Linkdump #118

Extra-large murder mitten: https://tinyurl.com/y4ayd86d

Some interesting animations showing Earth’s ozone hole: https://tinyurl.com/2p9dt9aj

Sooooo basically this is how male dromedary camels flirt. SO HOT: https://tinyurl.com/2wmpz2ps

“Planktonium is a short film by Jan van Ijken about the unseen world of living microscopic plankton. It is a voyage into a secret universe, inhabited by alien-like creatures”: https://tinyurl.com/3c5rydj

A selection of experimental music featuring bagpipes: https://tinyurl.com/28sxrnyn

If you’re familiar with the classic Internet phenomenon known as “The Backrooms”, here’s a wonderfully creepy CGI “found footage” version: https://tinyurl.com/mryjxcsm

Dune, but with Elmo instead of Timothee Chalamet: https://tinyurl.com/2p9frxbk

Possibly THE shiniest fish in existence: https://tinyurl.com/yedrkb29

Gorgeous beading by Jan Huling: https://tinyurl.com/2p9frxbk

This video gives you the behind-the-scenes story of what it took to capture the first timelapse of a growing brinicle: https://tinyurl.com/h89hh6sn

A unique kind of camouflage company: https://tinyurl.com/yckkrycy

The beautiful color and patterning of an African ground beetle: https://tinyurl.com/yk6d2f6y

The fossilized coral reefs of the Nevada desert: https://tinyurl.com/2p8mhwam

A Twitter feed entirely devoted to diatoms: https://tinyurl.com/vk4xhkpu

An online atlas of dye colors you can get from various mushrooms: https://tinyurl.com/4at2b7dj

Take an exciting tour through the Digital Museum of Plugs & Sockets: https://tinyurl.com/4pt6jacz

How to grow perfect, cubic salt crystals: https://tinyurl.com/2whttsm5

Inside the MK-35D Soviet school calculator: https://tinyurl.com/9c6wspr5

“A movement within a painting, which begins with the savagery of a battle and comes to a halt in a rendition of a masterpiece of the 15th Century; The Battle of San Romano by Paolo Uccello”: https://tinyurl.com/ypyrckjy

Playing an electric bass with a bow sounds lovely: https://tinyurl.com/yprptsmw

Julius Klingebiel was a convicted murderer who was forcibly sterilized and condemned to live out his days in an asylum. His detailed artworks still adorn the walls of his room: https://tinyurl.com/yhapw45h

An interesting, interactive timeline of swearing in Oscar-winning films: https://tinyurl.com/ms6mv7p7

Explore the Gallery of Physical Visualizations: https://tinyurl.com/2p8m2mzw

I really enjoyed browsing through UNESCO’s Lists of Intangible Cultural Heritage: https://tinyurl.com/3e594w2m

Another amusing noisemaking website: https://tinyurl.com/zb869drm

Pretty cool 3D printed dragon: https://tinyurl.com/mrxb73x9

A wonderful Twitter thread of Inuit art: https://tinyurl.com/2p8zusax

A dress that “breathes” (Instagram link): https://tinyurl.com/4hkatz9f

In this animated short film a real British chimney sweep master describes his everyday routine of forcing young boys to become workers: https://tinyurl.com/2p8rzya9

Apparently this feature helps block some of the light from above, kind of like sunglasses, allowing the fish to see a bit better in deeper, darker water: https://tinyurl.com/yc587wja

Fascinating gif showing exactly how porcupines release their quills when touched: https://tinyurl.com/bdfjejkm

The clever design of the Assassin’s Teapot: https://tinyurl.com/2p5m7wtb

How to make holographic chocolate: https://tinyurl.com/2hpkuepp

Why do ski jumpers hold their skis in a V shape?: https://tinyurl.com/2p88xe63

The story of what some consider the greatest recipe comment of all time: https://tinyurl.com/mtksb4bf

Cool animation showing the lighthouses of Ireland: https://tinyurl.com/3a4m3b3c

A well-done animation about the scale of the Orion Nebula: https://tinyurl.com/ymr5h43n

Common themes and tropes in movie poster art: https://tinyurl.com/u38juw25

From 2005 to 2014, eyelevel10585 would find old cameras with undeveloped film, do his best to develop it, and post the pictures on the internet: https://tinyurl.com/2p8zw2tt

Don’t be a Sucker (1947) is an American video to protect and educate people against “divide and conquer” propaganda tactics used by the media: https://tinyurl.com/y2m36dw9

Linkdump #117

Hallways with threatening auras: https://tinyurl.com/333f5nzf

How to dress for hostile architecture: https://tinyurl.com/4vxbzhzc

The Dutch government makes GREAT safety videos: https://tinyurl.com/3mnrs7x9

Mechanical Masterpieces is a collection of paintings re-imagined for the 21st century. Optimized for short attention spans, it allows viewers to poke, switch, disco, inflate and water paintings to their heart’s content. The installation was created for The Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh as part of their Tough Art Residency: https://tinyurl.com/2p8db5c2

A most wonderful collection of piñatas: https://tinyurl.com/2p9546wp

Beautifully intricate dot paintings by Oxana Lazari: https://tinyurl.com/2p9chtfu

If you’ve ever seen animal skeletons in a museum and wondered how all those bones get put back together, Galileo Ramos demonstrates the tedious and exacting process of putting a chameleon skull back together (skull bones of small and/or immature animals often come apart during the cleaning process in many species): https://tinyurl.com/43fbv8rz

Vibrant and amazing felted murals by Zofia W-G: https://tinyurl.com/2p89ymf5

Investigating the infamous “Waterloo breastplate”: https://tinyurl.com/4e9vjyct

Templates that help you recycle paper bags into small accessories: https://tinyurl.com/2s3vwtwp

A visual guide to reconstructing dunkleosteus (an extinct genus of large, armored, jawed fishes that existed about 382–358 million years ago): https://tinyurl.com/yckp3e53

You’re probably familiar with Dueling Banjos, but have you heard……..DUELING TROMBONES?: https://tinyurl.com/2p8e53f6

Vínill vikunnar is a weekly radio program on Iceland’s state broadcaster RÚV. The idea is simple, the play a whole vinyl album from start to finish. Each album is introduced in Icelandic, before playing side A, and the presenter speaks in the middle while they turn the record around and play side B: https://tinyurl.com/2nw5svry

A charming song to remind people that archaeologists do NOT do dinosaurs (the dinosaur scientists are Paleontologists): https://tinyurl.com/yckjmcuf

A ginormous archive of drawings of the root systems of 1,180 different plants: https://tinyurl.com/2mxsmhb2

Extremely cool looking caterpillar: https://tinyurl.com/44rt34u5

A neat little video of paper engineering class projects: https://tinyurl.com/2p8u8426

Take the McSweeney’s one-question career test!: https://tinyurl.com/2c9v3h4z

Can’t make it to see the Redwoods in person? Maybe you’ll enjoy a relaxing, three hour drive through the Redwoods on video (the music is kind of terrible so you might want to play your own): https://tinyurl.com/msttwyhw

Did you know the FBI has an “Artifact of the Month” gallery?: https://tinyurl.com/5x9b6ttd

You may be familiar with the hot new word game Wordle, but you may not have seen the fun word game called Lewdle, where all the words are lewd and inappropriate: https://tinyurl.com/yzsynaud

Danny Huynh makes fantastic, Mad Max-ish RC cars: https://tinyurl.com/yhuv36mz

River Runner lets you click anywhere on a map of the world, and then calculates the likely route a drop of rain would take to the sea where it to fall where you clicked – and then generates a flythrough from Google Maps which takes you on an eagle’s eye trip along the raindrop’s route to the ocean: https://tinyurl.com/yc8zaz2d

“In the late 1950s, Dr. W. Randolph Lovelace II and Brigadier General Don D. Flickinger, the chair and vice chair of NASA’s Special Committee on Life Sciences and both experts in aerospace medicine, seriously discussed the possibility of sending women rather than men into space”: https://tinyurl.com/wk9vrkhh

The Soviet nuclear disaster that happened 30 years before Chernobyl: https://tinyurl.com/2p8zhj7s

Sylvie Fancon offers stunning gowns with a literary touch: https://tinyurl.com/2casuzam

The Museum of Contemporary Emotions is a project from Finland which sought to map the emotions of the country’s residents over the course of the pandemic: https://tinyurl.com/y6cnp8mr

A fascinating list of 2021’s best data visualizations: https://tinyurl.com/cpxspywk

A weird little website where you are shown an image from WikiHow and you have to decide what the image is teaching (On desktop there’s a tiny dropdown menu to the right of the “How to”, click that to reveal the multiple choices you can choose from): https://tinyurl.com/2p86uvy7

Innocent cat devoured by ravenous pink blob monster: https://tinyurl.com/76se2mmd

A Zimbabwean archaeologist re-imagines the story of a momentous African civilization: https://tinyurl.com/2p8ax3ja

A short film centered around Mallorca and it’s hidden living fossils that inhabit the island: https://tinyurl.com/ypmsd7p4

Another fun little online music-making toy: https://tinyurl.com/2p828swd

What would popular logos look like in the Middle Ages?: https://tinyurl.com/2p8pe453

Ian’s Shoelace Site has everything you ever wanted to know about shoelaces!: https://tinyurl.com/yspfxt3h

Type in the name of a musical artist/band and it’ll show you a map of similar artists: https://tinyurl.com/2p8ywz9w

Scroll down into the darkest depths of the oceans: https://tinyurl.com/2p9djduf

Dr Ken Libbrecht is the world expert on snowflakes, designer of custom snowflakes, snowflake consultant for the movie Frozen – his photos appear on postage stamps all over the world: https://tinyurl.com/26k55arz

A cocktail dress made from 2,652 pennies: https://tinyurl.com/m2xee6df

imagineRio is a searchable digital atlas that illustrates the social and urban evolution of Rio de Janeiro, as it existed and as it was imagined. Views of the city created by artists, maps by cartographers, and site plans by architects or urbanists are all located in both time and space: https://tinyurl.com/5e97hk44

Image source: https://tinyurl.com/3854afvb

Linkdump #116

A rare sighting of a ginormous deep sea jellyfish: https://tinyurl.com/5n7fvex5

How to pronounce the longest place name in Aotearoa: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JeZ9epc_KSY

In 1996, Nez Perce Tribe members had to fundraise hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay the Ohio History Connection to secure artifacts that were rightfully theirs: https://tinyurl.com/3ce2jcwt

Floating Motors envisions a new concept of boating, for the first time bringing into the water the shapes of the most legendary cars of the automotive history, inventing a new water mobility trend which we like to call “Resto-Floating”: https://tinyurl.com/yckvrax2

An intimate look at the NYC subway & the thousands of items and people that get lost in its tunnel: https://tinyurl.com/4b6928bj

A gallery of photos from the 2020 International Aquatic Plants Layout (otherwise known as “Aquascaping”) Contest: https://tinyurl.com/5czsc95e

An analysis of that old favorite “Jingle bells, Batman smells…”: https://tinyurl.com/ye28urjc

Behind the doors of a handsome Georgian townhouse overlooking leafy Russell Square is the world’s oldest collection of material on the Nazi era: https://tinyurl.com/33xddd97

Ever feel like you need an extra set of hands?: https://tinyurl.com/2p83t84d

The unique horror that is the Mountain Dew Grilled Cheese: https://tinyurl.com/2p8pshfs

“Pantheon is a website which has grown out of a research project by MIT and is now a standalone thing – its aim is to “expose patterns of human collective memory. Pantheon contains data on more than 70k biographies, which Pantheon distributes through a powerful data visualization engine centered on locations, occupations, and biographies”: https://tinyurl.com/bdcmyxd4

Cartoon Fossils by artist Filip Hodas: https://tinyurl.com/yckv87mw

Hasselblad, maker of some of the world’s fanciest cameras, offers a gallery of their photo contest winners: https://tinyurl.com/ycksd7cu

Tired of migrants arriving from Africa, the E.U. has created a shadow immigration system that captures them before they reach its shores, and sends them to brutal Libyan detention centers run by militias: https://tinyurl.com/2p9eajx8

The website of the archive of the National Museum of African American Culture and History, which is not only a fascinating trove of information about Black American history but which is a really good example of how to present elements of a collection in digital form: https://tinyurl.com/55x42m6x

Cool little video showing a simulation of two galaxies colliding, and matching images of actual colliding galaxies: https://tinyurl.com/2p8bxkpz

Take an immersive virtual tour of the Valley of the Kings: https://tinyurl.com/mrxy86c2

If you’re a fan of brutalist architecture, you might fancy this chess set: https://tinyurl.com/2p9yu4rn

The saga of a bizarre, bewildering, and rather Twilight Zone-ish “gourmet” meal: https://tinyurl.com/yjc5sw29

A case of a woman with an ectopic pregnancy IN HER LIVER: https://tinyurl.com/2p8f2wf4

Ultra-upcycling: https://tinyurl.com/2p823hfb

Fantastic Stegosaurus Pride stickers, available in 2 sizes and 15 different designs: https://tinyurl.com/2p8hycjc

I hope the banana made a full recovery: https://tinyurl.com/3ndab865

Most of us have heard that story about how ancient Greeks used to abandon any babies that were born sick or imperfect, but the evidence tells a different story: https://tinyurl.com/ycxrjx5m

Birdwatchers around the world are being called on to turn detective and help in a search for some of the rarest birds on Earth: https://tinyurl.com/yw6mfvhd

The Arctic Chonkbeest: https://tinyurl.com/y9sfhjyb

Oooooh, SHINY: https://tinyurl.com/2p86ychr

Watch Sebastián Álvarez fly in and out of Villarrica, one of Chile’s most famous volcanos: https://tinyurl.com/3pu22cxy

Attack of the vampire butterflies: https://tinyurl.com/65tdpave

The world’s first self-propelled mechanical vehicle, in other words, the world’s first automobile, was built by the largely unknown French inventor Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot: https://tinyurl.com/2p9e8nyv

“Returned to Nepal by the FBI, a Sculpture Becomes a God Again”: https://tinyurl.com/2p8tyaww

I’m a terrible person for laughing: https://tinyurl.com/d4par5w6

Roughly ten thousand years ago a baby girl was buried in a cave with the utmost care. This find is notable not just because infant remains tend to decay away to nothing very quickly, and therefore are rare in the archaeological record, but also because it gives us insights into how this long gone group of people appear to have truly cherished their children: https://tinyurl.com/23swj2xb

Leila Jeffreys makes wonderful photos of birds (On the Photographic Artworks page, click each thumbnail to see an album of pics). Also a couple of lovely works under the Video Artworks tab: https://tinyurl.com/2p8e6c6a

“Zalgo text is digital text that has been modified with combining characters, Unicode symbols used to add diacritics above or below letters, to appear creepy or glitchy. Named for a 2004 Internet creepypasta story that ascribes it to the influence of an eldritch deity, Zalgo text has become a significant component of many Internet memes, particularly in the “surreal meme” culture”: https://tinyurl.com/ytkzyy42

A creepy and moving short story about a man and his personal banshee: https://tinyurl.com/2zatxt3n

The long and underappreciated history of male witches: https://tinyurl.com/2b3cp9jy

Neuroscience says listening to this song reduces anxiety by up to 65%: https://tinyurl.com/2p9x8c24

A closeup look at the gorgeous feathers of a hummingbird (Instagram link): https://tinyurl.com/42xusy8b

The wonderfully dark paintings of J Edward Neill: https://tinyurl.com/525beuru

Watch the trains of Tokyo in real-time from the comfort of your home: https://tinyurl.com/yc253z7z

If weird, shiny, inflatable, and all-around eye-popping fashion is your jam, behold the 2018 Spring/Summer collection from Jack Irving (I can’t even walk in heels but I still want those boots): https://tinyurl.com/4h9xe4jp

Image source: https://tinyurl.com/5byapv4r

Linkdump #115

Suits of armor made entirely of porcelain (Not intended for actual combat): https://tinyurl.com/2p8j4dwf

So apparently there are species of squid that have scales. Weird gooey scales: https://tinyurl.com/4yhbmkzr

Chris Wilson does very interesting things with wicker. I’m digging’ that arm chandelier: https://tinyurl.com/mr25dzhy

The Oilbird, locally known as the Guácharo, is a bird species found in the northern areas of South America including the Caribbean island of Trinidad. Its calls also sound like someone opened a portal into another dimension that happens to be full of demons: https://tinyurl.com/5n6bny9z

In this twitter thread Holly Herndon offers demonstrations of her software that essentially allows one person to sing with someone else’s voice (best description I can come up with as a fairly non-technical person): https://tinyurl.com/26wz9xex

I love TikTok musical collaborations. This one stars a clothes dryer: https://tinyurl.com/2p92cah2

Some nice, trippy AI digital art: https://tinyurl.com/yfpbumxm

Lovely stop-motion work by Polina Kutukina: https://tinyurl.com/2p99z75d

A twitter thread ranking each of the surviving Imperial Faberge eggs: https://tinyurl.com/yckwceee

Click or hover over an element on the Periodic Table to read the haiku: https://tinyurl.com/49eyk3mj

If you’re in Instagram, you might enjoy TheLifeOfCat: https://tinyurl.com/3uxkarm4

At long last, the rock stacking simulator you’ve all been waiting for: https://tinyurl.com/2p8fus8x

Peruvian artist Cecilia Paredes continues her ongoing series of camouflaged self-portraits with deceptive new works that leave only her hair, eyes, and ears untouched: https://tinyurl.com/kwbw9tmu

The time when New York banned pinball: https://tinyurl.com/2p92ph9w

A global, 11-year embroidery project: https://tinyurl.com/4d32eh79

The story of an unaccompanied migrant child: https://tinyurl.com/2p8z9r75

Growing up in the coldest town on earth: https://tinyurl.com/22yxehx8

The stunning paper cut art of Rogan Brown: https://tinyurl.com/5n8xxhsk

Images from the annual Takhini Hot Springs Hair Freezing Contest: https://tinyurl.com/2p87ww3f

That time they had a punk rock riot on Saturday Night Live: https://tinyurl.com/muccvztj

Francis REALLY loves trains. Like, a lot: https://tinyurl.com/8n3ytpf3

Browse through some lovely Natural Landscape Photography Awards winning shots: https://tinyurl.com/4b3ku4zs

Dr. Sarah Taber gives a brief Twitter rundown of how Sylvanaqua Farms, designed to be a groundbreaking model of sustainable farming, turned into a complete disaster. Warning: Mentions of animal abuse and suffering: https://tinyurl.com/yc5yh7ky

Planktonium is a short film by Jan van IJken about the unseen world of living microscopic plankton: https://tinyurl.com/yckmh3sn

Tombraiding is a dangerous profession: https://tinyurl.com/2p8hza8z

If you’re a fan of old postcards, you might enjoy this Flickr album: https://tinyurl.com/2bcuatbm

If you plan to look for vegan haggis in Glasgow, this review may be helpful: https://tinyurl.com/4spwdhc2

If you’ve never seen a Gogotte Formation: https://tinyurl.com/4shc9b3c

Can’t. Stop. Watching: https://tinyurl.com/2847n8tt

Jamie Okuma’s gorgeous beaded boots: https://tinyurl.com/y9en6jw5

300 hours of cosplay handcrafting in just over 3 minutes: https://tinyurl.com/4epfbwx7

So apparently you can buy honey made by bees that live in New Orleans cemeteries: https://tinyurl.com/ydumwuvp

Many people don’t know that Norway is the world capital of outdoor stairways: https://tinyurl.com/3jbb98x8

A fascinating visual analysis of fries: https://tinyurl.com/yr9bhp26

Watch baby coral eating leftover turkey: https://tinyurl.com/mwrt8c4t

Enjoy some music by Tahltan & Tlingit artist Edzi’u: https://tinyurl.com/far2ahp2

Some people dig tunnels for escape, others to sneak up on an enemy, or to smuggle goods, but some people just dig them for fun: https://tinyurl.com/mr3jtfke

Linkdump #114

How about some soothing archaeology ASMR: https://tinyurl.com/v6b22362

If you’re a fan of seafood you might enjoy this channel where we get to watch all kinds of weird and unusual sea critters being prepared for cooking (Video is in Japanese with English subtitles): https://tinyurl.com/yz8yzkcb

The Sicilian town of Gangi has a very…….interesting street layout: https://tinyurl.com/2a5f76w8

“Part dance, part lifestyle, Pantsula has its roots in Apartheid-era Johannesburg and continues to be a defining element of South African township culture”: https://tinyurl.com/rmcsnpv3

Harriet Parry creates lovely floral arrangements inspired by various paintings: https://tinyurl.com/5mmnwswj

God’s Own Junkyard is a psychedelic paradise of neon lights and vintage signs, all hidden inside an unassuming warehouse in deepest darkest Walthamstow: https://tinyurl.com/u75t6hz6

A thorough scientific analysis of James Bond’s exposure to infectious agents: https://tinyurl.com/4u2pvuf3

Eva Pacheo, a local crochet teacher in the town of Alhaurín de la Torre, in Malaga, Spain, came up with a fun and colorful way to provide shade for the town’s main shopping corridor, by creating a massive patchwork of crocheted tapestries and hanging them over the street: https://tinyurl.com/2456z428

