weeks ago.

Disruptions: How Driverless Cars Could Reshape Cities - I like the projections of driverless cars being available by the end of the decade!

Stanford students capture the flight of birds on very high-speed video - Watch the video - the birds are amazing. The high speed video provides a window into flight that we cannot get with our unaided eyes!

10 mindblowingly futuristic technologies that will appear by the 2030s - How many of these seem plausible to you? Back in the 1960s - many thought we’d have a colony on the moon by 2013. With technology, know-how is not the only requirement.

Gleanings of the Week Ending June 15, 2013

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Exploding Glass (Prince Rupert’s Drop) - Video

Feds issue guidelines for self-driving cars like Google's - Speeding up the advent of self-driving cars?

The City and the Sea - A survey of the landscape and politics of New York, post-Sandy - Analysis of what was discovered about New York due to Hurricane Sandy

Essential Friends + Gateways: Take A Long, Slow, Ride Along The Natchez Trace - This is something I’ve been thinking about doing for the past few years. This post has some good references when I get serious about actually taking the drive!

Here's what Pangea looks like mapped with modern political borders - A visualization to understand the first continent…and where the pieces are today.

WWII Drug: The German Granddaddy of Crystal Meth - It was used to keep pilots and soldiers alert

Butterflies tell UT climatologist about climate - An interview with Camille Parmesan

Nutritional Weaklings in the Supermarket - More color often means higher nutritional content

The Physics of Ferocious Funnels - Several visualizations to explain how tornados form and the historical tracks of tornados in the US.

Best Diets Overall - From US News and World Report

World Life Expectancy - Data presented mostly on maps. There is a portion of the site for USA Health Rankings.

Fish Oil - Info page from NIH

Blue Zones - Lessons learned from people who’ve lived the longest