Alaka Halder's Blog
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Budapest skyline (by fesign)
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what_if_heroes square by r3vision on Flickr.
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Turns out the Easter Island heads have bodies, too! Archeologists discovered bodies beneath the 887 stoic faces after 12 years excavating and studying the statues.
“They’re buried up to mid-torso level. So it’s understandable that the general public didn’t have a clue that those statues had bodies,” Jo Anne Van Tilburg, director of the Easter Island Statue Project, told Fox News this week.
While experts have known for some time that much of the stone figures has been partially buried due to centuries of exposure to the elements, “this is the first time that one has been excavated in such a way that the documentation was complete and scientific,” said Van Tilburg.
(via angelawublog)
Photograph: Thomas Poulsom
Birds made from Lego? Why not.
Lego-enthusiast, avian-admirer and professional tree surgeon Thomas Poulsom has taken inspiration from birds to create this brilliant series of (almost) life-size Lego models. He hopes to persuade the toy company to make his birds into official Lego kits - vote for him at lego.cuusoo.com
(via Telegraph)
Two orphaned baby burrowing owls, nicknamed Linford and Christie, have moved into the home of their keeper Jimmy Robinson. The owlets were hatched in an incubator at Longleat Safari Park, Wiltshire, and are now being hand-reared by Jimmy. The native American birds, which get their name from living in small burrows in the wild, can find plenty of nooks and crannys about his flat to hide. Tea cups and bookcases are a particular favourite, says Jimmy, but it’s good to see them developing their natural behaviour and they always seem to find me at meal times.
(via theanimalblog)
James Cameron (yes, the director) hopes to be the first solo visitor to the deepest part of the ocean. The Fanfin Seadevil, pictured above, may be one the living creatures to greet him on his way down (it’s cool though, they’re only eight inches long).
This was just too cute.
(via simplyperplexity)
From The Guardian:
Albert Einstein’s complete archives – from personal correspondence with half a dozen lovers to notebooks scribbled with his groundbreaking research – are going online for the first time.
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which owns the German Jewish physicist’s papers, is pulling never-before seen items from its climate-controlled safe, photographing them in high resolution and posting them online – offering the public a nuanced and fuller portrait of the man behind the scientific genius.
Only 900 manuscript images, and an incomplete catalogue listing just half of the archive’s contents, had been available online since 2003. Now, with a grant from the Polonsky Foundation UK, which previously helped digitise Isaac Newton’s papers, all 80,000 items from the Einstein collection have been catalogued and enhanced with cross referencing technology.
npr:
What makes people creative? What gives some of us the ability to create work that captivates the eyes, minds and hearts of others? Jonah Lehrer, a writer specializing in neuroscience, addresses that question in his new book, Imagine: How Creativity Works.
Lehrer defines creativity broadly, considering everything from the invention of masking tape to breakthroughs in mathematics; from memorable ad campaigns to Shakespearean tragedies. He finds that the conditions that favor creativity — our brains, our times, our buildings, our cities — are equally broad.
Lehrer joins NPR’s Robert Siegel to talk about the creative process — where great ideas come from, how to foster them, and what to do when you inevitably get stuck.
Places to visit in Bangladesh (1/2)
I’ve been a little homesick lately. But August, I suppose, is not so far away…
Read more of this article on CNN (link).
The 6-foot-3-inch point guard was mostly sidelined by his New York Knicks basketball team until a recent chance opportunity on courtshot him to stardom a week and a half ago…But basketball’s latest wonderboy may now find himself caught in a…
The wonderful Jenny Shi writes about how China and Taiwan are vying for “a piece of Jeremy Lin”. More in the Princeton Asia Review…
untitled on Flickr.
The view over Edinburgh from Arthur’s Seat (Arthur not pictured.)
While I’ve never climbed Arthur’s Seat, there were many weekends when mum, dad, my sister and I traipsed and circled around it, sometimes before heading off to the Sunday market, the Dynamic Earth, or somewhere else nearby.
Was that really 10, 13 years ago?
Had I not stumbled into this photograph, would I ever remember the Sunday morning when we bought my sister her white and pink bike, the one she hated? The fresh, paper, plastic smell of the Argos catalogues? The sound of the bagpipes on Princess Street? The pale white and pink floral cloth that mum bought near Sighthill while we were getting my first pair of glasses, but which she never sewed into anything (or did she?)? Or all the CD-ROMs on San Diego Zoo and outer space that we bought from St. James’ Mall, and the Beethoven CD that mum got me (because she liked classical music), but which I was perhaps too young (or rather, too obsessed with the likes of Westlife) to appreciate, but which I still have somewhere in my plastic, orange trunk here at Princeton?
It was all so long ago that the memories have begun to blur like the sky in this photograph. I can still make out the sentiments (now swept over in gold and blue), but the outlines have misted away. And that upsets me, so, so, so much. It’s like losing yourself, losing more than yourself.
- Everything is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer
Currently reading this book for ENG 370: Contemporary Fiction, and trying to figure it out. Delightfully extraordinary to think that EiS was Foer’s senior thesis. Might write more later!
Approximately one out of every 10,000 times, a four-leaf clover will appear among its three-leaf siblings. In real four leaf clovers (not shamrocks; those have three leaves), the fourth leaf tends to be smaller than the other three (which seems to be true of this picture). As legend goes, the leaves symbolize love, luck, hope and faith. (Link)
(via 0ut-fitted)