A nice Twitter thread where an actual archaeologist presents an example of the kinds of normal, everyday research archaeologists actually do (Despite what the movies say the job rarely involves lost hordes of gold or ginormous tombs): https://tinyurl.com/4d2t9kz6

A lovely thread of art by Moebius featuring Jimi Hendrix: https://tinyurl.com/3avn87u7

A fun little YouTube channel for fans of historical and pre-historical ceramics: https://tinyurl.com/2bxfnh4b

The Lur was a common musical instrument in ancient Scandinavia: https://tinyurl.com/22kn3r55

If you haven’t seen the subreddit that’s completely dedicated to physics gifs, please enjoy: https://tinyurl.com/d4xkfppd

“Do Not Erase” is a photo series featuring Post-lecture university chalkboards photographed by Jessica Wynne: https://tinyurl.com/4ce5bz3y

A fun little online toy that lets you play with and watch a virtual double pendulum: https://tinyurl.com/m6sdrbwz

From Anatomika Science on Instagram, a nice educational post about the Calabar python: https://tinyurl.com/4wb295mu

A website featuring vintage websites from Ye Olden Days that are still online: https://tinyurl.com/dt2m2u74

Take a long, leisurely, video walking tour of the Pyramids of Giza: https://tinyurl.com/52ud55b2

“Marginalia is a search engine, designed to help you find what you didn’t even know you were looking for. If you search for “Plato”, you might for example end up at the Canterbury Tales. Go looking for the Canterbury Tales, and you may stumble upon Neil Gaiman’s blog. If you are looking for fact, this is almost certainly the wrong tool. If you are looking for serendipity, you’re on the right track. When was the last time you just stumbled onto something interesting, by the way?”: https://tinyurl.com/2ppnmc7a

A Spotify playlist of songs sampled and used as inspiration by the band Massive Attack: https://tinyurl.com/cecb7z7k

The U.S. Wind Turbine Database shows the location of every wind turbine in the nation. It’s not the most exciting map ever, but there’s still some interesting info in here: https://tinyurl.com/3bn645yd

McMansion Hell brings us this breathtaking residence from 1980: https://tinyurl.com/t45rvx2n

The Infinite Corpse is a chain comic created by more than 500 different artists: https://tinyurl.com/cjufen5r

Car dashboards of the 1980s were, like, space age, man: https://tinyurl.com/5u53psxz

44 minutes of delightful songs in a range of Uralic languages (The Uralic languages form a language family of 38 languages spoken by approximately 25 million people, predominantly in Northern Eurasia. This language group includes languages like Sami, Udmurt, Estonian, and Hungarian), : https://tinyurl.com/ezzccakk

The beautifully crafted wooden guitars of Roland Hauke, soon to be offered for sale to the public for the very first time: https://tinyurl.com/wyrwtnu7

“Before she became an archaeologist, Milks was a professional violinist, and it struck her as bizarre that scholars were testing the performance of a tool using people who had no experience with it whatsoever”: https://tinyurl.com/yyhzym2

Now this is my kind of store: https://tinyurl.com/d2exmjr2

I just learned that author Peter Watts wrote a short story from the perspective of the monster from The Thing: https://tinyurl.com/jbf7hj5a

A handmade mini haunted house scene by Kieron Rose. It took nearly a year to make and has multiple 3D printed parts, 3 computers, 3 smoke machines (also 3D printed), 27 servos, 60 LEDs and 3000 lines of code: https://tinyurl.com/3xar3ycy

How to put chains on your massive, $60,000 tires: https://tinyurl.com/hj97wxuc

A wonderful (and rather sad) animated short about the legendary soldier bear, Wojtek: https://tinyurl.com/5tewnjvs

A marine biologist talks about how various species get into enclosed bodies of water like flooded quarries: https://tinyurl.com/uhkmcb2d

A traditional method for making hemp rope: https://tinyurl.com/sz2evre4

A rather cool robotic flying fox: https://tinyurl.com/3ehayr7z

Fantastic Isolation Painting Recreations by Eliza and Finn (Facebook link): https://tinyurl.com/265en45d

“Desirée Goyette who composed and performed the music for Garfield’s first animation, “Here Comes Garfield” in 1982 – also served as the live-action model for Garfield”: https://tinyurl.com/p8ysrnts

What would happen if characters in horror movies actually made sensible decisions?: https://tinyurl.com/kx6x2ks5

Image source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Portland/comments/bhkhuv/map_of_portland_if_all_the_ice_melted/

Linkdump #113

Ted Green has been collecting the sounds and sights of transit systems for more than a decade: https://tinyurl.com/ynthmfc8Fantastical felted and embroidered headwear by Séverine Gallardo: https://tinyurl.com/s5jrxws5

Explore Mars with NASA’s new realtime tool: https://tinyurl.com/25wu27by

Mark McCloud’s collection, also known as the “institute of illegal images” is the most comprehensive collection of decorated LSD blotter paper in the world: https://tinyurl.com/yms7my3n

Please enjoy this caterpillar and its angry butt pompoms: https://tinyurl.com/ffavf78f

German photographer Jan Erik Waider is known for his interesting approach to landscape photography. Preferring to draw out abstract shapes in nature, he often travels to Iceland to produce unique takes on the oft-photographed environment. So, it was only natural that he make a trip when the Fagradalsfjall volcano began erupting in March 2021: https://tinyurl.com/2ppnpkh9

A side-by-side comparison of the respective music videos for the Michael Jackson song “Beat It” and the “Weird Al” Yankovic direct parody “Eat It”: https://tinyurl.com/2mdm4s55

Some whimsical animated scenes: https://tinyurl.com/3hmzyn2y

What if every sport used bowling balls?: https://tinyurl.com/yaxmhk3h

Cyttaria gunnii, commonly known as the myrtle orange or beech orange, is an orange-white colored and edible ascomycete fungus native to Australia and New Zealand (Images may be disturbing to people with trypophobia): https://tinyurl.com/yshj2pep

Artist Mike Strick makes a wide range of creepy-cool sculptures, props, and toys: https://tinyurl.com/tzjbr3ef

A website that helps you find niche museums near you, or anywhere: https://tinyurl.com/3d2ndke4

“Each year, disasters around the world kill nearly 100,000 and affect or displace 200 million people. Many of the places where these disasters occur are literally ‘missing’ from open and accessible maps and first responders lack the information to make valuable decisions regarding relief efforts. Missing Maps is an open, collaborative project in which you can help to map areas where humanitarian organisations are trying to meet the needs of people who live at risk of disasters and crises”: https://tinyurl.com/3u37fp6z

An educational page all about how boats float and how, therefore, they are engineered and built – at every step of the way there are small interactives which let you explore the relationships between the hull, the water and gravity, which as you read give you a degree of understanding about how the whole ‘floating’ thing happens at scale: https://tinyurl.com/sampyd69

Mdou Moctar stands out as one of the most innovative artists in contemporary Saharan music: https://tinyurl.com/chew3msy

A fascinating pottery decorating technique. The thread he’s pulling is actually very thin tape: https://tinyurl.com/yupbuhrw (Artist’s Instagram: https://tinyurl.com/yfyk2yma)

“I recently made a physical object that defies all intuition. It’s a square of acrylic, smooth on both sides, totally transparent. A tiny window.”: https://tinyurl.com/46k984h5

Some lovely pics of a gorgeous, colorful jumping spider: https://tinyurl.com/jpevavns

Artist Adam Ellis has created a darker, creepier version of Charlie Brown: https://tinyurl.com/fxuws8vc

He may not be good at harmonica but daring he’s trying his best: https://tinyurl.com/2bjkzysh

Take a trip to the Fox Village of Japan, where visitors can enjoy six different species of fox: https://tinyurl.com/wk4sxvhe

Mindat is the world’s largest open database of minerals, rocks, meteorites and the localities they come from: https://tinyurl.com/trfs2pxs

“If Pretty Woman had starred Willem Dafoe instead”. This is horrifying: https://tinyurl.com/y5n85yue

“Geneticat is a little webpage which presents a filing cabinet, a shelf, and a polygonal cat which is attempting to jump from the former to the latter. Except the cat doesn’t know how its body works, and is learning, generation by generation, what its limbs do and how ‘jumping’ is meant to happen – each time the poor thing falls to the floor, a new iteration is generated, learning from the mistakes of its predecessors”: https://tinyurl.com/4wxw6d7c

An entire subreddit for people with overly dramatic houseplants: https://tinyurl.com/56dfbmeh

Built from ingenuity and desperation, the French coastal village of Equihen-Plage gives a whole new meaning to the term ‘boat house’: https://tinyurl.com/4et473pc

elan.school is a harrowing webcomic now in 67 installments (the latest posted August 27) by a survivor of the “Elan School”, a reform school in the woods of Poland Springs, Maine. The school, which operated from 1970 to 2011 when it was shut down, used cult methods, forcing kids to scream insults at each other hours a day, remain expressionless while being insulted, box each other in a ring, and confine others to sit in the corner. Communication with family was closely supervised to keep the abuse hidden: https://tinyurl.com/fun5f5aj

The saga of the Armour Institute of Technology’s infamous Snow Cruiser: https://tinyurl.com/mdp2x4je

“At Unsettling Toy Removal and Rehoming, we appreciate that not every toy is suited for every family. A doll who changes rooms, or a fluffy bear who stares may be a delight to some, and a horror for others. We take pride in matching unsettling toys with people who appreciate their “quirks.”: https://tinyurl.com/te23ty9f

It takes a LOT of work to get dinosaur fossils out of rocks: https://tinyurl.com/3eb6hubn

Can you guess any of the movie titles from these AI-generated posters? (I sure couldn’t): https://tinyurl.com/3kwkua9f

A stunning time lapse short film of the 2013 Kumbh Mela gathering. Kumbh Mela is a Hindu pilgrimage which attracts, each year, the greatest peaceful get together of people in the world: https://tinyurl.com/xda5w4mx

British Pathé shows us how paper furniture was made: https://tinyurl.com/w5ew8k4w

The Kennis brothers create amazingly lifelike reconstructions of humans and human relatives from our ancient past: https://tinyurl.com/yjsr5trf

Dang, Tyranosaurs did NOT play around: https://tinyurl.com/5crswbxj

Every time I visit the Museum of Bad Art I find something I love: https://tinyurl.com/22d5hvzf

“There’s an old story about an explorer arriving in a new territory. He points to a mountain (or some other geographic feature) and asks a local what it’s called. The local gives him a name, say “X,” and from then on the explorer calls it Mount X. Except the local was just telling him the word “mountain” in the local language. Translated, the name is now “Mount Mountain”. This is a polyglot tautology”: https://tinyurl.com/4yfwrk9c

“Old Buck” is a poignant animated short about an old dinosaur fighting to stay on top: https://tinyurl.com/kck88fed

One of my favorite fungi: https://tinyurl.com/c9b6mnrj

Met Gala gowns as Sci-Fi/Fantasy books: https://tinyurl.com/wsa7bw24

What would you do if you had a device that can tell you the facts about anyone and anything?: https://tinyurl.com/3dnxmc2t

Crowartist’s Easy shop: https://tinyurl.com/69ernbsd

Linkdump #112

The joys of shedding time when you’re a husky owner: https://tinyurl.com/3adeec2n

I’ve never been that into accordion music, but this guy is pretty darned impressive: https://tinyurl.com/2jthady6

Why comics have the power to transform education for neurodiverse people: https://tinyurl.com/2axd9xzz

A rather horrifying gif of the spread of the Dixie Fire in Northern California: https://tinyurl.com/kmnkfxhs

A 36-pound (approx 16.33 kg) scrapbook of Depression era comics: https://tinyurl.com/n2z38pey

Winning videos from the 2021 Small World in Motion Competition: https://tinyurl.com/p6d5zh6w

A fascinating look at a cross section of an elephant skull (Just bone, no gore): https://tinyurl.com/fv53pzpm

Animals like jellyfish are sometimes far too fragile to collect and preserve, so here’s how scientists 3D scan them: https://tinyurl.com/m7fufahn

Fleetwood Mac before Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks joined: https://tinyurl.com/u2r583t7

The hidden beauty of seeds: https://tinyurl.com/eca954kj

In 1927, Austrian modernist architect Adolf Loos designed a home specifically for 21-year-old Josephine Baker, who had just moved to Paris. The problem was that Baker had not officially commissioned a design from Loos, so the house was never built. Still, the design of his Baker House has intrigued architects and designers ever since. The bizarre details include a third-story pool, windows with no view, and stairs that go everywhere: https://tinyurl.com/4s43ja9s

Micro-origami that slowly unfold when placed on water: https://tinyurl.com/hmp9yuww

George Rhoads’ ball machine sculptures: https://tinyurl.com/d3jndcv4

Nestflix offers more than 400 fake movies and TV shows that only exist within the fiction of real movies and shows: https://tinyurl.com/3ur6s7ss

Recreating a lost (and potentially dangerous) medieval mead recipe: https://tinyurl.com/4aa49n77

Tracing the travels of a mammoth that died over 17,000 years ago: https://tinyurl.com/57jx693m

Shamsia Hassani has a lot going on, not only is she the first female graffiti artist from Afghanistan, and a professor at Kabul University, but she is also the co-founder of Berang Art Organisation, an artist-run group that promotes contemporary art and culture in Afghanistan through programs, workshops, seminars and exhibitions: https://tinyurl.com/yeameaks

So apparently alpacas scream when scared or angry: https://tinyurl.com/3uy83enr

TIL that there’s a Potato Photographer of the Year award: https://tinyurl.com/hay43ym9

NASA/JPL have released a map of all the visible meteors that have lit up our skies since 1988: https://tinyurl.com/2b5tj2dm

The Divergent Association Task is a research test that asks you think of ten English nouns that are as different from each other as possible: https://tinyurl.com/3cbte92u

This Dutch site lets you download templates for the creation of foldable cardboard structures in any shape you could possibly conceive of: https://tinyurl.com/dtwvw2mf

An interesting kind of stop-motion short film, where the humans are live action, but the environment is manipulated around them: https://tinyurl.com/es6ewx37

What happens when you use a distortion pedal on a harp: https://tinyurl.com/xhj74vs

This slime mold gif is kind of mesmerizing: https://tinyurl.com/4uuy94t7

If you lived in New York sometime between the 1940s and 60s, you may have walked past the legendary Moondog, also known as “The Viking of 6th Avenue: https://tinyurl.com/7zesccdj

List of lists of lists: https://tinyurl.com/2x78s8ev

The saga of Middle Aged Men in Lycra: https://tinyurl.com/2baxp5fd

Gabe Sin turns hair into high art: https://tinyurl.com/7k9yjad3

The HD Video Feedback Kinetic Sculpture is part sculpture, part performance art, and may make the most complex video feedback ever created, using three cameras, two video switchers, a sheet of beam-splitter glass, and an HDMI input from a phone or live video feed: https://tinyurl.com/p4v7b96a

Aboriginal Australians practiced complex agriculture long before Europeans arrived on their shores: https://tinyurl.com/36ec84u9

Lost & Found Nature is a site which features all the animals which we thought were extinct which in fact tuned out not to be: https://tinyurl.com/3wv5kpw

“I can’t really explain what this TikTok channel does, but I do know that it is ART because it makes me feel slightly uncomfortable and uncertain and that’s what art is meant to do, right? Right?”: https://tinyurl.com/47xccyww

The fascinating world of whistled languages: https://tinyurl.com/4uvzct97

This musician will sing about your enemies over WhatsApp: https://tinyurl.com/v373m3ax

Animated short film: “In a strange, dark box lives a group of box-headed elderly humanoid creatures with roots instead of legs. Most of these creatures are sunken into a catatonic sleep, unaware of anything outside their hermetic, sealed-off world”: https://tinyurl.com/x89t2eur

TheCGBros Presents “The Legend Of The Crabe Phare” – A Graduation film by The talented Crabe Phare Team: https://tinyurl.com/4f7srskx

Behold the glowing disco wonder that is the Diamond Squid: https://tinyurl.com/yvf8ksyc

Images source: https://www.offgridweb.com/preparation/infographic-poisonous-vs-edible-berries/

Linkdump #111

The Landslide Blog shares information and updates about landslides around the world: https://tinyurl.com/4855mw3v

10 films by filmmakers with learning disabilities: https://tinyurl.com/3a9ythw2

Stand Here For Dance Party: https://tinyurl.com/wry7eyvy

Explore centuries of artifacts that were excavated from the bottom of Amsterdam’s Amstel River: https://tinyurl.com/5y59bc4v

Now THIS is how you do a Motörhead cover: https://tinyurl.com/282fhev8

While it’s generally accepted (at least in the Western world) that every child has one mother and one father, it’s actually not a universal belief: https://tinyurl.com/fekvkknx

A rare orchid that tricks beetles into trying to mate with it: https://tinyurl.com/5zn37me3

It took 760 hours for handweavers to reproduce the Tunic of Lendbreen from scratch using old-fashioned technique: https://tinyurl.com/x5n85n7h

The Very First Two Hours of MTV. Dang, that takes me back: https://tinyurl.com/eepkz5zb

Various cultural groups around the world have been eating insects for pretty much ever: https://tinyurl.com/rrb9v8dt

Behold the dance of the tentacled droplets: https://tinyurl.com/2kh8vvhw

So apparently there are professional pigeon breeders that specialize in pigeons that steal other pigeons: https://tinyurl.com/j2yt6c5c

A retrofit of the sidewalk railings on the Golden Gate Bridge last year has caused the bridge to “hum” when wind conditions are just right (much to the annoyance of neighbors). Musician Nate Mercereau has responded to the complaints by using the hum to create ambient music: https://tinyurl.com/v5rebf4p

How Singapore built one of the world’s largest floating solar farms: https://tinyurl.com/ffbvhmzt

A contender for the creepier pub sign in Britain: https://tinyurl.com/y52st6cr

The Black Gold Tapestry is an enormous artwork: 67 meters in length – a scale equivalent to two city blocks or the height of a 20-story building. This hand-embroidered illustrative tapestry tells the story of how oil has impacted human civilizations around the world, from the beginning of time to the present day: https://tinyurl.com/5xmrve75

Centuries ago the Navajo tended flourishing peach orchards, but in 1863 the government ordered the Navajo to leave their homelands. When they refused the army slaughter their livestock and burned all their peach trees. Now one woman is reviving the rare fruit: https://tinyurl.com/3erv2729

A collection of the best U.S. film shots of the decade, 2010 – 2019 (according to whoever complied this list): https://tinyurl.com/3mpcr97r

Olbeinsey is the most northern part of Iceland, a tiny island that, according to Wikipedia, is due to disappear due to wave erosion “probably around the year 2020”. Which raised an obvious question: is it still there?: https://tinyurl.com/3nvtxb77

The modern banjo first made its way to Morocco in the 1950s, and since then its become part of the country’s musical landscape: https://tinyurl.com/kzj6n82b

Brief video of how they use a massive wrecking ball to remove unstable rock in Norway: https://tinyurl.com/fv3z243a

Bit-field patterns created from applying simple formulas: https://tinyurl.com/axwsxx

A look at one woman who made it her mission to give other people the chance to have a child: https://tinyurl.com/dcrmm634

Seven spectacular moths in slow motion: https://tinyurl.com/d3kurjkh

The process of glassing (as in fiberglass) a longboard: https://tinyurl.com/ydru96jf

Mr. Rafieh’s amazing pencil shop: https://tinyurl.com/2wasn4uy

The Computer Graphics Museum’s YouTube channel is a serious blast from the past: https://tinyurl.com/f84t9hxc

The occupant of an early medieval grave in Finland may have had Klinefelter syndrome, a condition where a male is born with an extra X chromosome: https://tinyurl.com/23muvzuy

So did you hear about that fungus they found at Chernobyl that just EATS radiation like it’s a totally normal thing to do?: https://tinyurl.com/xdsctpka

Enjoy some weird and educational tweets from the World Bollard Association: https://tinyurl.com/fb4c9xe6

The Climate Impact Lab offers an interactive map that allows you to view the past, present, and possible future of our world’s climates: https://tinyurl.com/228bvc3b

Allow me to introduce you to the glorious creature known as the Ping Pong Tree Sponge: https://tinyurl.com/2y3m4djs

On todays’ episode of Nature Is Horrifying, Tetzoo gives us a lovely gallery of critters that have died from trying to swallow food that they definitely should not have tried to swallow (A little graphic but none of the pics show blood): https://tinyurl.com/5xjypv66

A story of a woman who changed astronomy, and the man who got rewarded for it: https://tinyurl.com/2tmuvnbt

Recently it was reported that scientists had unearthed the remains of a 3000 year old shark attack victim. Now Peru has one that may be 3000 years older: https://tinyurl.com/3hbn88w6

“Edward Hopper’s world was New York, and he understood that city more than most people. He understood that, even though you may live in one of the most crowded and busy cities on earth, it is still possible to feel entirely alone. This painting, “Nighthawks”, was completed on January 21st, 1942, just weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbour and America’s entry into World War II”: https://tinyurl.com/nkzvt2ky

If you’ve ever wondered how Venice protects itself from flooding: https://tinyurl.com/ff27h39b

Take a look at a 310 million year old brain: https://tinyurl.com/6hhzzupe

Renowned architect Kengo Kuma amplifies the already magical nature of Antoni Gaudí’s Casa Batlló in Barcelona with layers of shimmering curtains: https://tinyurl.com/4wv4zpze

Linkdump #110

An outside look at filming a train scene: https://tinyurl.com/2c6rddjw

The “Let the Bodies Hit the Floor” song, but for kids!: https://tinyurl.com/wf4dn44z

Worldwide telescope isn’t really a telescope, but it uses a suite of free and open source software and data sets that let’s you explore the wonders of space like a pro: https://tinyurl.com/jzwabyu4

A brilliant and somewhat creepy scarecrow: https://tinyurl.com/hjrwexr6

The inescapable horror of (fake) transition contact lenses!: https://tinyurl.com/fxjzruvu

The original, unaltered period photo into which actor Jack Nicholson was composited to create the iconic photograph seen in the final shots of The Shining: https://tinyurl.com/je4zd6xw

Don McLeish is a real life seahorse whisperer. “The saga of Lucy” is a great story with lots of photographs: https://tinyurl.com/36z2s8t6

This sounds so annoying, yet I kinda want one: https://tinyurl.com/cvctat9z

The lovely South Philippine dwarf kingfisher: https://tinyurl.com/3kx4jah3

Chefs of three different skill levels make Paella, and have their creations tested and analyzed by a food scientist: https://tinyurl.com/asvjpeke

100 mug handles in 100 days: https://tinyurl.com/3v559469

Follow two LGBTQ trailblazing couples­—Angelica and Jahaira and Luis and Ngoc—on their way to compete at the World Latin Dance Cup: https://tinyurl.com/9m2kjr47

This virtual group show of 27 women-identifying artists is curated by Philippa Adams, former director and curator of London’s Saatchi Gallery: https://tinyurl.com/bd4aza7d

A lovely/sad abandoned church in Russia: https://tinyurl.com/5y4d6ztu

Inflatable fashion by Feyfey Yufei Liu: https://tinyurl.com/a973sw46

The Kamenstein MKII World of Motion Carousel Kettle is a steam-driven kettle with cute horses that start spinning as your water is boiled: https://tinyurl.com/j3vp8prm

Lightograph is a new way to make still photos come alive by manipulating light: https://tinyurl.com/2f75h7jf

Another fun little interactive musical tool, but this time it’s designed like a Rubik’s Cube: https://tinyurl.com/y5yhvx37

Madehow is a website that lists all kinds of things in alphabetical order. All you have to do is click on a thing and you’ll get a complete rundown of how that thing is made: https://tinyurl.com/4jkudx5p

A small 3d model of the planet, on which you can visualise various data such as current wind or current patterns, or current temperature, or the charrningly-named ‘misery index’ which tracks the degree of economic distress felt by ‘regular’ people worldwide: https://tinyurl.com/54whybv2

The Mutoid Waste Company is a performance arts group founded in London. It started in the early 1980s, emerging from Frestonia’s ‘Car Breaker Gallery’. They are probably best known for their recycled art installations at Glastonbury Festival: https://tinyurl.com/7jbj6rh2

You never know when you might need a ginormous marker: https://tinyurl.com/feh5zbb4

Relax and enjoy a Katmai Natl. Park bear cam: https://tinyurl.com/t9m2vzz5

A short Tumblr thread of marble statues carved to look like they’re covered in sheer fabric (A couple pics are mildly NSFW): https://tinyurl.com/m8uzuxmt

Delightfully animated illustrations of moths and bugs by Vladimir Stankovic: https://tinyurl.com/k3h5yyuh

Ken Hermann has a love of Kolkata and the flower men at Malik Ghat Flower Market: https://tinyurl.com/5xvjxep2

Designer iris van Herpen debuts five amazing dresses made from up cycled ocean debris: https://tinyurl.com/y9nppedw

The strange flavor of Parthian Chicken from Ancient Rome: https://tinyurl.com/br2w3a2r

Marc Burckhardt paints wonderful scenes of from fables, myths, and imagination ((Click on the options under the Gallery Works label to see more paintings): https://tinyurl.com/5a77x3yv

Exploring an interesting phenomenon known as “choice blindness”: https://tinyurl.com/4cz48etp

A new kind of temporary tattoo that lasts up to a year: https://tinyurl.com/pdjmf3ze

Cool little gif showing the different gravities on each of our solar system’s main bodies: https://tinyurl.com/pbn8h63a

Volcanic sand blows across a frozen lake: https://tinyurl.com/wezh7u66

“Listen, we need to talk about wombats”: https://tinyurl.com/dkt324yh

A lovely website dedicated to tracking the seasonal migrations of various N. American species, using citizen reporting to gather data (I particularly like the “Maps” section): https://tinyurl.com/5y849fst

Great macro video of Ladybug larvae hatching (Contains brief shots of bug sex): https://tinyurl.com/t2zp8sw2

The band “chipmunks on 16 speed” does a range of rather creepy/moody/awesome covers: https://tinyurl.com/r77btht7

Feni is a rare liquor made from cashew fruit, and it’s produced only in Goa, India. While some brands are pushing to take feni to the mainstream, this family has survived by hand making small batches and selling locally: https://tinyurl.com/n6633trv

If you’ve seen posts about an ice cream place selling Mac & Cheese flavored ice cream, now you can make your own at home! Yay?: https://tinyurl.com/4v4ueyt2

Paste Magazine published a list of the 50 best dystopian movies. Some of the entries surprised me, and there are a few I’ve never even heard of: https://tinyurl.com/uf6za2v4

In 2020 people all over the u.S. started receiving packages of mystery seeds from China. One reporter decides to find out why: https://tinyurl.com/cmmpxmur

It’s a chair, but it’s a log!: https://tinyurl.com/54n2dz68

Kevin Parry shares how he made one of his optical illusion TikToks: https://tinyurl.com/fmw2nt4c

A rather interesting list of 50+ short films you can watch on YouTube (“The Birch” is one of my favorites): https://tinyurl.com/hruzx8t3

Linkdump #109

Some odd, amusing, and disturbing maps from the Atlas Of Prejudice by author Yanko Tsvetkov: https://tinyurl.com/44z3y4ep

Some lovely seashell sculptures to brighten your day: https://tinyurl.com/tykwvdb

The Order of the Good Death is a collective of professionals who want to help people understand that death is a natural part of life, and help them release their fears and misconceptions related to death, dying, and decay: https://tinyurl.com/3u7ussbe

An interesting look at how the pointy shoes trend in 1300s Europe affected the health and shape of people’s feet: https://tinyurl.com/5wrjhhe8

TIL there’s a plant that has no chlorophyl and looks like a candy cane: https://tinyurl.com/3hkzndye

The wonderful range of traditional masks from New Guinea: https://tinyurl.com/8dy2eww

The science of colored shadows: https://tinyurl.com/3ed37ejr

Ringheiligtum Pömmelte is a late Neolithic, Early Bronze Age henge monument from the late third millennium BC. The site was discovered in 1991 through aerial photography near the present-day village of Pömmelte in the district Salzlandkreis, in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany: https://tinyurl.com/k77x5sw

The difference between a Tornado Warning and a Tornado Watch, clearly illustrated: https://tinyurl.com/ny4r3zd3

Check out the vegan menu at this upscale NYC restaurant: https://tinyurl.com/wkk5j4

The Huldremose woman is one of the best preserved bodies from Denmark’s prehistory. This Iron Age mummy from year 55 AD was naturally preserved in the Huldremose bog on Djursland, Denmark. Today, almost 2,000 years later, you can see her remains at the National Museum of Denmark: https://tinyurl.com/42upck39

That one time when the U.S. government thought it might be cool to build a new highway using nuclear bombs: https://tinyurl.com/67yb2sdv

If you’ve ever wanted to learn about needle felting, this 5 minute video for beginners is an excellent place to start: https://tinyurl.com/zmnayn4p

Artvee is a website with an enormous database of searchable, public-domain classical art: https://artvee.com/

The Cucuteni–Trypillia culture of Eastern Europe was one of the oldest and longest-lived in the world: https://tinyurl.com/2navsadr

What an opera singer looks like in an MRI scanner: https://tinyurl.com/ed75788z

From 2017, a visual voyage across the US-Mexico border, stitched together from 200,000 satellite images: https://tinyurl.com/45krwmm4

How radical gardeners took back New York City: https://tinyurl.com/8bfk6tm2

Take a virtual tour through the Darth Vader House in Houston Texas: https://tinyurl.com/yppb8cr5

Just a few of the 331 entrants battling for the title of Cuprinol Shed of the Year: https://tinyurl.com/fvnmdway

Exploring a mysterious, stinky, and rather threatening mud puddle that moves under its own power: https://tinyurl.com/8ku9kvwt

The story of a wealthy American industrialist who died a horrible death due to a radioactive “health tonic.” This is why we have regulations now: https://tinyurl.com/v3a7vvkz

In 1899, six years before her death at age 70, Aboriginal Tasmanian Fanny Cochrane Smith made five wax cylinder recordings of traditional Aboriginal songs and language. They are the only recorded example of Tasmanian Aboriginal songs and the only recorded example of any Tasmanian Aboriginal language: https://tinyurl.com/9tys84t2

A Flickr page dedicated to people who love control panels: https://tinyurl.com/f593fht6

Pop artist James Ritzi’s gloriously bizarre building: https://tinyurl.com/j4mecdv7

A stop-motion video of the insides of fruits, as well as video of how the artist did it (He has WAY more patience than I do): https://tinyurl.com/h935ewm2

Rarely seen 1976 16mm footage from the Star Wars Archive shows actors Kenny Baker who played R2-D2 and Anthony Daniels who played C-3PO trying out their new costumes at Elstree Studios, while others were testing out unfinished droids for the film: https://tinyurl.com/47nrehx5

A 3D printed, 11 gear Mobius Strip: https://tinyurl.com/bxzfs9aa

If you’re in the market for a charming house with a resident 95-year-old tortoise, I have the perfect place for you!: https://tinyurl.com/sa6wb6mn

If you’ve ever been around mourning doves and wondered why they make that squeaky noise when they fly, here’s why: https://tinyurl.com/rvwh443k

I’d never heard of a fractal vise until now, but these things are rad!: https://tinyurl.com/ukrckaf3

A model of the Heidelberg Letterpress made entirely from cardboard and paper: https://tinyurl.com/49y4w3ny

A website dedicated to the history of Italian car design: https://tinyurl.com/dyy58bns

Man Khanna’s charming Claymen: https://tinyurl.com/tbrurc26

Wangechi Mutu is a Kenyan artist who crafts stunning sculptures (As well as amazing collages): https://tinyurl.com/2xn5dhr7

Wonderfully unique and creative ceramics from Jan Howlin: https://tinyurl.com/tvm59c

“Over the last month, I challenged 3D artists with the Alternate Realities CG challenge. I provided an animation for everyone to work from, and the results were stunning. 2,400 artists delivered, the top 100 were chosen for this montage”: https://tinyurl.com/fkuvy3mm

Hydraulic press videos as interpretive dance. I LOLed: https://tinyurl.com/2e3hhzjk

European ideas of African illiteracy are persistent, prejudiced and, as the story of Libyc script shows, entirely wrong: https://tinyurl.com/3w72d3zu

This guy makes AMAZING things with wire: https://tinyurl.com/csdkpy2

A fascinating spider web: https://tinyurl.com/4bdw83zk

The Vølfgang Twins demonstrate how they make their handbuilt Tagelharpa: https://tinyurl.com/ytbzrthu

Meet the Ringed caecilian, a super weird amphibian that looks like a worm: https://tinyurl.com/nt6vhnyk

Beautiful botanical gifs by digital artist Shane Griffin: https://tinyurl.com/3p8zjkw5

How one man built a simple-yet-brilliant water computer: https://tinyurl.com/tettw7ea

The lovely, flowing patterns of sheep, captured by a drone: https://tinyurl.com/tn9453zf (More videos on his website here: https://tinyurl.com/3c5w2vkj)

Linkdump #108

Next time someone tries to tell you that farming is boring: https://tinyurl.com/wrhuyewp

“Baby farming” was a term coined during the Victorian Era to describe the practice of taking custody of unwanted children or those whose parents were unable to care for them, for a small fee. Essentially, a baby farm was a for-profit orphanage: https://tinyurl.com/8vuambxw

I was not aware that the Shoebill stork sounded like a construction site. Now I know: https://tinyurl.com/fmhh4d4h

A day in the life of a weed delivery man in New York City at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic: https://tinyurl.com/dpph6rr

An interesting (If not terribly practical) tent designed to hang from trees: https://tinyurl.com/yycfy68a

AXM Paper Space Scale Models lets you download plans for some fantastic paper models of various spacecraft: https://tinyurl.com/dtdp36pt

Spend the night in a gorgeous restored windmill in rural Kent: https://tinyurl.com/nayyw2pz

Soooooo apparently tarantulas can swim. SURPRISE!: https://tinyurl.com/2srz7dwf

Artist Edgar Askelovic, aka Aspencrow, crafts amazing sculptures with a wide range of materials (a few pieces are NSFW): https://tinyurl.com/43zdxtr4

If you’ve never seen the large-scale art installations of Daniel Popper, you’re in for a treat (Click the “Projects” tab to see his works): https://tinyurl.com/yj87v2m8

If you’ve ever seen those pics of fruits that have been grown into weird shapes, like hearts or squares, now you can do it yourself. And apparently this website also sells tiny underpants for peaches, if that’s your thing. I’m not gonna judge: https://tinyurl.com/4ajtev6p

Charlie doesn’t think his antique car-collecting habit has become a problem. But some of his neighbors are angry and his wife is sick of it. What’s the line between hoarder and preservationist?: https://tinyurl.com/4ncvv2xe

In Glenelg, on the west coast of Scotland, there’s the Skye Ferry, the last turntable ferry in the world: https://tinyurl.com/2338jyny

Nice little twitter thread from Fake History Hunter, regarding misrepresented photos of nurses in WWII: https://tinyurl.com/c868peky

Vintage Swedish stoves have a look and charm all their own: https://tinyurl.com/b7wn3fe8

A historic Russian recipe that turns apples into marshmallow: https://tinyurl.com/25ur5y59

Some of the best Milky Way photos of 202: https://tinyurl.com/nbwyhepa

The Superb Fairy-wren has developed a brilliant way to identify its babies and outsmart cuckoos that like to lay their eggs in other species’ nests: https://tinyurl.com/vxj5jsxm

The Chinese government is apparently committed to building what may be the world’s most difficult dam on the Yarlung Tsangpo river. It would be a megastructure in the Himalayas, closely involved with the Indian border, in the world’s deepest canyon, would control a major source of water for India and Bangladesh, and in a seismically dangerous area: https://tinyurl.com/wmexys33

Flat pack pasta was created to potentially save space during shipping and storage, and it also looks super cool: https://tinyurl.com/2uyedkdh

Mesmerizing B&W time-lapse footage of clouds, set to the wonderful song “The Last Goodbye” by Eric Kinny and Danica Dora: https://tinyurl.com/asrmakkj

A new antitrust case shows that Prime inflates prices across the board, using the false promise of ‘free shipping’ that is anything but free: https://tinyurl.com/2bvpu5z3

The amazing Simone Biles in extreme slow motion: https://tinyurl.com/3s9h825w

This digitally enhanced and animated Abraham Lincoln is kinda cool, and honestly kinda creepy: https://tinyurl.com/srfxfvbw

Rumba Moreno is an all female rumba group shaking up Cuba’s music scene. In Uproar London-based filmmaker Moe Najati explores male resistance to their music: https://tinyurl.com/dyw5yz7j

A site that will take you to another, apparently entirely-random, website at the press of a button: https://tinyurl.com/yvy3ykwn

The fascinating physics of Tuned Mass Dampers that keep skyscrapers steady: https://tinyurl.com/sactetmk

The dark, macabre, surreal art of Murielle Belin (FYI some pieces involve preserved dead animals): https://tinyurl.com/cketpnuv

Sir Patrick Stewart as vacuum cleaners: https://tinyurl.com/k4atuvpt

“Inspired by design of historical maps, this project aims to concisely, but still comprehensively visualize the current state of the World Wide Web, and document the largest and most popular websites over the period of 2020-2021, along with their countless aspects and features”: https://tinyurl.com/2w853569

An Instagram feed of an AMAZING makeup artist, Drian Pili Bautista: https://tinyurl.com/yhe4c6mt

Some delightful digital art by Hal Tenny: https://tinyurl.com/3p4bu7uy

Fascinating cryptozoology mega thread from one of my favorite twitter accounts: https://tinyurl.com/acs7vbey

As an American, the Swindon Magic Roundabout looks like an absolute nightmare and I would probably have a panic attack: https://tinyurl.com/2b3thpd8

“In this episode, John Noksana, Carolina Behe, and Mumilaaq Qaqqaq sit down with Threshold producers Amy Martin and Nick Mott to discuss Inuit food security and Inuit sovereignty in the North”: https://tinyurl.com/7rvttu73

Linkdump #107

Fio Silva’s murals are a beautiful blend of natural forms and motions: https://tinyurl.com/4b7vruup

If you live in a place that doesn’t have cicadas, here’s what you’re missing: https://tinyurl.com/dvpxj2bs

One man in Italy has spent 50 years creating an amazing collection of stones: https://tinyurl.com/m766d3cp

Zimbabwean photographer and digital strategist Tawanda Kanhema documented 500 miles of roads in Zimbabwe after learning his country did not appear on Google Maps: https://tinyurl.com/evek5s4a

Textile artist Alexandra Kehayoglou on weaving memories of forgotten landscapes: https://tinyurl.com/yh5c6m94

Meet the Indian Peacock Softshell Turtle (Which looks NOTHING like a peacock, FYI): https://tinyurl.com/3p646fks

A very well done intro to how archaeological firms use remote sensing tools to find sites and areas of interest without physically digging, and how these tools can be invaluable in helping find sensitive sites like unmarked graves: https://tinyurl.com/ymdaksr2

One of the last matriarchies in Europe: https://tinyurl.com/252s33fy

If you’ve never seen the odd and amusing work of British artist David Shrigley, please enjoy!: https://tinyurl.com/yw9h6cec

Cool science with LEDs (Things start getting interesting about halfway through the video): https://tinyurl.com/rm7wtret

The story of a renowned surgeon who had a remarkable career. A career that was nearly hidden from the world when it was discovered that Dr. James Barry was actually a woman: https://tinyurl.com/3eryfymy

“Have you heard about the BASEBALL-SIZED CELLS living in the deep sea? Or the rocks that GROW? Or how these cells & rocks are home to hundreds of animals? Have you heard how we’re trying to mine these things to make electronics work?”: https://tinyurl.com/f495pkvc

Some insights into Misophonia, a disorder in which certain sounds trigger strong, and sometimes violent, emotional or physiological responses: https://tinyurl.com/64hdtnb5

“The End” is an artistic short film made entirely of gifs of the final scenes of a wide range of B&W and color films: https://tinyurl.com/yh4a7t9u

Whip spiders are fascinating creatures, though not everyone will find them to be delightful: https://tinyurl.com/8n9duttw

Have you heard of the orisha Elegba?: https://tinyurl.com/u7k9ks8e

Dive into all of the mysterious lore, debated symbolism, and enchanting aesthetics of the famous Hunt of the Unicorn tapestries, currently displayed in the MET Cloisters: https://tinyurl.com/us43ppt8

The Wikipedia entry for fictional Great Dane puppy Scrappy-Doo has six sections, 15 subsections, 19 sub-subsections, and is 2000 words longer than the Wikipedia entry for the entire history of Poland. BUT WHY?: https://tinyurl.com/2hwnwdre

14 year old Indian beatboxer, Shashwat, from Madhya Pradesh, India: https://tinyurl.com/wwz9pfc3

A fascinating and horrifying story about how parasites give a certain kind of ants a bizarrely extended lifespan: https://tinyurl.com/esezxfcv

Please enjoy this adorable Twitter thread of TikToks from England’s Black Country Living Museum: https://tinyurl.com/ynhns95d

The ‘Colacho,’ a man dressed as a devil, jumps over babies during ‘El salto del Colacho’, a traditional festival in the village of Castrillo de Murcia in Spain: https://tinyurl.com/vycyjfcp

Now you can create medieval memes with this tool from the Dutch National Library: https://tinyurl.com/tz9mz26d

Awww, the beloved Galapagos rock formation known as Darwin’s Arch has collapsed: https://tinyurl.com/f9b4shhy

“I found an article that said ‘The microwave was invented to heat hamsters humanely in 1950s experiments.’ And I thought, no it wasn’t. …was it?”: https://tinyurl.com/7mymurny

“I grew up with Josh Duggar, Ask Me Anything”: https://tinyurl.com/3m6r8px2

The Kyrgyz of the Pamir Mountains in Northern Afghanistan live at a high altitude way above tree lines, where no crops grow. Survival depends on the animals that they milk, butcher, and barter. This is part of a global story shot for National Geographic and titled “The Evolution of Diet”, on self-sufficient communities, their lifestyle and food habits: https://tinyurl.com/2bw7km8f

Hisako Koyama created one of the most influential solar observation collections in the last 400 years. But before that she was a little girl in WWII Tokyo, looking up at the stars during air raid blackouts: https://tinyurl.com/u6rr9edc

How average are you?: https://tinyurl.com/4njw2snw

If such things interest you, you can now see the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale Pavilions online: https://tinyurl.com/46rn642x

If ceramic buttons are your jam, this UK Etsy shop has a lovely selection: https://tinyurl.com/jemk2um8

Bees actually have rather unique, individual faces: https://tinyurl.com/yz58av5u

A short animated video telling the story of The Lion Man, a small ivory sculpture, carved 40,000 years ago, and the oldest known image of a being that does not exist in nature: https://tinyurl.com/8ny4stz5

A Tumblr dedicated to hard line comic illustrations: https://tinyurl.com/e7pebyvw

A sweet little Twitter thread of artistic cookies: https://tinyurl.com/75cynwnf

Image source: https://pixel77.com/artist-week-amazing-illustrator-alberto-seveso/

Linkdump #106

This is the largest free kitchen in the world. Open 24 hours, year round, this food hall feeds 100,000 people for free each day: https://tinyurl.com/ezhff5wy

A delightful animated lesson about the infamous Double Slit Experiment: https://tinyurl.com/4uevzt2u

When a multimillionaire offers a massive reward for her missing cat, searchers race each other across a ritzy island filled with mysteries: https://tinyurl.com/9zpe8jzm

Barbara Daniels creates masterfully creepy and disturbing illustrations that imagine what our world look like if the roles of humans and animals were reversed, and we were dominated and abused by other species (C/W Some illustrations feature images of nudity, torture, death): https://tinyurl.com/a5f8arfm

A moving poem about Gaza, by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha: https://tinyurl.com/h6pbh4rd

The Dive Motel in Nashville offers 23 unique, specially designed rooms for folks who love that retro-party feel: https://tinyurl.com/yns74umt

A surprisingly interesting video about one species of small fish and how drastically it impacts our world: https://tinyurl.com/3nea2c4n

It’s kind of amazing how flexible ships are. Of course they need to be or else they’d break apart, but it’s still kind of a trip to see it in action (Warning – video includes very loud rock music): https://tinyurl.com/3bs23mvb

Revisualizer is a fun little online music toy that lets you create sounds with your keyboard and drag elements around the screen: https://tinyurl.com/y6rxfe9r

A list of odd and interesting lists: https://tinyurl.com/weet4hs

Lights At Sea is an interactive map which shows the location of lighthouses around the world. The map uses different colored flashing markers to show the light characteristics of each lighthouse shown on the map: https://tinyurl.com/yy98ec

Crumbling archaeological sites of southern Iraq – in pictures: https://tinyurl.com/yh9kwrsw

If spending hours watching drain unclogging videos sounds fun to you, I found the perfect YouTube channel (the tree roots are my favorite): https://tinyurl.com/28a9dkfk

What happens when you try to take a break at an animal rescue: https://tinyurl.com/7fuv6nvm

A vapor cone, also known as shock collar or shock egg, is a visible cloud of condensed water which can sometimes form around an object moving at high speed through moist air, for example an aircraft flying at transonic speeds: https://tinyurl.com/3v4r28xm

A rather interesting Tumblr dedicated to “Problematic ships”: https://tinyurl.com/jztrx5a8

For the Tintin fans, an alphabetized list of Captain Haddock’s curses: https://tinyurl.com/w7d3jzch

Romain Laurent is a photographer, director, and motion artist who crafts a wide range of fantastic videos and gifs: https://tinyurl.com/4nmzx5sn

Our Forests is a time-lapse video from Google Earth, showing the severity of deforestation in some parts of the world: https://tinyurl.com/sy5ac734

“Who wants to torment Americans with English place name pronunciations?”: https://tinyurl.com/ju344rfa

Architect Federico Babina imagines how famous artists might have designed a home: https://tinyurl.com/ezx536tt

Behind Closed Doors is a YouTube channel offering video tours of buildings you typically wouldn’t have a chance to look inside of: https://tinyurl.com/btrufvv2

“Whether pitched up, down, or at the wrong rpm entirely, sometimes the wrong speed on a turntable can completely transform a song”: https://tinyurl.com/3tf4uyde

The Covid Art Museum features art from around the world, created during COVID lockdowns: https://covidartmuseum.com/

Making some dubstep in the chemistry lab: https://tinyurl.com/e35s7y4f

A website about the ancient monuments of Ireland, and the history and folklore that surround them: https://tinyurl.com/34synhrf

I assume most people are familiar with the horrific experiences of the POWs immortalized by the film The Bridge on the River Kwai, but many may not know that one of those prisoners was an avid archaeologist: https://tinyurl.com/rnjzsk6w

Turning toast into fine art: https://tinyurl.com/9wnbh6yk

The Kit is a selection of guides and resources designed to help people undertake online research and investigative journalism, and contains all sorts of tips and links to useful tools which will help you uncover links and connections between people and entities online: https://tinyurl.com/jnjmspaa

Having trouble finding something to watch on your streaming service? Movie of the Night is a smart service that helps you find stuff to watch through a decent search engine – pick your country, your genre preferences, your desired era of release, and it will find stuff for you available to stream in your country on the main platforms available: https://tinyurl.com/paa5xwbc

An Instagram account dedicated to the weird and random listings you can find in the depth of Wikipedia: https://tinyurl.com/exthc6fw

Revealing the lost colors of ancient Mesopotamian sculptures: https://tinyurl.com/yh4427w7

Ememem is an inventive artist who fills potholes in his home city Lyon, France with beautiful mosaics to brighten the days of anyone who spots them: https://tinyurl.com/rekamfu7

Walrus can make a surprising range of sounds. Some sounds may be a bit less…….enchanting than others: https://tinyurl.com/26s2v9ms

Linkdump #105

If you’ve ever wondered what kind of sounds a baby hyena makes: https://tinyurl.com/uup388mb

A first look at HBO’s new Game of Thrones spinoff ‘House Of The Dragon’: https://tinyurl.com/ccjftdra

A lovely Twitter thread about human OBGYNs helping non-human primates give birth: https://tinyurl.com/2vdnvphd

How to make an origami Chinese thread book with 31 tiny pockets for storing embroidery threads, packets of needles, paper patterns, etc: https://tinyurl.com/4u8sk9an

Baby capybara are the BEST THING EVER: https://tinyurl.com/e2xdj756

Louie Kamookak has been on a 40-year quest to solve the Franklin mystery—for himself and for his people: https://tinyurl.com/yv8tme4j

The weird science of the placebo effect keeps getting more interesting: https://tinyurl.com/efe25wce

The Parker Solar Probe was clocked at over 330,000 miles per hour as it zipped through the sun’s outer atmosphere: https://tinyurl.com/wpr3x889

An unassuming frog spawns a lovely musical collaboration: https://tinyurl.com/pknftj8d

In the 1970s a scientists decided to conduct an unusual experiment to learn more about human conflict, violence, and behavior. It involved a raft, a priest, and ten hot volunteers: https://tinyurl.com/4tc5xuja

A little Twitter science thread regarding seal flippers: https://tinyurl.com/4w48fsyt

Video game weapons reimagined as Nerf guns: https://tinyurl.com/3a9jvyue

Interesting short video showing how the Earth’s rotation has changed over time: https://tinyurl.com/suurcs47

A really well-done animated video about the 1971 Attica Prison Rebellion and the violent retribution that followed: https://tinyurl.com/42f7t7y2

A planetary scientist rates Saturn emojis: https://tinyurl.com/348x6shb

Take a journey with the archaeologists looking into the history of pants: https://tinyurl.com/3umnd686

“Recycle art activist” Thomas Dambo makes gentle giants from scrap wood, old pallets, twigs and debris: https://tinyurl.com/4xzb8w5h

An interactive map of Russia’s many monotowns: https://tinyurl.com/8djtvfdj

Eleven ways of smelling a tree: https://tinyurl.com/mjn7zn22

The “Passer through Walls” sculpture in the Paris Catacombs: https://tinyurl.com/7tssacn8

Two meticulous maps showing the names and locations of every brothel, bar, casino and saloon that existed in the Cheyenne and Levee Districts of Chicago between 1870 and 1905: https://tinyurl.com/2x6thv3u

Metabunk.org is dedicated to the art and pastime of honest, polite, scientific investigating and debunking: https://tinyurl.com/3zbrtj3n

11-year-old girl rescuing a Draughtboard Shark that got wedged between two rocks at low tide: https://tinyurl.com/5aact8us

Beautiful 19th-century Indian drawings show Hatha yoga poses before they reached the West: https://tinyurl.com/3mvswj7b

I grew up in walrus territory and I will NEVER forget the aroma. “Here is the problem with 2,500 lbs of predatory sea potato using the slipway of a lifeboat station as a spa bed…”: https://tinyurl.com/9h5p46

“This Land Is Mine” is a short animated film by Nina Paley, about the history of conflict in the Levant: https://tinyurl.com/r5jpf4zk

A charming little surprise in a brick wall: https://tinyurl.com/a89ppkdm

A lovely article about the oldest human burial we’ve found to date: https://tinyurl.com/h5bdac58

William Mullan photographs some of the world’s rare, beautiful, and unusual apples: https://tinyurl.com/c6s2kau8

A cool little lesson on alligator foot mechanics: https://tinyurl.com/2a52n5fe

Since last April, thousands of homeless New Yorkers in the city’s shelter system have been staying in formerly private hotels — a need brought on by the pandemic. Here are some of their voices: https://tinyurl.com/r3k9wf54

Dry Cleaning is a post-punk band from South London featuring a tight rhythm section, sweet guitar riffs, and wonderfully scattershot spoken word vocals: https://tinyurl.com/y82a98wk

There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically): https://tinyurl.com/8kvvh32k

A cool little website that demonstrates water drainage to “base level.” Tap to drop a raindrop anywhere on the contiguous United States and watch where that water ends up: https://tinyurl.com/j4zb3sxm

Madame Mori, Haute Couture’s Real Madame Butterfly: https://tinyurl.com/jbcxpra2

One of the most historic landmarks in Hollywood is easy to miss. Located south of the intersection of Hollywood and Cahuenga Boulevards, EaCa Alley appears in some of the biggest films of the silent era: https://tinyurl.com/cxjmf8zr

The last Germans to surrender at the end of WWII: https://tinyurl.com/39wxecxp

Linkdump #104

Antoni “Dante” Villoni takes us on a rather speedy and fascinating bike tour of the Paris Catacombs: https://tinyurl.com/6n9kweft

15 volunteers finally come back to the surface after spending 40 days in a cave for science: https://tinyurl.com/72wuha9w

Ambulance driver, rescue worker, and orphanage founder for both children and cats, Muhammed Alaa al Jaleel goes above and beyond to help people in war-torn Syria: https://tinyurl.com/w4c7esc2

Jessie Marion King was best known as an accomplished book illustrator, but she was also a pretty fantastic jewelry designer: https://tinyurl.com/vtwrp355

Artist Warren King crafts charming life-sized cardboard people to help him feel more connected to his cultural past: https://tinyurl.com/2h69erzc

Your next pet could be a creepy, fur-covered slap bracelet: https://tinyurl.com/2p2fufhu

How do stone axes really compare to modern steel axes? Townsends decides to find out!: https://tinyurl.com/w4hrs8e4

Shimunia paints gorgeous, vibrant landscapes using embroidery thread and fibers: https://tinyurl.com/c7evr2ay

Long ago, a meme challenged the Joshes of the world to come together and battle for supremacy. In April of 2121, it finally happened: https://tinyurl.com/45jv8s3d

If you appreciate fine guitars, you might enjoy browsing the website of Jersey Girl Homemade Guitars. The company, based in Japan, has been making hand-crafted guitars for thirty years. A collaboration between the luthier Kaz Goto, his wife Eiko and Akiko Oda, each guitar is unique, with elaborate and beautiful wood inlays, and comes with a matching strap and (often) a matching pedal, each designed along with the guitar: https://tinyurl.com/5xmuy9vs

The German cave-homes of 19th century farmers: https://tinyurl.com/yb7pn3pr

The only thing better than a pig-calling contest is a pig calling contest + Metal: https://tinyurl.com/2s79n8bh

The project to remove the dams on the Klamath River has received plenty of national media attention as it continues to move forward in a positive way. You’ve probably heard of the ecological impact the removal of the dams will bring to the Klamath basin. It will also return the heart to the Yurok tribe: https://tinyurl.com/2mmu8ymu

How to use a square to draw a circle: https://tinyurl.com/yz6yabn2

An impressive octopus transformation: https://tinyurl.com/dpufdnde

“In gritty 1980s New York, one West Village flophouse became a last-chance refuge for addicts, criminals, LGBTQ runaways, and anyone with nowhere left to go. And my mom was their queen”: https://tinyurl.com/wr3ft62p

Beautiful joinery in a 100 year old house: https://tinyurl.com/hehd7cu8

A Toshiba typewriter that can type English, Japanese, and Chinese: https://tinyurl.com/yjy7zcsp

Ian’s revolutionary shoelace knot: https://tinyurl.com/8fn5ykjy

I just discovered the “Awful Taste But Great Execution” subreddit and it’s even better than I expected (Some posts are a bit NSFW): https://tinyurl.com/art4pkst

The creepy, colorful, otherworldly art of Robert Steven Connett: https://tinyurl.com/4fdhpv2d

“When the robot revolution comes they are going to use this video as evidence against us”: https://tinyurl.com/383duwrn

How the US Postal Service was the underlying circuitry of western expansion: https://tinyurl.com/62k8buv7

Sorry Crossfitters, but THIS is what peak human performance looks like: https://tinyurl.com/4wy3u7zx

So there’s a roleplaying game called Thousand Year Old Vampire, and one player has made a fantastic illustrated saga of his play-through: https://tinyurl.com/tsnrukam

“Why French makes no sense”: https://tinyurl.com/umjeyerm

“New research published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) shows that land use by human societies has reshaped ecology across most of Earth’s land for at least 12,000 years”: https://tinyurl.com/4zbb72vn

British & Exotic Mineralogy is a website dedicated to a book of the same name, published by James Sowerby in the early 1800s. You can click on each illustration to learn more about that particular mineral, and the “About” section of the website is pretty interesting in itself: https://tinyurl.com/276ph7ax

A lovely blog post that uses detailed gifs to help explain how internal combustion engines work: https://tinyurl.com/5v5pfcw

The story of a forklift, a fire, and 20 million pounds of butter: https://tinyurl.com/er6fcfz3

I’m not sure what this instrument is called but it sounds badass: https://tinyurl.com/n5sn88bf

Linkdump #103

NeSpoon is a Polish street artist who creates lovely murals based on traditional lace patterns: https://tinyurl.com/52sxpydh

Redecorating the Oval Office isn’t just a statement of the president’s taste. It’s also a statement of control: https://tinyurl.com/ny9nx2rc

Comprising a hundred and fifty male couples, Thebes’s Sacred Band was undefeated until it was wiped out in 338 B.C. In the nineteenth century, the mass grave of the men was found: https://tinyurl.com/vp3wbrwp

An educational Twitter thread about tiny snakes and their weird jaws (It’s pretty heavy on the science terms, but the pics are still cool): https://tinyurl.com/hukvc7tv

Please give it up for Mr. Handsome!: https://tinyurl.com/yuw4rjyc

Of COURSE it lives in Australia: https://tinyurl.com/rexw978z

Good news! Your dazzling designer pizza purse dreams have been realized!: https://tinyurl.com/vx8hzvu4

Dr. Christine Na-Eun Millar is a physician, gamer, and costumer who loves to unwind by crafting lovely and impressive historical gowns and outfits: https://tinyurl.com/r4uhtc3d

Powerful portraits by Sophie Rowan: https://tinyurl.com/4d22bxc4

The amazing life, and tragic death, of Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, She was an educator, political campaigner, suffragist, and women’s rights activist, and the mother of the beloved activist and Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti: https://tinyurl.com/j8b3smk5

A pair of orbiting black holes millions of times the Sun’s mass perform a hypnotic pas de deux in a new NASA visualization. The movie traces how the black holes distort and redirect light emanating from the maelstrom of hot gas, called an accretion disk, that surrounds each one: https://tinyurl.com/5buktr5z

Bolivia’s Lake Uru Uru was once a beautiful and thriving ecosystem, but was sadly overtaken by a seemingly endless sea of plastic waster and chemicals. Now hundreds of volunteers have come to clean it up: https://tinyurl.com/7b9krhzw

“Mind The Gap” is a downloadable clinical handbook of signs and symptoms in Black and brown skin, designed to highlight the lack of diversity in medical literature and education: https://tinyurl.com/225ckkpr

You may have seen posts of Louise Bourgeois’ giant spider-like sculpture, but you may not know the story and trauma behind its creation: https://tinyurl.com/3ec833av

The volcano that burns blue: https://tinyurl.com/jts5n2hp

“Every single Imperial occupation of Afghanistan since Alexander the Great has had the same justification. They were all defensive invasions, necessary to reduce the “threat” from Afghanistan to the Imperial power”: https://tinyurl.com/852yut44

A collection of ridiculous over-acting and corny dialogue from the 1978 disaster movie ‘The Swarm’. African killer bees invade Texas, provoking a considerable amount of melodrama: https://tinyurl.com/4pzukzbx

Valeska Gert was a fascinating character. Born in 1892, she became renowned as a dancer, choreographer, mime, and cabaret artist. Some crowds were entranced by her boldness, and others repelled and angered by the “grotesqueness” of her performances. Some even credit her for planting the seeds of the punk movement, but everyone seems to have their own thoughts and feelings about this artist. Here’s a short performance piece she did, and there are loads more links about her online: https://tinyurl.com/3v2rr3jt

A lovely little banjo cover of Aphex Twin’s “Avril 14th”: https://tinyurl.com/ub79zvtx

A painting transforms before your eyes: https://tinyurl.com/332ksjt6

“Do you want a thread exploring the links between that ship stuck in Suez, the Trojan War, the founding of Singapore, and Chinese foreign policy, from the Belt and Road and South China Sea to Taiwan? Of course you do!”: https://tinyurl.com/k6de4j9c

Here’s what it’s like to spend the night in Chernobyl: https://tinyurl.com/57bn7vj4

This pterosaur supported its giant neck with bones built like bicycle wheels: https://tinyurl.com/29fy7pur

Georgia’s (The country, not the U.S. state) pre-Christian festival of Berikaoba nearly vanished before one woman made it her mission to revive it: https://tinyurl.com/xkp55ez6

Ahhhh, I do love the DIY inventiveness of Russians: https://tinyurl.com/3tdyx96p

A valiant tweeter shares fun and educational reviews of animal bites: https://tinyurl.com/39umrzzp

For the 3D printing nerds out there, a triple axis tourbillon mechanism (Yes I absolutely had to google what a tourbillon is): https://tinyurl.com/j3w92erk

The Titanic’s lost Chinese survivors: https://tinyurl.com/wx2b493t

From Bored panda, a giggle-worthy thread of non-traditional science paper titles: https://tinyurl.com/3vp2zekb

Photojournalist Brian Skerry explores the culture of whales: https://tinyurl.com/4zs8jedz

A lovely short film about the Nez Peace and local farmers working together to restore the Lostine River and its once-flourishing fish populations: https://vimeo.com/527606800

A living hammock made from weeping willow branches: https://tinyurl.com/ravpb7vp

Have you ever heard the drumming of a male Ruffed Grouse?: https://tinyurl.com/3d8wrh9y

This little turtle is NOT having it: https://tinyurl.com/p8t7t5up

The Lomax Digital Archive (Part of the Library of Congress) provides free access to audio/visual collections compiled across seven decades by folklorist Alan Lomax (1915–2002) and his father John A. Lomax (1867–1948): https://tinyurl.com/nmh85c3v

A lovely infographic about cephalopods: https://tinyurl.com/4dn9cdbn

Linkdump #102

So it appears that bees can actually tell time: https://tinyurl.com/2a8ac4jv

Dr. Jen Gunter gives a brief lesson on how hormonal birth control treats acne (FYI Dr. Gunter is NOT a fan of naturopathic medicine): https://tinyurl.com/mu5h7mre

If you’re trying to build something that involves bending wood, you may find this video quite helpful: https://tinyurl.com/yfdw4mea

Back in the Ancient Times (commonly known as “The 80s”), Joe Strummer decided to make a black-and-white improvisational gangster film inspired by Italian neorealism: https://tinyurl.com/2md7p3he

Support your local library!: https://tinyurl.com/39mut5ka

Carrie Fisher’s Star Wars audition: https://tinyurl.com/4ffk49s3

If you love sharks you might be interested in this cool wall chart: https://tinyurl.com/s3kbavhs

Smithsonian takes us on a tour of some of the world’s most unusual (and sometimes disturbing) books: https://tinyurl.com/2dev294e

The sounds of a harp-like instrument called the yazh, named for the mythological animal Yali whose image was carved into its stem, once filled the halls of temples and royal courts in southern India. Over time, however, the Tamil musical tradition all but vanished: https://tinyurl.com/bmc8r27m

Before there was Javier Botet, before there was Doug Jones, there was Bolaji Badejo: https://tinyurl.com/22yshu9a

Otters, otters, and MORE OTTERS!: https://tinyurl.com/d5rmruf5

Artists and scientists come together to create eerie, otherworldly music out of spider webs (Scroll down to the bottom to watch the videos): https://tinyurl.com/4p7ukuut

Scotland and Kenya come together in an unexpected way: https://tinyurl.com/s6cak5ah

Cynthia Consentino’s Porcelain Madonna series morphs traditional Madonna statues into new and unique forms: https://tinyurl.com/yy899n46

The strange case of the rabbits that walk on their hands: https://tinyurl.com/4w5z978h

In case you didn’t know, the Louvre’s entire collection is now available to explore online: https://tinyurl.com/vsxvk95t

“Found a good outfit” is a Twitter account dedicated to showing you how you, too, can dress like classic characters from TV, movies, books, video games, and more: https://tinyurl.com/bycw4ak

Located above the Arctic Circle, the Norwegian city of Lofoten sits in the middle of an unusual temperature anomaly that makes it surprisingly livable: https://tinyurl.com/9fubffpa

In today’s weird nature news, scientists discover a species of ant that can shrink and then re-grow their brains: https://tinyurl.com/bjy9wsju

Please enjoy the Strange Cats: https://tinyurl.com/6vx6v56h

On some beaches rip currents are responsible for up to 80% of lifeguard rescues, and part of why they’re so dangerous is that you have no idea they’re there until one grabs you. But if you COULD see a rip current it would look something like this: https://tinyurl.com/yha7zdzd

Follow Conservation Display Specialist Rachael Lee on a design journey to create a bespoke visual interpretation of the iconic artist Frida Kahlo, unique to the exhibition ‘Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up’: https://tinyurl.com/wc8nxmyy

Jared Cowen is a photographer and cameraman who also writes and podcasts specifically about film locations for a variety of publications. His latest traces how East L.A. became the unheralded star of the classic hip-hop movie Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo: https://tinyurl.com/d9ew3zft

The Corridor Crew is a (very) popular visual effects-centered YouTube channel, and among their many projects is the series VFX Artists React, where they watch famous and obscure clips from movies and TV, breaking down how they were done. Their April Fools video had their reaction to the footage of the Apollo moon landings: https://tinyurl.com/hesfkdap

This website shows a map of Reddit, and each dot is a subreddit”: https://tinyurl.com/v9k5py7u

If you’ve ever wondered how an escalator works but were afraid to ask, this delightful model shows you all the inner workings that make escalators go: https://tinyurl.com/a7vw95p8

So how do you acquire an “Acquired taste” anyway?: https://tinyurl.com/znupc4zt

A gripping drama about dumplings, consortiums, and the history of emojis: https://tinyurl.com/ymypmsbw

Google Earth Time-lapse lets you look at various parts of the world and see how they’ve changed over the years (Hopefully your computer is newer than mine because mine is sooooo slooooowwwww and it ruins the effect a bit): https://tinyurl.com/hm6hr62

Image source: https://fyfluiddynamics.com/2021/04/wrinkles-on-collapsing-bubbles/

Linkdump #101

The story of young Vinny Byrne, a fourteen-year-old boy who found himself fighting for Ireland in the Easter Rising. An eighty-year-old Vinny reminisces on his time with the volunteers, which took him around the city during the fighting. With Vinny’s Dublin brought to life by handmade miniature sets and puppetry, the film offers a uniquely charming first-hand account of the 1916 Rising: https://tinyurl.com/wuh5ch8z

Interpreting some of the world’s oldest known rock art: https://tinyurl.com/2nfptw8z

If you love science illustrations, Twitter’s #SciArtTweetStorm hashtag brings us a wealth of posts from illustrators around the world: https://tinyurl.com/pj9x28a9

Some folks may not be aware that in certain cultures, during certain time periods, it was completely normal and acceptable for men to wear corsets, sometimes for fashion and sometimes, as is the case in this article, as a medical device: https://tinyurl.com/udvw4hts

I’m a 70s kid so weird macrame wall hangings and plant hangers were an everyday part of the landscape, but Sandra de Groot takes it to a whole now and glorious level: https://tinyurl.com/p97d8b9j

A wonderful song and video from Trio Mandili, three Georgian polyphonic singers – Tatuli Mgeladze, Tako Tsiklauri, and Mariam Kurasbediani: https://tinyurl.com/9k6bwtsc

“Pleasant people doing pleasant things and there’s not much drama and you just kind of feel lovely about the world”: https://tinyurl.com/ysmubype

If you’ve never heard the sound a baby rhinoceros makes: https://tinyurl.com/jmdp7nk

A weird website of imaginary friends: https://tinyurl.com/54vk4enw

Interesting scientific article about a washed up minke whale that was found to have scoliosis. It certainly happens in animals, as it does in humans, but it’s not often that we find examples like this: https://tinyurl.com/34tad63t

Radiohead’s “Creep” performed in 13 different styles: https://tinyurl.com/3v4zfwym

Ravel’s Bolero performed by four musicians on one cello: https://tinyurl.com/y5myrfd9

Beautifully decorated Easter eggs by artist Dinara Mirtalipova: https://tinyurl.com/3dpkchxw

New style of stringed instrument just dropped and I have to say I’m a fan: https://tinyurl.com/3t225rj3

An experiment devised by one of Greece’s greatest thinkers and scientists, Eratosthenes, was recreated once again recently by students from 35 nations around the globe as part of an annual scientific project: https://tinyurl.com/jzc54daz

A Leonia High School teacher has created a poignant, Latin language cover of “Let It Be,” among the most famous songs by the Beatles: https://tinyurl.com/hp2f5jd9

Relearning a centuries-old technology to save Scandinavia’s beloved stave churches: https://tinyurl.com/5tadpes7

“The Bombay Highway Code“ is a poem, a postcard and a love letter bundled up in one short film shot on the streets of Mumbai: https://tinyurl.com/5a5x2mnv

From TYWKIWDBI, a brief post about gene transfer between insects and plants, with links to more detailed articles: https://tinyurl.com/9s7s6jx9

A celebration of contemporary paper art, a new book gathers a wide-ranging collection of collages, quilled portraits, and intricately cut landscapes from 24 artists and studios around the globe: https://tinyurl.com/8wkuacmp

A cool little lesson on how various manmade objects can impact water flow: https://tinyurl.com/6rnjbsve

If you were wondering how the world’s billionaires have been doing over the last year: https://tinyurl.com/3538juj5

Dr. Nehemiah Mabry, PE, knows a lot about bridges. Nehemiah is a structural engineer and an educator; and he builds bridges for a living. Dr. Mabry sits down with WIRED to talk about all different kinds of bridges from around the globe: https://tinyurl.com/4cv7de9m

New York’s 300-year-old trash becomes treasure in the hands of urban archaeologist and artist Scott Jordan: https://tinyurl.com/yabdctht

For anyone who happens to be interested in such things, here’s a transcript of the court proceedings against John Bellingham, the man who assassinated the British Prime Minister in 1812, and was subsequently executed and then sent to the St Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical School for dissection and study. Before the Anatomy Act of 1832, using the bodies of executed criminals was really the only legitimate way that English medical schools could get cadavers for research and teaching. The other method involved doing business with local body snatchers, a practice that was quit illegal but still quite common: https://tinyurl.com/5czpxv7f

The church forests of Ethiopia are small and precious oases in a land where the old growth forests have been almost completely wiped out to make way for agriculture: https://tinyurl.com/2jj5mnpe

Image source: https://www.discoverthewild.co.uk/resources

Linkdump #100

This Academy Award-winning animated short centers around five individuals fighting to maintain balance: https://tinyurl.com/2svku83e

Dong Yuan is considered a pioneer of Chinese landscape painting. His artwork ‘Awaiting the Ferry at the Foot of the Mountains in Summer’ is considered so delicate, it can only be viewed for up to thirty minutes. But recreating this masterpiece in CGI reveals a new perspective, exposing how this innovative depiction of nature was intended to be seen by the observer: https://tinyurl.com/f68hscfa

That time a Russian ship used classical music to save 2000 trapped beluga whales: https://tinyurl.com/58as9ztd

A fun little website that shows you a model of the human mouth, tongue, and throat, and lets you move the various parts around to change the sound, pitch, and air flow: https://tinyurl.com/nxsx3v44

Haretopia is a charming interactive website that….well, just see for yourself: https://tinyurl.com/343jw57y

I think this is the first time I’ve seen a cross-stitch wall mural: https://tinyurl.com/wx2pmey5

In modern day Afghanistan some people are still using a centuries old method to keep grapes fresh all winter long: https://tinyurl.com/473nujne

Photographer John Moore brings us stories from the U.S.-Mexico border: https://tinyurl.com/hexs3xb6

“How Deadly” is a YouTube channel that breaks down viral videos about dangerous Australian animals: https://tinyurl.com/y63pm8cx

Did you know that you could explore inside the International Space Station on Google maps?: https://tinyurl.com/5b3jxae8

The Artists’ Grief Deck. “These cards were made by artists and by caregivers experienced with supporting people in processing loss, to help so many of us who have lost someone or something, and who may not be able to safely grieve together. There is no one correct way to use these cards, but we have these suggestions”: https://tinyurl.com/j5c9mccj

A Twitter thread ranking supernatural monsters by sex appeal: https://tinyurl.com/u2n27xvb

Did you know that some species of crocodiles can gallop? SURPRISE!: https://tinyurl.com/4seafv6y

Filmmaker Andrei Golovnev captured this hypnotic aerial footage on Russia’s Kola Peninsula in the Arctic Circle. The animals use this cyclonic motion to protect members of the herd from predators: https://tinyurl.com/4rzntsja

How a historic monument to graffiti art was unrecognizably transformed into a luxury high rise with the personality of a sad hotel lobby: https://tinyurl.com/3bdc6nud

What it’s like to live in a country that doesn’t officially exist: https://tinyurl.com/3whxevbn

An open source AI that lets you upload songs and then extract/isolate vocals, instruments, etc (I haven’t actually tried it out myself yet, so I can’t say how well it works): https://tinyurl.com/cvmvwxds

21st Century Baroque (Some photos show scenes of violence, but not bloody ones): https://tinyurl.com/3ykhkfd6

If you’ve ever wondered if you’re pronouncing “Lilac” correctly: https://tinyurl.com/ktmxuxfr

From the Anatomika Science Instagram feed, a sad and interesting story of bone cancer in a snake (No gore, just a few pics of the intact snake, and one of its skeleton): https://tinyurl.com/s2w4hbd3

If you’ve ever seen those fascinating diaphonized specimens, as in the bodies of dead creatures that have been specially prepared and dyed so the tissues are clear but the bones and cartilage are brightly colored, here’s a nice little video series about how that whole process works. It’s not bloody, but it does feature dead critters being de-fleshed and prepared: https://tinyurl.com/bffduf

Some great vintage photos of contestants in the 1966 24th World Science Fiction Convention costume contest: https://tinyurl.com/4vmcv38h

That’s the most impressive lava bread I’ve ever seen (Also the only lava bread I’ve ever seen): https://tinyurl.com/24awpeuf

This lawyer reacting to My Cousin Vinny is like a full-on Courtroom Law 101 class in a single video (And really, who DOESN’T love that classic Marissa Tomei scene?): https://tinyurl.com/f3kstybb

BABY BIRBS: https://tinyurl.com/v7b8d5

14 key pieces from museums from all over the Highlands of Scotland, brought to you online via film and photography with supporting stories and archive images from each museum: https://tinyurl.com/52pwkrku

The Mashua is a flowering plant that produces edible tubers, and has been a staple crop in the Andean highlands for centuries. I’d actually never heard of it and only just learned about it when I was googling around trying to learn about the history of potato cultivation in the Americas: https://tinyurl.com/w6nsj8

Image source: https://tinyurl.com/nu9mrvvc

Linkdump #99

Rabarama sculpts human figures emblazoned with a dazzling range of colors, textures, and patterns: https://tinyurl.com/34att27z

Ever dreamed of being a Swiss shepherd battling wolves in a stunning natural setting? Well now’s your chance!: https://https://tinyurl.com/8zd55988

Wild cats vs. toilet paper: https://tinyurl.com/zrtkyvza

The Norfolk Knife, a very large pocket knife with 75 different tools: https://tinyurl.com/3kyc7re8

Beate Karlsson creates wonderfully bizarre wearable art. Would I ever actually wear those frog boots? No. Do I still desperately want them anyway? Absolutely (A few pics are NSFW): https://tinyurl.com/aeer9z8

A University of Crete archaeologist presents a study on the anonymous, unwanted and maligned dead: https://tinyurl.com/j29kekk7

“The Sea in You” is about a mermaid becoming friends with a goth girl. I’m only up to Episode 6 and I already love it: https://tinyurl.com/yjjhjb2s

The nearly forgotten history of Cherokee numerals: https://tinyurl.com/xbhk53bu

A Twitter thread about baking with 4,500 year old Egyptian yeast: https://tinyurl.com/y2nrun8u

For the sci-fi nerds, a YouTube video comparing the sizes of fictional planets: https://tinyurl.com/c8uu7ewv

If urban exploration is your jam, “In todays video we explore this $80,000,000 glass mansion by the name of the Evergreen crystal palace. This place was built to be a family lake house for the Plaster family. In 1990 Mr. Plaster built this home completely out of glass, green marble, and brass. It is for sale right now and it comes with 300 acres, a boat dock, helicopter pad, and much more”: https://tinyurl.com/2ez6fkjr

You may have seen, somewhere on social media, that famous image of an entire human nervous system laid out in a display case, but where, and who, did that nervous system come from?: https://tinyurl.com/s979dezr

Looking for that perfect accent chair for your apartment, home, or office? Look no further!: https://tinyurl.com/yz4fncsf

An interesting little gif of how a piano key works: https://tinyurl.com/pw6fu76m

Someone invented a new pasta shape: https://tinyurl.com/58u8epum

McMansion Hell brings us a splendid specimen from 1979: https://tinyurl.com/y32cabwm

A track by track deconstruction of Massive Attack’s “Unfinished Sympathy”: https://tinyurl.com/3skyebc6

A quick & cheeky guide to identifying art movements: https://tinyurl.com/wesnx7sn

Pigeon legs. So much legs: https://tinyurl.com/2r6xw4tt

A Redditor documents growing 97 different varieties of broccoli: https://tinyurl.com/2ekcb5z2

A Twitter thread listing the signs that you may have become a whale in your sleep: https://tinyurl.com/wr93pvc

Another urban explorer shares photos from an abandoned crematorium (more photo galleries under the “Suffering” heading in the menu): https://tinyurl.com/deh3u3js

Swiss filmmaker Pascal Schelbli created a powerful animated short film that highlights the issue of trash in the ocean. The short film shows what would happen if the waste in the ocean came to life and replaced the creatures living there: https://tinyurl.com/2nshc8dm

The Italian grandmothers who make the world’s rarest pasta: https://tinyurl.com/ss9fxf7v

Spring ice drums in the village of Oymyakon, Yakutia: https://tinyurl.com/p8jdwdyp

Many of the sounds you hear in nature documentaries are not actually the real ones recorded in the wild. That might be because the sounds are too difficult to actually record in the wild or because making up or exaggerating sounds makes for a better viewing experience. These sounds are done by somebody like Foley artist Richard Hinton: https://tinyurl.com/4ba3t39z

Another delightful historical medical story from Thomas Morris (C/W it’s about treating gangrene of the genitals): https://tinyurl.com/45ytwf9d

Linkdump #98

I was cruising a random Reddit thread and someone mentioned Mercedes Lackey’s short story “Roadkill”, about a killer cardboard box that feeds on dead animals (and more), and I managed to find a readable copy online. The formatting is kind of terrible but I do enjoy the story: https://tinyurl.com/bcxjy38b

In today’s weird nature news, scientists have identified a fungus that mimics flowers. Like, REALLY well: https://tinyurl.com/vtm4ajsb

A Croatian island of walls: https://tinyurl.com/3sz4sebp

Soooooo there’s this new app that lets you animate photos in a most horrifying fashion (sound on): https://tinyurl.com/3x5sddxc

Excerpt from “Beyond Noh” an animated film that rhythmically animates thousands of individual masks from all over the world, beginning with the distinctive masks of the Japanese Noh theater and continuing on a cultural journey through ritual, utility, deviance, and politics: https://tinyurl.com/4vdwf49n

Every single one of these flowers is made from sugar: https://tinyurl.com/4xpjk6ee. The artist even has some how-to videos: https://tinyurl.com/3frunf6j

“Glaciers reflect our past and reveal our future. This short film overlays imagery from the archives of the National Land Survey of Iceland with current day footage of six outlet glaciers in the Hornafjörður region of Southeast Iceland to reveal the breathtaking story of a rapidly disappearing frozen world”: https://tinyurl.com/yhbw57cd

John Cleese and Graham Chapman (before their Monty Python fame), with Tim Brooke-Taylor and Marty Feldman, lampooning the stereotypical “rich people claiming they were happier when they were poor”: https://tinyurl.com/akds48vd

“Best rainbows on Earth are in Hawaii, scientist says“: https://tinyurl.com/tdhe479c

Strange and unusual stained glass sun catchers: https://tinyurl.com/2v3y3hvt

How to operate an airport in Antarctica: https://tinyurl.com/yrrnbktc

Have you ever worried how real astronauts or cosmonauts can defend themselves or render harmless hostile life forms? What if an alien breaks into the International Space Station? Or a crew member loses his or her mind and goes berserk? The following set of images will put your mind to ease: https://tinyurl.com/ya255vze

A collection of pre-war amplifiers (if that’s something you’re into): https://tinyurl.com/r8shfe6v

A delightful dive into how one might smuggle luxury cars by water. You never know when this might come in handy: https://tinyurl.com/2aapswf4

Once known as the ‘Versailles of the Caribbean’, its hollow ruins are one of the few lasting remnants of a forgotten royal court – the first Black monarchy established in the Western world that rose from the ashes of the Haitian Revolution: https://tinyurl.com/59vxbjw9

The vibrant & surreal beaded art of Betsy Youngquist: https://tinyurl.com/56jsfws

How to help a snapping turtle cross the road without losing a hand: https://tinyurl.com/2k6ymzh8

“Moon chalk”. Gotta admit it looks like it would be a pain to actually use: https://tinyurl.com/4bprwrrt

A wonderful Twitter thread, from the Hell Creek Reference Collection, about critically analyzing evidence when reconstructing the past: https://tinyurl.com/3zhhcsje

Anatomically accurate human hearts, brains, and fingers, plus toads and beetles and other delights, all made of chocolate: https://tinyurl.com/prkp9b49

Tentacle tights for you cephalopod lovers out there (No this is not hentai related): https://tinyurl.com/343fh462

The Mütter Museum has a new online escape room game you can enjoy from anywhere: https://tinyurl.com/f3x3eyjw

Spanish musician Xavier Lozano playing a flute made from a street barricade: https://tinyurl.com/3wsmup6s

So what was it like to be Sid Vicious’ neighbor?: https://tinyurl.com/j7zz364z

According to some, this is the best bus shelter in England. And it’s pretty sweet, gotta admit: https://tinyurl.com/dup4undb

I present: System of a Hoedown performing Chop Suey, bluegrass style: https://tinyurl.com/2nx5k2rp

Videographer Yusuke Shigeta used pixel animation to reconstruct the Battle of Sekigahara (c1600) depicted on a folding screen, adding details of the natural landscape that still exists at the ancient battlefield: https://tinyurl.com/ekxy65p7

During 2020, photographer and filmmaker Dustin Farrell spent the better part of six months, driving more than 38,000 miles to chase down storms and shoot footage. The end result, 101 incredible shots of nature’s fury in action, compiled into an epic 3-minute short film: https://tinyurl.com/49yfhxtn

In 2014, Japanese flower artist Azume Makoto sent a bouquet of flowers and a bonsai tree on an incredible journey straight into space over the Black Rock Desert. The plants rocketed over 300,000 m into the Nevada sky by way of a high altitude balloon that Makoto specially adapted for the project, entitled Exobiotanica: https://tinyurl.com/5928bf34

In this edition of “A World of Difference,” Korey Kiepert, owner and engineer with The Gravity Group, goes through the 8 main types of roller coasters and breaks down how they work as well as the decisions behind why they get built in the first place: https://tinyurl.com/rba784sr

A brief visit to the British Museum’s X-ray lab: https://tinyurl.com/wnap2mxy

An interactive world map showing the #1 song in each country: https://tinyurl.com/5ebm433a

Linkdump #97

The history and archaeology of dogs in the Arctic: https://tinyurl.com/yw6rrhdc

Rafael Silveira’s vibrant embroidery art: https://tinyurl.com/2v699re3

The deep sea Black Dragonfish is a wonderfully bizarre creature. But have you seen what their larval form looks like?: https://tinyurl.com/42p57hbz

In other weird animal facts news, whale sharks have teeth on their eyes: https://tinyurl.com/5sc3vrap

A nearly perfectly preserved chariot has been uncovered in Pompeii: https://tinyurl.com/393frd5d

The British Museum presents ten top historical board games: https://tinyurl.com/thtm4ud2

Please enjoy the Digital Museum of Plugs and Sockets! I mean if you’re into that sort of thing: https://tinyurl.com/uscw2k6

On Aug. 14, 2014, a hurricane churned high above the North Pole. It was the heart of the Atlantic hurricane season at this time, but this hurricane’s eye did not touch the water, and it did not make landfall: https://tinyurl.com/3t6e2d4p

The Toronto Circus Riot of 1855. “No one seems to agree on exactly how the fight at the brothel got started. Some blame a particularly loudmouthed clown. Some say the clowns cut in line — or knocked the hat off a fireman’s head. But this much is clear: that night, the clowns kicked some firefighting ass”: https://tinyurl.com/7wu5nvpm

Meet Billy the Kid, disturbingly animated: https://tinyurl.com/8u3azwer

That online iceberg toy has a new & improved version: https://tinyurl.com/u9r3k5kw

Take a tour of Egypt’s Abu Simbel Temple in 3D: https://tinyurl.com/3w29kwna

You’ve probably seen at least some of the articles and viral videos showing how awesome and futuristic prosthetic arms and legs have become, but actually living with one is rarely as cool and life-changing as they make it look: https://tinyurl.com/bf649t6

Researchers in Paris have been investigating the effect of vertical shaking, which can be used to suspend a layer of liquid in mid-air. They have discovered a peculiar phenomenon that allows lightweight objects to float on the bottom surface of this liquid, with a kind of reverse-buoyancy: https://tinyurl.com/nwcyabf7

That time in 1983 when David Bowie asked an MTV host why the channel largely ignored Black artists: https://tinyurl.com/m4rmjtuc

Musician Emilia Benjamin of The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment demonstrated the rich, layered sound of a traditional 13-string Lirone. Benjamin also explained that where and how the instrument was invented, its history of accompanying vocalists, the string variations of different models, and the many names given to the instrument: https://tinyurl.com/334ne96h

The cool and creepy sounds of icebergs: https://tinyurl.com/3459v2tn

TIG welding in slow-motion recorded at 1,000 frames per second: https://tinyurl.com/w399ujst

Very odd, and visually beautiful. “Rybak’s daughter is Yuldus Bakhtiozina’s debut feature film. This is a story of trials and transformations associated with the need to overcome despair. The film glows with life-affirming color and rolls into satirical laughter at social reality”: https://tinyurl.com/27nuawvp

Built between 1921 and 1924 for Queen Mary, consort of George V, by the leading British architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, this dollhouse includes contributions from over 1,500 of the finest artists, craftsmen and manufacturers of the early twentieth century: https://tinyurl.com/strdwuas

In this six-minute time lapse video, you can watch a single cell grow into an alpine newt salamander: https://tinyurl.com/2ma9zpcf

The biggest mirror telescope ever has come closer to completion! The mirror casting process will take 2.5 months before it reaches room temperature, and then begins 4 years of polishing: https://tinyurl.com/2dp8b4zd

Tim Travers Hawkins’ new HBO Max documentary, Persona: The Dark Truth Behind Personality Tests, investigates America’s infatuation with personality testing, revealing the surprising origin story behind the MBTI while surfacing ethical questions and criticisms that these seemingly harmless instruments are profoundly discriminatory and reflective of larger troubling issues of who exactly is considered worthy and valuable in society: https://tinyurl.com/2cta2dwp

The multimedia art of Dylan Gebbia-Richards reminds me of some sort of vibrant, trippy, alien fungus adorning a far-away planet: https://tinyurl.com/3d75anry

We see plenty of articles about the construction of Westminster Cathedral, but this one’s about the rather impressive and somewhat horrifying construction of its foundations: https://tinyurl.com/txfpjyt7

So apparently there are some sea slugs that can escape danger by ripping their own heads off. Ah, the beauty and majesty of NATURE!!: https://tinyurl.com/v8d7bpey

A live-action MRI of a Chinese speaker and a German speaker: https://tinyurl.com/3ey4hxua

“On a July day in 1990, a confrontation propelled Native issues in Kanehsatake and the village of Oka, Quebec, into the international spotlight. Director Alanis Obomsawin spent 78 nerve-wracking days and nights filming the armed stand-off between the Mohawks, the Quebec police and the Canadian army. This powerful documentary takes you right into the action of an age-old Aboriginal struggle. The result is a portrait of the people behind the barricades”:
https://tinyurl.com/4w7h34yu

Image source: https://tinyurl.com/yf6tm78x

Linkdump #96

Artist Ali Gulec has a lovely gallery of freaky, funky, awesome skulls and skeletons: https://tinyurl.com/4nn37y36

Witness the birth of Kermit the Frog in Jim Henson’s live TV show, “Sam and Friends” (1955)“: https://tinyurl.com/2tyyammj

How HP Lovecraft pronounced “Cthulhu”: https://tinyurl.com/synxfyene

Bhangra fan Gurdeep Pandher of Yukon sends all of us a snowy dance of joy, hope and positivity: https://tinyurl.com/24ps7yxs

A delightful Twitter thread about the history of sewage management in London: https://tinyurl.com/ypsrdutd

The city of Baltimore places salt boxes around the town during winter, so that residents can sprinkle salt and keep walkways and driveways free of ice. Here’s a google map of all the salt boxes, many of which have been decorated by locals. Just click on an “Art Box” icon to see a photo of that box: https://tinyurl.com/rtj8f3uy

The US government, in setting standards for food quality based on appearance, also shaped our perception of what is acceptable to eat. This does not always line up with reality. But having set the standards, the government then had to deal with food producers who took shortcuts to make food appear better to the consumer. In some cases, the standards were not so much about quality as they were about protecting an industry: https://tinyurl.com/2enwrff3

Iceberger. Draw an iceberg and see how it will float: https://tinyurl.com/2ucfcc45

If you’ve never heard of a Patagonian crater agate, please enjoy: https://tinyurl.com/4ftnr6b4

These are the 23 varieties of native corn grown in the Eye of the Not A Cornfield Project: https://tinyurl.com/eeuyepjr

“Under Paris’ glittering Eiffel Tower, undocumented Senegalese migrants sell miniature souvenirs of the monument, to support their families back home. Far from their loved ones and hounded by the police, each day is a struggle through darkness in the City of Lights.”: https://tinyurl.com/sbsmjum9

Sapphire, a 1959 crime drama focuses on racism in London toward immigrants from the West Indies and explores the “underlying insecurities and fears of ordinary people” that exist towards another race: https://tinyurl.com/2s63htus

How cultural taboos can be tied to conservation: “But as the colonists, missionaries, and traders who followed in Cook’s footsteps violently suppressed Native people and knowledge, these protections frayed—and with them, the marine ecosystems that had supported Pacific cultures for millennia. In Hawai’i, after the U.S. government overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy and opened the waters to commercial fishing, moi and other fish populations plummeted. Similar scenarios unfolded across the world’s oceans”: https://tinyurl.com/49z4swdm

Yaupon is North America’s only known native caffeinated plant and once threatened the British East India Company. So why has the world forgotten about it?: https://tinyurl.com/5fwwd5fe

Tracking down the source photos for The Beatles’ 1967 album Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band: https://tinyurl.com/434wb5ka

Another amazing selection of gorgeous macro insect photos (as well as other critters, and some lovely landscapes): https://tinyurl.com/3dpdj3w9

After it’s “discovery” by European explorers, the great pyramid of Chichén Itzá was rebuilt into the tourist attraction it is today: https://tinyurl.com/hnbkm8v2

I just learned that there’s a species of jumping spider that’s evolved to look like a moth caterpillar and IT’S SO FUZZY: https://tinyurl.com/9tahf4et

“On the day of Vesak, the biggest Buddhist festival in South and Southeast Asia, a monk carries out annual prayer rites at the Quantum Temple. Artifacts that belong to the past and foretell the future swirl overhead in a hyper-fictional topography made up of hill fort homes, geodesic monuments, haunting projections, and gigantic fish.”: https://tinyurl.com/8kf23ef9

Tim Flach produces beautiful portraits of all kinds of animals. This link is for the “Endangered” gallery, but he has a few other galleries as well: https://tinyurl.com/5c4s8snp

If you’re a fan of Yellow Submarine, Airbnb has one: https://tinyurl.com/y38kc2fh

Scenes from Silence of the Lambs, organized by color (Contains some gifs of gore, violence): https://tinyurl.com/3c6mcmzx

The tale of Rattlesnake Kate (and her infamous dress): https://tinyurl.com/87x4zc8x

“Angélica Dass’s photography challenges how we think about skin color and ethnic identity. In this personal talk, hear about the inspiration behind her portrait project, Humanæ, and her pursuit to document humanity’s true colors rather than the untrue white, red, black and yellow associated with race”: https://tinyurl.com/4vay76x7

BBC 4 Radio has a fascinating podcast series where they talk about 100 different human-made objects, one at a time, from the British Museum Collection: https://tinyurl.com/8b4tv6ds

A little dive into the history of the private underground transportation used by U.S. members of Congress and their staffers: https://tinyurl.com/r75uvcj2

Is the most accurate sword fight in cinematic history?: https://tinyurl.com/2pp6yzrw

“At best, the story of American intelligence activities before and during the crisis is far from complete. One of the most extraordinary omissions to date is the central role played by Moody, a 38-year-old code-breaking whiz and the head of the NSA’s Cuba desk during the perilous fall of 1962. Even today her name is largely unknown outside the agency, and the details of her contributions to the nation’s security remain closely guarded.”: https://tinyurl.com/m7ext8tf

The Aga Khan Museum in Toronto has acquired a colossal sculpture made from 100,000 pieces of Lego by the Ghanian-Canadian artist Ekow Nimako, who is known for his Afrofuturist reimaginings of Black histories built from Lego bricks: https://tinyurl.com/shv4emhh

This animated short explores the effects of time and change focusing on the the worlds seemingly never ending cycles. The deterioration of one is the foundation for another. This fact takes on new dimensions when the unexpected forces of nature clash with the existing structures of our civilization (contains a brief scene of a dead animal): https://tinyurl.com/3f6n872

The chef who turns Beef Wellington into art: https://tinyurl.com/79z6bx4m

Image source: https://www.deviantart.com/dragonthunders/art/History-size-chart-Cambrian-823211177

Linkdump #95

Enjoy a Google Street View of a scale model of Ancient Rome that took 35 years to complete: https://tinyurl.com/ykn8edou

If you love taking your time with food, you’re gonna love this 100 hour lasagna: https://tinyurl.com/4vv7bh64

Using new technologies to help understand white blood cells: https://tinyurl.com/1fs0kikg

The real archaeology behind Netflix’s “The Dig”: https://tinyurl.com/ghp8m8it

Sophia Bogle, professional book restorer, shows us how to restore a 120-year-old book. This includes deconstructing the book, repainting the cover, soaking and cleaning the pages in water, and reassembling the cover and pages: https://tinyurl.com/2zsodxx9

Why Cosmic Horror, sometimes referred to as Lovecraftian Horror, is so hard to translate into film (C/W – horror movie clips, gore): https://tinyurl.com/15fd9gvv

“Rich visual parallels between Indigenous artworks and microscopic natural structures hidden in the world around us reveal unexpected and intriguing similarities that can deepen our respect for our country and its stories”: https://tinyurl.com/2v8t7ya3

If you’ve never experienced tumbleweeds firsthand, please enjoy: https://tinyurl.com/yuee59fo

In the mood for a funny, sad, and gossipy historical documentary? I have just the thing: https://tinyurl.com/5x8r9plb

A kimono house that’s been producing works of art since 1555: https://tinyurl.com/g7p8opfi

James Wooden Legs, Spiritual Advisor, grew up in Lame Deer region in the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Montana, and became deaf from a bout with spinal meningitis when he was an infant. James Wooden Legs is fluent in both Plains Indian Sign Language  and American Sign Language, and in this video he shares four stories from his culture: https://tinyurl.com/8g2yx4vf

Spinning the 78’s from the top of the world: https://www.aor.am/

New research has allowed geoscientists to show the uninterrupted movement of Earth’s tectonic plates over the past billion years for the first time, which will help us understand how plate tectonics powers life on Earth: https://tinyurl.com/473t5fu7

When we look up at night, the universe seems pretty quiet. But that perspective is an illusion; in reality, there are millions of world-shattering events happening every instant across the cosmos. This short film explores just how much is going on every moment in our ridiculously enormous universe: https://tinyurl.com/yx39h7js

Same Energy is a visual search engine that uses image categories to locate similar, related images: https://same.energy/

“There are eleventy thousand projects about Agatha Christie’s missing days so now can I get a film about how at 40 she took up with a 26-year-old archaeologist, swam with him in her pink undies, and married him?” A Twitter thread: https://tinyurl.com/2n9wg6bn

“Self-Organising Textures” is an interesting tool that helps us understand the complexities of pattern formation: https://tinyurl.com/yycme4l9

If flowy gowns are your thing, I just learned about Rahul Mishra and -swoon-: https://tinyurl.com/36mlowgo

I fell into this rabbit hole the other day. It’s a YouTube channel dedicated to talking about, explaining, and analyzing all sorts of science-fi, horror, psychological thrillers, and other types of films: https://tinyurl.com/1lioyl0z

Apparently somewhere out there in space there’s a gas giant, much like Jupiter, but with a completely clear sky: https://tinyurl.com/1h0nche9

From The Toast, an amusing list of Things Women In Literature Have Died From: https://tinyurl.com/44nup2tv

The story of a secret society of lightning strike survivors, and the symptoms they still live with: https://tinyurl.com/2z8mrcl6

The delightfully surreal digital collages of Julia Lillard: https://tinyurl.com/3oxf3omg

“Can a project’s success be judged on the basis of its never being completed? Yes, if it’s a living archive of the world’s most complex countryside. It means an undertaking unprecedented in scale and scope, utilizing myriad forms of media in audio, visual and text platforms. One where the stories, the work, the activity, the histories are narrated, as far as possible, as far as we can manage, by rural Indians themselves. By tea-pickers amidst the fields. By fishermen out at sea. By women paddy transplanters singing at work, or by traditional storytellers. By Khalasi men using centuries-old methods to launch heavy ships to sea without forklifts and cranes”: https://tinyurl.com/1s0uyoas

Using Star Wars to explain how mRNA vaccines work: https://tinyurl.com/yrvu6weo

In the mood for a creepy short? Try this film on Vimeo, about an antique mini Ferris wheel: https://vimeo.com/427579189

To preserve Black history, a 19th-century Philadelphian filled hundreds of scrapbooks with newspaper clippings and other materials. But now underfunding and physical decay are putting archives like this one at risk: https://tinyurl.com/2h798rgx

Hear the strange music of distant planetary system TOI-178: https://tinyurl.com/tojrv7vj

Linkdump #94

Yes, this colorful 50s motel could be yours!: tinyurl.com/352kenk7

Bernie Sanders talking to mall goths about anarcho-socialism in 1988: tinyurl.com/z3knflmk

The nature-inspired loveliness of the Liyuan library: tinyurl.com/8v97kky4

Frame By Frame: The Art of Stop Motion: tinyurl.com/e74kst6t

Tim Storms holds Guinness World Records for the lowest vocal note by a man and the greatest vocal range of a man: tinyurl.com/ojxlapu8

A rather complex steampunk wristwatch that honestly looks extremely inconvenient to actually wear: tinyurl.com/4ce6b9pb

How fast can trap-jaw spiders move their chelicerae? Hannah Wood uses high-speed video cameras to document the rate that these appendages move: tinyurl.com/12rvtov6

I had no idea that harvesting durian fruit was so potentially fatal: tinyurl.com/19serx75

Lest you think ping pong is boring, here’s two French champions, Jacques Secrétin and Vincent Purkart, adding a bit of fun to the match: tinyurl.com/3trjr2ku

The saga of two out-of-place ducks in Oakland: tinyurl.com/re9pfoqf

A historical collection of found paper airplanes: tinyurl.com/bqqcnsz4

Botanist makes death metal about photosynthesis: tinyurl.com/yokvijlj

Disney animator Millicent Patrick never received the deserved credit for her role in designing the iconic Gill-man costume for Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954): tinyurl.com/x2gk0w36

Feel like you’re lacking an extra bit extra of spice in your boring Zoom meetings? Cronkshaw Fold Farm has just what you need!: tinyurl.com/1jn097x3

“Cholitas” are Bolivian women with indigenous heritage known for their colorful attire, round top hats and ornate earrings. In the world’s highest capital city of La Paz, Bolivia, 11 Cholitas are on a mission to overcome sexism and discriminatory attitudes and climb mountains in their traditional garb. Since December 2015, they’ve been ascending the country’s snowy peaks as mountain climbers: tinyurl.com/1koq15kq

Take a tour inside a truly splendidly designed tiny home/office camper van: tinyurl.com/3aq8ey1k

A brief history of the parka, an item of clothing that’s allowed people to survive and thrive for thousands of years in some the most inhospitable places (including a cool pic of the interior insulating structures of a caribou hair): tinyurl.com/yxypmujp

The Staves, a three-woman indie folk group, share a lovely rehearsal video: tinyurl.com/39ne5hpv

A giggle-worthy Twitter thread about birds with rather unflattering names: tinyurl.com/1tet719b

Gorgeous new creations from designer Iris van Herpen, made from collected ocean plastics: tinyurl.com/394mkev5

According to his last wishes, renowned ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev was buried in the Russian cemetery at Sainte-Geneviève-des-bois, near Paris. His memorial was designed and built by set designer, Ezio Frigerio who often designed Nureyev’s choreographies sets. This mosaic memorial resembles one of the oriental kilim rugs that Nureyev loved so much: tinyurl.com/1j9k6cyu

Magdalena Vissagio, an award-winning comic book writer, has created “Modern Presidents”, a manipulated photo series that imagines what past Presidents of the United States might look like in current times: tinyurl.com/4pva8fz3

If our doctors spoke to us like veterinarians: tinyurl.com/yfrk6let

The Science Museum Group cares for a diverse and internationally significant collection of 7.3 million items from science, technology, engineering, medicine, transport and media. I’ve started with looking at “Orthopaedics”, because medical history is fascinating to me, but you can search for any topic you like: tinyurl.com/c920r35d

Image source: tinyurl.com/1hzwiqjc

Linkdump #93

A delightful miniature handcrafted for the modern age: https://tinyurl.com/y3qetmbr

Plowing snow in the Italian Alps: https://tinyurl.com/y64nxbz6

An interesting gif showing the composition of the earth’s surface: https://tinyurl.com/yygef6ks

Lovely zoetrope by Tee Ken Ng: https://tinyurl.com/y4tx73oy

In the mountains of northern Spain, in the 1980s, archaeologists discovered what they believed to be human remains 100ft underground. As improbable as that may be, the story only gets stranger – because the remains weren’t of Homo sapiens, nor were they Neanderthals. They were something new altogether: https://tinyurl.com/y46eo3xh

A tough and extremely worthwhile read about what some migrants endure to reach the U.S., and the horrors that drove them to make the journey: https://tinyurl.com/yyh7wzxp

Finnish sauna culture has been added to the UNESCO list of Intangible Cultural Heritage: https://tinyurl.com/y2ttl5yd

Sooooo apparently chocolate ramen is a thing: https://tinyurl.com/yxdf4u33

An interesting and interactive way of learning about musical scales: https://tinyurl.com/yyyab4y8

If you’re a fan of macro insect photos, photographer Alex Wild has a great selection to enjoy: https://tinyurl.com/yy3m4qeu

Archaeologists can see literally social/economic inequality in peoples’ bones: https://tinyurl.com/y2eetute

Overlooking the distant mountain ranges of northern Italy, the Ötzi Peak observation deck by NOA* Network of Architecture is completed at an elevation of 3251 meters (10,660 feet): https://tinyurl.com/y57u7qpx

Remembering a supreme canine actor: https://tinyurl.com/y397qn4s

The paintings of Jules Perahim remind me of Dali: https://tinyurl.com/yy76a2ph

Pee-Wee Park, a giggle-worthy mashup horror film: https://tinyurl.com/yxbzwq85

I was today years old when I found out that there’s such a thing as a “Sympathetic nail violin” (You can skip ahead to about 6:30 if you just want to hear what it sounds like): https://tinyurl.com/y6xaplqc

A delightful diatribe about all the things wrong with a single scene from Gladiator: https://tinyurl.com/y2u5c9fr

Worn copies of World Books, agricultural texts, and classic novels become canvases for Rose Sanderson’s insect studies. Now a few years old, the expansive series boasts more than 100 paintings featuring beetles, moths, and butterflies that splay across the printed material: https://tinyurl.com/y62xft79

A delightful Twitter thread about a chap who volunteered to be infected with 50 parasitic worms. For science, of course: https://tinyurl.com/y3kc2ja2

Lovingly restoring a 1978 Millennium Falcon model: https://tinyurl.com/y2ucx42z

So apparently Microsoft has been granted a patent that would allow the company to make a chatbot using the personal information of deceased people: https://tinyurl.com/y28kyeov

A firefighter edits himself into a TV show to highlight a few issues with media representations of firefighting. I absolutely LOLed: https://tinyurl.com/y4lsffuj

London’s Weiner Holocaust Library has published several hundred digitized survivor testimonies online, and plans to release roughly 1,500 more later in the year: https://tinyurl.com/y5pa2gzo

A drone takes us on a tour of the inside of a Dutch Walrus-class diesel electric submarine: https://tinyurl.com/y3wteczo

Six drummers participate in a well planned musical attack in the suburbs: https://tinyurl.com/y44fkrwu

Wikiart is a fantastic resource where you can look for art based on style, genre, time period, artist name, etc: https://tinyurl.com/gw8xkrk

A Scottish game bird struts around making rather odd noises at a skier. Is it angry? Aroused? Trying to inform him about his car’s extended warranty? WHO KNOWS: https://tinyurl.com/y5vatt8k

Linkdump #92

The sheer bizarre delight of Mitchell Grafton’s “Face Jugs”: https://tinyurl.com/yy5o55vt

A font that changes shape as you type: https://tinyurl.com/y6y5m2lb

Did you know that Scotland has an official Islamic tartan?: https://tinyurl.com/y5a3m2m4

“Pattern Radio: Whale Songs” uses AI to let you explore thousands of hours of whale songs, and the “Select Tour” button lets you dive even deeper: https://tinyurl.com/yydxt6pv

Taiwan’s first illustrated encyclopedia of marine debris: https://tinyurl.com/y63qrrdu

Maori tips for repelling biting insects: https://tinyurl.com/yyxeopv5

“Designed very much like a tool belt worn at the waist, the chatelaine held an array of both useful household appendages and fanciful items on a series of chains, reflecting a woman’s hobbies and activities of the day”: https://tinyurl.com/y5jnsop8

Animated Knots offers a wealth of gifs to help you learn to tie a dazzling variety of knots: https://tinyurl.com/yyrzcc6t

YInMn Blue, the brilliant pigment discovered in 2009 at an Oregon State University lab, is finally making its way to artists’ studios: https://tinyurl.com/y45ws2n6

A sweet and airy song from Salt Cathedral: https://tinyurl.com/yywm3752

A nice article about how easy it is for archaeological sites to become contaminated with modern objects and materials: https://tinyurl.com/y5uh6z9f

“For the opening episode of the latest season of Define Beauty—our flagship series exploring the boundaries and conceptions of beauty—directorial collective Youth Hymns, who have previously worked with Snoop Dog and Wolf Alice, present Facefixx: a poppy dystopian take on social media and hyperreality”: https://tinyurl.com/y4cxq3g7

Someone built a K’NEX full-sized pinball machine, and it’s pretty impressive: https://tinyurl.com/y458w6qj

A delightful short video showing the life cycle of a Puss moth: https://tinyurl.com/y2raux2t

The underground reservoir protecting Tokyo from floods is a pretty phenomenal feat of engineering: https://tinyurl.com/y5o62u7q

Using the latest colorization and animation technology, this video makes “Classic European beauties” of the past come to life. It’s kind of half awesome and half creepy, TBH: https://tinyurl.com/y24n7y5q

A compilation of clips from BBC Earth shows the magnificent beauty of different owls at different stages of life, beginning with birth: https://tinyurl.com/y3f3jm9t

Dr. Seuss characters become adorable trophies: https://tinyurl.com/y253fnc8

Sushi art by Takayo Kiyota (Slightly NSFW): https://tinyurl.com/yyt6uza6

Arquitectura libre is a long-term project on the self-built environment. It focuses primarily on the architecture of remittances; the fantastical houses being built by financing from Mexican immigrants in the US who send money home. Arquitectura libre explores the idea of a home more as symbol than as function: https://tinyurl.com/y2tqmwf6

Stanley Kubrick asked a young publicist to write a track for his movie,2001, but decided not to use it in the film. Now it’s been released after 52 years and we can all hear it: https://tinyurl.com/y5cqa6bu

Not all Neanderthals were ‘cavemen’: half were women. Here’s what archaeology can tell us about how they may have lived: https://tinyurl.com/y2994pe5

“Inhabit Media Inc. is the first Inuit-owned, independent publishing company in the Canadian Arctic. We aim to promote and preserve the stories, knowledge, and talent of the Arctic, while also supporting research in Inuit mythology and the traditional Inuit knowledge of Nunavummiut (residents of Nunavut, Canada’s northernmost territory)”: https://tinyurl.com/y5a3w3lq

That’s right, scientists have finally discovered the first fossilized dinosaur butthole: https://tinyurl.com/y6hj35xz

The delightful world of Fat Cat Art: https://tinyurl.com/y2qzjcfp

Björk as mushrooms: A thread: https://tinyurl.com/yxcpmzh6

The Tibetan Book of Proportions is an eighteenth century manual that gives precise iconometric guidelines for depicting the Buddha and Bodhisattva figures: https://tinyurl.com/yxsyx7q6

Helvetic Kitchen offers a wealth of Swiss recipes for any occasion. I hope you like carbs!: https://tinyurl.com/create.php

Linkdump #91

Lotte Reiniger is known today for her extraordinarily elaborate silhouette animations. Her 1926 feature, “The Adventures of Prince Achmed,” is the oldest surviving full-length animated film. This short documentary provides a fascinating look at Reiniger’s process, offering viewers the opportunity to watch a prolific and pioneering artist at work: https://tinyurl.com/y3m5gqgc

The Bad Drawing Club, a weekly remote art club for the worst artists in the world: https://tinyurl.com/y3mss22f

Researchers have made a surprising discovery while studying ancient wall paintings in a Tibetan Buddhist cave temple: https://tinyurl.com/y325xnbo

Willard Wigan, micro sculptor: https://tinyurl.com/y4sx588f

Inventing new Kanji just for 2020: https://tinyurl.com/yyjufwt6

Video reveals why woodpeckers don’t get stuck to trees: https://tinyurl.com/y5l2wtya

The secret life of sea snot: https://tinyurl.com/y38v5cbu

As a fan of Scandinavian crime dramas, I must note they left out the attractive-but-depressed college student who refuses to talk about it and that part where a main character hallucinates/dreams about a mysterious being that may or may not be evil but definitely wears an outfit that involves antlers: https://tinyurl.com/yxqucj49

A dreamy, artistic short film about the Bousher Bike Life Crew of Bawshar: https://tinyurl.com/y68atkl6

Another virtual sound machine website filled with all manner of background noises and soundscapes: https://tinyurl.com/ztozrz7

The rich and stunning artwork of Freda Kahlo’s diary: https://tinyurl.com/y6tspsuz

What’s it like to drive a Mars rover?: https://tinyurl.com/yyvpf2ce

Artist Hillary Waters transforms leaves into intricate works of art: https://tinyurl.com/y2nf2ecx

A Turkish town of abandoned Disney castles: https://tinyurl.com/y2n3j3uk

In 2020, a competition was held to select the art object to be burnt in the village of Nikola-Lenivets, Russia for Maslenitsa, an old Slavic holiday. The jury selected the Burning Bridges project by KATARSIS, a St. Petersburg-based architectural practice: https://tinyurl.com/y5yg3mh4

A plant propagation wall. I kinda like it, though I wouldn’t recommend gluing things to the wall if you live in a rental: https://tinyurl.com/yyjt57zl

A pumpin’ tune to start your day off right: https://tinyurl.com/y6ryv5zc

All the way from Denmark, a soothing, calming 10-hour film just for dogs: https://tinyurl.com/y543p4o3

For only $150, you can smell like a pencil. Yay?: https://tinyurl.com/y6x579av

That time when the U.S. government paid people to be artists: https://tinyurl.com/y53cx538

In this short film on Vimeo, Abdellah, a young shepherd living in the mountains, is forced to get food and save his cattle. Once he gets to the village, he faces a supernatural phenomenon: https://tinyurl.com/y2efsols

Artisans in India have been handcrafting these unusually challenging locks for 400 years: https://tinyurl.com/yxqmou9l

Ride Japanese roller coasters online (not recommended if you get motion sickness from watching videos): https://tinyurl.com/y4k69frj

This is adorable. A hedgehog owner in Japan loved her pet so much she decided to design a miniature mobile home so she could take it with her wherever she went: https://tinyurl.com/y6y9mnbs

Enjoy a compilation of POV parkour videos (also might induce some motion sickness): https://tinyurl.com/y2zkc475

An entire catalog of Soviet sausages! Because……reasons!: https://tinyurl.com/y2e7btv6

The fascinating skeleton of the glass sponge species Euplectella aspergillum: https://tinyurl.com/yykxxt5d

The history of the color orange: https://tinyurl.com/yxscgd7l

Czech director Jaroslav Moravec presents a wry tragicomedy charting the fallout between friends after a banal disagreement. As two grown men obstinately avoid dealing with their ruptured relationship, a mysterious mentor works in the shadows to help them duke out their problems: https://tinyurl.com/yyash462

image source: https://tinyurl.com/y5mmk8nw

Linkdump #90

Wonderful and interesting twitter thread about the history of South Asians in pre-1920s Berkeley: https://tinyurl.com/y5v6regy

I laughed way too hard at this: https://tinyurl.com/y329jp46

So uhhhh, how do eels make more eels, anyway?: https://tinyurl.com/y56g5zvj

“The Grammar Of Happiness” follows the story of Daniel Everett among the extraordinary ‘nonconvertible’ Amazonian Piraha tribe, a group of indigenous hunter- gatherers who speak one of the most unusual languages on earth: https://tinyurl.com/y248nee3

Haggard Hawks’ top 30 tweets of 2020: https://tinyurl.com/y6ah3qnf

Learn some fun and useful Swedish slang from Alexander Skarsgard: https://tinyurl.com/y3vfrqd6

Super creepy animatronic objects that resemble human body parts like mouths, eyes, and noses: https://tinyurl.com/y4ehwmvc

Behind the scenes at the New York Times, in 1942: https://tinyurl.com/y27eul3n

Historians and Acousticians work together to recreate the soundscapes of the past: https://tinyurl.com/yy9ugpyz

Artist Xavier Collette transforms mushrooms into delightful monsters (Website translated from French with Google Translate): https://tinyurl.com/yxjw3x77

The unique celebrations and traditions of the Rauris Valley in Austria: https://tinyurl.com/yy24hs4c

“This film, Landscape of Power: Freedom and Slavery in the Great Dismal Swamp summarizes the three-year archeological field study of the Great Dismal Swamp in southern Virginia and North Carolina, conducted by Prof. Daniel Sayers and his team through a NEH “We the People” grant. Drawing on the major research findings that for the first time establish occupation by maroon communities in the swamp for more than 200 years, the film carries to the public a story of agency, resistance and resilience among escaped slaves”: https://tinyurl.com/yxuvkytl

In her “Real Life Models” series Hungarian photographer Flora Borsi imagines what real life models of strange abstract paintings would have looked like: https://tinyurl.com/m2s2zjj

On January 1, 2021, copyrighted works from 1925 entered the US public domain, where they’re now free for all to use and build upon. These works include books such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, and Franz Kafka’s The Trial (in the original German), silent films featuring Harold Lloyd and Buster Keaton, and music ranging from the jazz standard Sweet Georgia Brown to songs by Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, W.C. Handy, and Fats Waller: https://tinyurl.com/yb97y9kv

Take a leisurely 11-minute time lapse journey through the waterways between Rotterdam and Amsterdam: https://tinyurl.com/y4nkgqet

An emotional cartoon about a young boy loving and losing his father (C/W alcoholism): https://tinyurl.com/y253prsa

How seawalls are slowly erasing Hawaii’s beaches: https://tinyurl.com/ybvv6eed

Insects in flight, in slow motion: https://tinyurl.com/y5n8equq

I’ve often seen complaints about the UK’s ridiculous Health & Safety rules, but I hadn’t realized how many of the “Rules” were actually myths. This website does a great job of breaking them down by general category, and then by specific cases: https://tinyurl.com/y26nrhl4

A soothing video of an 1969 Ural M63 motorcycle being lovingly restored: https://tinyurl.com/yxeul73p

Some truly impressive hand drawn flip book art: https://tinyurl.com/y6b7paoh

Linkdump #89

Tree.fm lets you listen to the natural sounds of forests around the world. (I actually couldn’t get any sound when I tried this website on my desktop, but it works fine on my phone): https://www.tree.fm/

The Striated Frogfish might look shaggy and……kind of cute? But don’t be fooled, these fish are voracious predators that can swallow prey as large as themselves: https://tinyurl.com/y9mx3y8p

Larry Callies comes from a long line of black cowboys living and working on the frontier: https://tinyurl.com/yc2rbzag

Ever found yourself sitting around thinking, “I wonder if spotted hyenas fart”? Well wonder no more!: https://tinyurl.com/y9w56zm8

“Ladies and Gentlemen i present to you John Carpenter’s The Thing, as performed by the claymated, Antarctic cast of the hit children’s animation Pingu. Directed by Lee Hardcastle, in under 3 minutes.”: https://tinyurl.com/y9wc8wng

(FYI, the videos have closed captioning available for English, Spanish, and French speakers) “Created by Gabriela Badillo, the exciting series of animated short films “68 Voices, 68 Hearts” (68 voces, 68 hearts) retells indigenous tales narrated in their native tongues. Created in 2013 under the premise that no one can love that which they do not know, this series has produced 36 short films so far, with the goal to cover Mexico’s 68 linguistic groups, representing 364 linguistic variants in eleven linguistic families, including Otomi, Tohono O’odham, Huichol, Tarahumara, Nahuatl, Mayan, and Mixtec”: https://68voces.mx/

A long but really interesting lecture on the neurological drivers of human behaviors and perceptions, by leading Neuroendocrinologist Robert Sapolsky: https://tinyurl.com/y8rvv8l6

Diana Scherer uses a special technique to make plant roots grow into beautifully intricate patterns: https://tinyurl.com/ydegux8j

Worried about plague? Need to impress a girl at the ball? Want to know the proper way to harvest mandrake? This website has all the advice you’ll ever need!: https://tinyurl.com/y7trh7dw

The family with no fingerprints, and the challenges they face in today’s world: https://tinyurl.com/yavfhejq

A lovely little stop-motion gif of a whale: https://tinyurl.com/ybhjd28u

(NSFW) The bizarre, fantastical, and oddly charming concept art of Rob Bliss: https://tinyurl.com/ya58bjql

The history, and possible technology-driven future, of Antoni Gaudi’s one-of-a-kind cathedral: https://tinyurl.com/yxv32q2o

You may have seen posts about Dr. John Snow’s 1854 cholera map and how it revolutionized the way we track down the sources of outbreaks, but the truth is somewhat different from the myth: https://tinyurl.com/y7q5rdbb

NASA’s Scientific Visualizatin Studio has loads of great visual resources about all things earth & space: https://tinyurl.com/y9d4slh8

Annie Lennox and The London City Voices perform a version of When I am Laid in Earth, from Henry Purcell’s ‘Dido and Aeneas’, in support of Greenpeace: https://tinyurl.com/yazdg2oh

How do we decide when to call an outbreak a pandemic?: https://tinyurl.com/yb24t4rn

Visualizing what Athens, Greece would have looked like 2,500 years ago: https://tinyurl.com/ycwu86hr

The Lord of the Rings characters if they were dogs: https://tinyurl.com/y7h6r9k2

(NSFW) Photographer Elon Berge looks inside the lives of women of the Suicide Girls Burlesque: https://tinyurl.com/y755ddur

That time when Quetzalcóatl replaced Santa Claus (Article translated into English with Google Translate): https://tinyurl.com/ycf9evmt

Swallowed Souls: The Making of Evil Dead II: https://tinyurl.com/ydz68ngg

One year of beaver dam traffic captured on a trail cam: https://tinyurl.com/ycnvumnn

Brussels-based director Soetkin Verstegen bills her methodical and nostalgic animation “Freeze Frame” as a “miniature cinema inside an ice cube.” Produced in a grainy, vintage style, the black-and-white short loosely follows workers as they harvest and attempt to preserve the frozen blocks. Amidst scenes of the monotonous, assembly line efforts are insects, frogs, and various creatures swimming across the frames and eventually, crystallizing into skeletal ice sculptures: https://tinyurl.com/y84nmtpl

(Image source: https://tinyurl.com/ycfvtbp9)

Linkdump #88

The Conditional Orchestra uses the current weather conditions in a specific location to compose delightful tunes: https://tinyurl.com/y8ch6wxd

A cool presentation on how cameras work, including interactive visuals to help demonstrate how each part works: https://ciechanow.ski/cameras-and-lenses/

The dialect of England’s Black Country (known as one of the birthplaces of the Industrial Revolution) area is perhaps one of the last examples of early English that’s still spoken today: https://tinyurl.com/ydfh23pd

I used to work at a store that sold all kinds of imported goods, including some food items, and the price of our vanilla beans would fluctuate wildly depending on what sort of climatic or political upheavals were going on in Madagascar at any given time. Why Madagascar, you ask?: https://tinyurl.com/y3lzqo2q

Turns out that you can grow your own opals at home, though it’s not exactly “easy”: https://tinyurl.com/y93eq2jf

13 year old Christopher Walken in his very first film role, playing a boy who can see through walls: https://tinyurl.com/y96qppgd

The nature-inspired sculptures of Selva Aparicio (I really like the carved rug): https://tinyurl.com/y87rfq23

New analysis of the Antikythera Mechanism presents evidence that the mechanism’s front-dial ring is a 354-day lunar calendar, not a 365-day calendar as previously supposed: https://tinyurl.com/y3rv82qn

Internet user ranks their least favorite bodies of water: https://tinyurl.com/ybq7whut

When scientists give a new thing a name, it’s often some boring old Latin that most of us will kind of ignore in favor of a “common name”. But in some cases, scientists do indeed have a great deal of fun with scientific naming: https://tinyurl.com/ydz3rd3b

Blob Opera is a machine learning experiment that lets you drag characters around to create your own unique opera performance: https://tinyurl.com/y8yvhbaa

In the 1640s, the Parliament of England, Scotland and Ireland effectively made many long-held Christmas traditions illegal, and it went down about as well as you might imagine – ultimately helping to reignite the English Civil War: https://tinyurl.com/y7wcmpj3

Rare, behind-the-scenes look at ‘The Empire Strikes Back’: https://tinyurl.com/y86stc6v

Handy tips on how to not get murdered in one of those quaint English villages where people always seem to get murdered: https://tinyurl.com/yd5gfm4d

Artist Fiona Tang creates flowing and intense murals (and other art): https://tinyurl.com/ybxn4es8

So apparently in Elizabethan England it was legal to kidnap children for conscription into the British royal children’s choir: https://tinyurl.com/ya78zmym

A cool little video that demonstrate the different gaits dogs use. It’s intended to help animators and artists, but it’s also cool for anyone who just likes to learn how animals do stuff: https://tinyurl.com/yd8hvgap

Materiom offer open-source recipes for making raw material, like bioplastics, from natural ingredients: https://tinyurl.com/ycya38ly

A selection of the best science photos of 2020: https://tinyurl.com/y9hbll27

Scientists discover a cricket that makes it’s own megaphones: https://tinyurl.com/yb9w8fsh

If you love bizarre monsters AND love embroidered patches, you will love Hannah Comstock: https://tinyurl.com/y6u9lbet

“I am proud to present my latest project – the Astropanel. This program will help you decide when you should bring out your telescope“: https://tinyurl.com/y7kso4jz

Inventionis Mater is an Italian duo who interpret the music of Frank Zappa on classical musical instruments: https://tinyurl.com/y7c3jsul

“When people in the West throw their clothes away, their cast-offs often go on a journey east, across the oceans, to India’s industrial interior. From the Kutch District of western India to the northern city of Panipat, garment recyclers turn into yarn the huge bales of clothes that come from people and places distinctly strange”: https://tinyurl.com/jozjpvd

(Gif source: https://tinyurl.com/yb2yvlbb)

Linkdump #87

Enjoy an educational video about 5000 year old spreadsheets: https://tinyurl.com/y5kbznhq

“Since 2007, South Africa has experienced innumerable rolling blackouts and power outages due to the South African Energy Crises. Recurring utility disruptions have had tremendous financial, social and political impact on a country struggling to find ways to keep up with ever-increasing energy demand. Ailing and outdated infrastructure, combined with government corruption, inaction and mismanagement by authorities has only caused these crises to persist and grow”: https://tinyurl.com/y2el5dlc

The stop-motion granny: https://tinyurl.com/y6oaojhk

“They called her a witch, because she chatted with animals and owned a terrorist-crow, known for stealing gold and attacking bicyclists. A lynx slept in her bed, and she shared her roof with a tamed boar. Simona Kossak was a scientist, ecologist and the author of award-winning films – as well as an activist who fought to protect Europe’s oldest forest”: https://tinyurl.com/y4ffapkv

An absolutely adorable tardigrade puppet from Hand Sewn Heads: https://tinyurl.com/yyxscamf

A heartwarming story about modern day, real-life fairies. Caution, this story may leave a bit of dust in your eye: https://tinyurl.com/y5fhpzfp

Slo-mo cameras show secrets of bat’s flight: https://tinyurl.com/y2yrh84t

Winning Photos from the 2020 Bird Photographer of the Year Contest: https://tinyurl.com/yym664uj

If you use paints and want to improve your color matching skills, or are just getting started with painting, Chris Breier’s color theory and color matching videos may be helpful for you: https://tinyurl.com/y63cl6mz

A Tasmanian man has spent decades compiling a database of more than 30,000 edible plants around the world in an effort to reduce malnutrition by showing people how much food exists in their local landscapes: https://tinyurl.com/y2cvvvra

How did the White House become the White House?: https://tinyurl.com/y6zsn652

From 2017, an interesting article in Nature describing a wide range of visual organs that have evolved independently, in a vast range of species, since life first started developing on earth. It’s a pretty science-y paper that’s written largely for other scientists, not the general public, so don’t feel bad if there’s terminology you aren’t familiar with: https://tinyurl.com/yxcjlq9y

“Hubble turned 30 this year, and it has a birthday present to share with you! Newly released Hubble images of 30 celestial objects from the Caldwell Catalog show stunning cosmic sights, many of which you can see with a backyard telescope!”: https://tinyurl.com/yyh7yvcj

Spiders in Space is a K-12 educational experiment that examines the behavioral and physical changes of golden orb weaving spiders in space. The experiment was launched aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour on May 16, 2011 and transferred to the International Space Station on May 19, 2011: https://tinyurl.com/y3qtx3m5

At the Museum of the City of New York is a really dolls’ house special: the famous Stettheimer Dollhouse. Carrie Walter Stettheimer (1869-1944) developed the Dollhouse over the course of 19 years (from 1916 to the death of her mother in 1935), creating many of the furnishings and decorations by hand: https://tinyurl.com/yy22g9bf

At the end of the 17th century there appeared the first noting of a mysterious kayak-paddling “Finnman” seen in Orkney waters. Jonathan Westaway explores the subsequent explanations and how early modern science’s fascination with unfamiliar objects, and the “out-of-place” in general, helped conjure the idea of an Inuit presence in the region and, in turn, a new chapter of Scottish folklore: https://tinyurl.com/yyf4w7l8

Two lifelong friends go birdwatching and talk about the banalities and quirks of life in this surprisingly deep animation by Joe Bennett & Joe Pera: https://tinyurl.com/y6z32xl6

A surprisingly catchy acoustic guitar version of Stayin’ Alive: https://tinyurl.com/y6esvl2z

Internet-famous animals rendered into 3D prints. I love that squirrel: https://tinyurl.com/yyy8vuvz

An Oscar-winning animation from 1950 that’s considered to be the “9th Greatest Cartoon of All Time”: https://tinyurl.com/y2hbqbj2

Atlas Obscura on the doctor who was HIGHLY suspicious of polyester pants: https://tinyurl.com/y5fwpk7g

The CRAP Test, developed by Molly Beestrum, is a helpful tool to use when trying to decide if a website is a credible, valid source. The CRAP Test looks at four major areas: currency, reliability, authority and purpose. When determining whether a website is credible or not, evaluate it on those four areas: https://tinyurl.com/y4p6kdyj

From 2012, but still very relevant today, an article about how political consulting became a big business, and then some: https://tinyurl.com/y3evvev5

Click on the Secret Door and be transported to a randomly chosen location in Google Street View. To see a new location, just refresh the page and then click the door again: https://tinyurl.com/y4ftnes8

Artist Shawn Feeney’s Musical Anatomy series blends humans with musical instruments in a fascinating way: https://tinyurl.com/yyltbhtc

The wonderfully surreal paintings of John Brosio: https://tinyurl.com/y3aw7szm

Not many in the U.S. know that ice cream brand Häagen Dazs commissioned well-known interior, industrial and traditional designers, one for each eleven years from 2008-2019, to create uniquely beautiful and delicious Christmas ice cream cakes for the annual Häagen-Dazs Ice Show in France and for sale in France, Belgium, Amsterdam, London and Japan at the holidays: https://tinyurl.com/yy7ccgfp

“In the heart of urban Brooklyn, a 300-year old farmhouse still stands. Archaeologist Alyssa Loorya explains how artifacts found at the site trace the life cycles of New York City–from 1720 to today”: https://tinyurl.com/y537f7yz

Linkdump #86

The DARPA Subterranean Challenge will task teams of robots with autonomous exploration deep beneath the surface of the Earth. Here’s one team as they prepare for the Final Event in 2021: https://tinyurl.com/yyze7afn

The strange and terrible tale of how Liberia became a tax haven for US companies: https://tinyurl.com/y4tcuhq2

A collection of Native American legends and folklore, sorted by tribal group: https://tinyurl.com/br6kdf

CG artist Pwnisher challenged his followers and fellow artists to come up with a short render based on a basic template that he provided. 125 artists responded, each offering their own very different take on the provided source image of a character walking toward a mountain: https://tinyurl.com/y6xj5rr4

A gross-yet-fascinating timelapse of a cooked potato decomposing into a shriveled wad of dust (The tiny critters look like spider mites to me but I could be completely wrong): https://tinyurl.com/y3qu8lyv

The cutest handmade bag ever: https://tinyurl.com/y58oack9

A YouTuber may have found an answer to the question of what ended up happening to pirate Anne Bonny: https://tinyurl.com/y2dpozv7

Released by New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1925, this short film features nearly century-old footage of daily life in the Nile Valley: https://tinyurl.com/yy97nuxz

“Pedestrian Survey” is a very common archaeological technique, and a fancy way of saying “Line up side-by-side and walk straight ahead while staring at the ground”. Yep, archaeology is nonstop excitement, folks: https://tinyurl.com/yykhs38b

A delightful twitter thread featuring movie scenes that imitate or resemble famous paintings (Some mildly NSFW content): https://tinyurl.com/yxdf3z7x

“Killing the journalist won’t kill the story. We are a network of journalists whose mission is to continue and publish the work of other journalists facing threats, prison, or murder”: https://tinyurl.com/yyq79sop

According to Need is a new five-part documentary podcast from 99% Invisible: “The way homelessness has exploded in California over the last decade, you’d think there was no system in place to address it. But there is one – it just wasn’t designed to help everyone.” Produced by Katie Mingle, the Prologue covers her arrival in Oakland last year, Chapter 1 focuses on Tulicia’s experience sleeping inside her car with her son, and Chapter 2 spends a day in the 211 “homelessness hotline” call center to find out why it’s a dead-end for so many people: https://tinyurl.com/y3uofr4h

This superb watch by Swiss watchmaker Jaquet Droz features mechanical birds that chime the hour: https://tinyurl.com/y5udkh9q

What do the American bison, western gorilla, and Eurasian eagle-owl have in common?: https://tinyurl.com/y2pxrbvo

If fancy wood joinery is your jam, you’ll love Dylan Iwakuni’s YouTube channel: https://tinyurl.com/y5yc5cmv

A documentary that follows people as they search the world for their doppelgänger, a person who looks just like them even though they aren’t related, and examines how similar their lives are (or aren’t): https://tinyurl.com/yxhd2ohf

A collection of “Cold War calculators”, handheld measuring tools that help the user gauge the severity of things like chemical weapons, radiation contamination, and bomb blasts: https://tinyurl.com/y5soqfou

If you’re a lover of literature, you’ll love Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award. Make sure you scroll down to read passages from past years’ winners. Yes, they are as bad as you imagine: https://tinyurl.com/y5zmbfwh

In 1942 a forest ranger discovered hundreds of human bones and skulls in a Himalayan lake. Despite decades of research and multiple hypothesis, the mystery of who they were, why they were there, and how they died is still being untangled: https://tinyurl.com/y4o62839

The Internet Archive Manual Library is a collection of manuals, instructions, walkthroughs, and datasheets for a massive spectrum of items: https://tinyurl.com/yyyqqzb5

An animated map of every reported UFO sighting between 1906 and 2014: https://tinyurl.com/y2rasmkb

“We worked with the team at Imperial War Museum to reimagine what the end of the First World War might have sounded like for their Making a New World season. They asked us to create an interpretation based on a unique image from their archive: a section of film called the End of the War which shows a before and after recording made by a ‘sound ranging’ unit at the end of the First World War, on 11 November 1918”: https://tinyurl.com/y3oh9v9r

Ranking emergency alarms from around the world. Israel’s definitely freaks me out a little bit: https://tinyurl.com/yy4exe3k

Colorful rammed-earth domes on Iran’s Hormuz Island. I would totally live in a village that looked like this: https://tinyurl.com/y5mzhfqh

Linkdump #85

Stephanie Kilgast’s vibrant sculptures blend scenes of nature with humanity’s trash in a beautiful way: https://tinyurl.com/yxmw8pfz

Visual Polyhedra. Each polyhedron’s page contains a 3-dimensional virtual model of the polyhedron, followed by a summary of the polyhedron’s vital statistics: https://tinyurl.com/y5xfc9on

A 15th century poem by Francois Villon is translated into London slang by William Ernst Hensley in the 19th century, and now it’s been turned into a “cant” song (a song with lyrics that are spoken rather than sung): https://tinyurl.com/yykq2m4d

Some extremely impressive art cakes: https://tinyurl.com/yy7cwj98

The 2020 duct tape prom attire winners. These are pretty impressive: https://tinyurl.com/yxqtbptw

16 tips for loosening rusty bolts: https://tinyurl.com/y6n3k25t

“Buck v. Bell: Inside the SCOTUS Case That Led to Forced Sterilization of 70,000 & Inspired the Nazis”: https://tinyurl.com/y4u5d2r7

Dissecting the original Dr. Who theme music (use the menu to navigate through the sections): https://tinyurl.com/yxt8qkdo

“As a special Halloween treat, we are pleased to present this unique and hilarious DJ mix made up of the best (worst?) in Dracula-themed disco”: https://tinyurl.com/y569xluh

Residing in the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago is an astoundingly intricate lock depicting the Grimm Fairytale, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves”: https://tinyurl.com/yxptdtl3

A world map of abandoned and out-of-service railroad lines: https://tinyurl.com/y588esxp

Always true to its purpose, the Internet Archive has devised a way to store and play Flash animations using emulators created by Ruffle and the BlueMaxima Flashpoint Project, who have already archived tens of thousands of Flash games. All those adorable Homestar Runner cartoons? Saved from extinction, which would have been their fate, since “without a Flash player, flash animations don’t work.”: https://tinyurl.com/y6rmh664

So how do you retrieve a 600+ foot cargo ship from the bottom of St. Simons Sound?: https://tinyurl.com/y2ulng9j

Andre Antunes creates metal versions of popular music. Rather skillfully, in my opinion: https://tinyurl.com/yx9ecldb

So this one time, scientists decided to do an MRI on a woman who was undergoing an exorcism. Because SCIENCE, that’s why: https://tinyurl.com/y4tljn3l

The Impossible Goblet is made of borosilicate glass, giving it an impressive amount of flexibility you would never expect to see in glass: https://tinyurl.com/y5oo7eyd And what IS borosilicate glass, anyway?: https://tinyurl.com/y3q5bxvc

If you’re a fan of stories that are weird, paranormal, and all-around questionable, head over to Medium’s “The Weird Closet”: https://tinyurl.com/yxtfmx6g

A-ha’s “Take on Me” was born in 1981 as a song called “Miss Eerie” by A-ha members Pål Waaktaar’s and Magne Furuholmen’s previous band Bridges: https://tinyurl.com/y5umlwmk

For fans of the 1995 movie Hackers, a collection of behind-the-scenes Polaroids of the actors in their various costumes: https://tinyurl.com/y3nvcrcc

Corey Arnold’s photo journal of working the Bering Sea. I grew up on the coast of the Bering, so these bring up some nostalgia for me: https://tinyurl.com/yymscmjg

The slightly embellished true story of Black Agnes, kick-ass defender of Dunbar Castle: https://tinyurl.com/y4xua3kl

“Star Wars Down Under”. You might want to turn on the closed captions to help translate the Australian slang: https://tinyurl.com/y3cl8l4j

Cool little video about the chemistry and physics of choosing sky and plant colors when you build a fictional world: https://tinyurl.com/y257tvht

50 pies for 50 U.S. states: https://tinyurl.com/yy7qfz6f

Translating tattoos on Andean mummies: https://tinyurl.com/y3raq976

Applying the principals of Konnakol (the art of performing percussion syllables vocally in South Indian Carnatic music) to Twinkle Twinkle Little Star: https://tinyurl.com/y5skssya

George Parker Bidder was born with a surprising gift: He could do complex arithmetic in his head. His feats of calculation would earn for him a university education, a distinguished career in engineering, and fame throughout 19th-century England: https://tinyurl.com/y4any4nn

The Observatory of Deaths at the Border is an interactive map which uses data from the Institute of Race Relations (IRR) and GISTI (a legal service for asylum seekers in France) to plot where people have died trying to cross from Europe into the UK: https://tinyurl.com/y3js3zpo

For non-Americans who have ever asked “Why are Americans like that?”, this article about American Bro culture offers some excellent insights: https://tinyurl.com/yxv6yjcj

You’ve probably heard pieces of the song in various movies, tv shows, and commercials, but you probably haven’t seen the video (unless you’re a creaky old fossil like me): https://tinyurl.com/y6zlfkw8

If Indigenous crafts interest you, here’s Mary Weahkee, an archaeologist for the State of New Mexico, who was commissioned by the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe to re-create the ancient craft of making a blanket from thousands of turkey feathers for an upcoming exhibit: https://tinyurl.com/y3zo3my9

Turns out that wolverines can be trained to rescue people buried by avalanches. If you know anything about wolverines this news may evoke mixed feelings: https://tinyurl.com/y4pclh27

Elon Musk’s space transportation company SpaceX is in the process of creating a constellation of thousands of mass-produced small satellites in low Earth orbit. This constellation is called Starlink. The small satellites in Starlink will be used for a range of military, scientific and exploratory purposes. And you can track them all on this live, interactive map: https://tinyurl.com/ybhkly3n

Linkdump #84

A drawing a day, by Edward Carey: https://tinyurl.com/y3bjrgue

Researchers at MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms have created tiny building blocks that exhibit a variety of unique mechanical properties, such as the ability to produce a twisting motion when squeezed. These subunits could potentially be assembled by tiny robots into a nearly limitless variety of objects with built-in functionality, including vehicles, large industrial parts, or specialized robots that can be repeatedly reassembled in different forms: https://tinyurl.com/y4ummt2b

“Infinite Bad Guy” uses machine learning to analyze all the covers of Billie Eilish’s Bad Guy and align them to within a quarter beat of each other, allowing you to seamlessly move between cover versions while the song plays continuously: https://tinyurl.com/y3thudyr

Gorgeous beadwork by Jennifer Chrisco: https://tinyurl.com/y3lsfosy

Italian singer Adriano Celentano released a song in the 70s with nonsense lyrics meant to sound like American English, apparently to prove Italians would like any English song. It was a hit, and resulted in this: https://tinyurl.com/yy8xcaoy

Wonderful little experiment in 3D animation: https://tinyurl.com/y4bmqzbs

Sculptor Tomás Barceló Castelá draws inspiration from sources both ancient and modern to create his wonderfully individual and captivating artworks: https://tinyurl.com/y2b29xwx

The Poetry Map of Scotland has more than 350 poems, each linked to a specific place in Scotland. The map is a standard Google map, and you can zoom in and click on the title of poems, which takes you to the poem itself. The map is a project of the Stanza Poetry Festival, and the poems have been submitted by living poets: https://tinyurl.com/y6afaqyk

Play That Funky Music Rammstein. Just the pick-me-up you need in troubled times: https://tinyurl.com/y56u9p49

The Omni Calculator website offers a cornucopia of calculators to help you with everything from figuring out how much alcohol to serve at a wedding to gear ratios to how much sun exposure is safe: https://tinyurl.com/y8qsf4q8

You may have seen that strangely alluring pig couch that went viral recently, but you may not know its backstory: https://tinyurl.com/yysfmawc

Exploring cultural traditions in Russia’s northern Pinezhsky region: https://tinyurl.com/y3ody2wd

Another fantastic website for people who love macro photos of insects: https://tinyurl.com/y6rl2wvy

Smooth beats and hypnotics figures in this video directed and animated by Istanbul-based Gökalp Gönen: https://tinyurl.com/y5djf45r

Hans Zimmer performs Time Soundtrack from Inception live mixed with a film by Bashir Abu Shakra shot in the Dolomite mountains of Italy. It took him 2 years to make the film and it is absolutely stunning: https://tinyurl.com/yxhzga4n

Thirty-five years ago, a Bouyei ethnic minority member was trafficked across China to a faraway village where nobody spoke her language. This year, she miraculously found her way home. C/W – physical abuse, human trafficking: https://tinyurl.com/y4xzexrp

Paintings by Alessandro Sicioldr. I love how he uses a classical style of light and shadow, blended with elements of the bizarre: https://tinyurl.com/y4hucftd

Messy Messy delves into the saga of the man who bought a ghost town. Sounds like it’s a lot harder than people think: https://tinyurl.com/yy88pmvp

A modern take on the enchanted forest getaway: https://tinyurl.com/yxs9rf63

Plink is a multiplayer musical tool that lets you create beats with random strangers: https://tinyurl.com/3htauew

Tropospheric ducting is a type of radio propagation which allows transmission of VHF frequencies and above beyond traditional line of sight range. Which explains a whole lot of those “Mysterious voice coming from the radio” stories: https://tinyurl.com/y5gd2hr8

If you’re a fan of animated photo gifs: https://tinyurl.com/y4cdxfvd

Some seriously intense and unique facial jewelry: https://tinyurl.com/y32ks3vy

How about a little ham for the Christmas tree?: https://tinyurl.com/yy2r9hck

Halitrephes Jellies are like fireworks of the sea: https://tinyurl.com/y7owg8gw

In 1965 Gerald Potter, who would go on to direct Heavy Metal, directed a lesser-known film called The Railrodder. Its star was beloved silent movie star Buster Keaton, doing what he does best in the one of the last roles he’d ever play: https://tinyurl.com/y7vpqerd

How a reindeer skin sleeping bag helped tell a story of Arctic survival: https://tinyurl.com/yxdrqrj8

The challenges of chasing down fake fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls: https://tinyurl.com/yxtjnjs2

Diving into the details of a 17th century tapestry, made in China for the Portuguese market, depicting the abduction of Helen of Troy: https://tinyurl.com/y46n44xf

From artist Maeve Travis, a lovely fan-made graphic novel adaptation of a collaborative short story posted on tumblr, for the prompt “Temples are built for gods. Knowing this a farmer builds a small temple to see what kind of god turns up”: https://tinyurl.com/y22lscf8

Paleoartist and scientific illustrator Gabriel Ugueto has a golden rule for his work: Accuracy. In order to resurrect the dinosaurs, Ugueto begins with a single bone and works his way from inside out: https://tinyurl.com/yy2efekm

Linkdump #83

Digital pet portraits with a unique and derpy style: https://tinyurl.com/y4mqcxuq

If ships are your thing, the Cruisemapper website not only lets you track the cruise ships of the world, it also offers a wealth of deck plans, accident records, and more (use the menu at the top to navigate through the topics): https://tinyurl.com/y5oobc2a

The strange and intriguing saga of 1970s Germany’s version of Elon Musk: https://tinyurl.com/yxnzkb4c

Artworks by Cheyenne River Lakota Souix artist Chris Pappan: https://tinyurl.com/y23ht2nc

A beautifully distorted art video takes us through the enchanting mountain forests of Vancouver’s North Shore: https://tinyurl.com/y38uy7ep

The BBC Motion Graphics Archive is a showcase of the history and development of motion graphics across the BBC and includes examples of opening titles, promotion trailers, stings, idents and program content sequences: https://tinyurl.com/y5fe7dhh

Fran Blanche explains how Mission Control’s Big Displays worked during the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo era: https://tinyurl.com/y3ae72so

Phenomenal, fantastical ceramics from Grafton Pottery. No seriously, this stuff is rad (Facebook link): https://tinyurl.com/y5g6gr5d (Non-Facebook link): https://tinyurl.com/yy8jevfx

An ongoing project to create an interactive map of all the shipwrecks in the Wreck Inventory of Ireland Database: https://tinyurl.com/y8ncu7yz

The 50 Words Project is a new interactive online map which allows you to listen to and learn words in more than 60 Australian Aboriginal languages. The map, created by the University of Melbourne’s Research Unit for Indigenous Language, includes sound recordings of First Nations languages from across the Australian continent: https://tinyurl.com/y2cvxap8

Among the Murik people of New Guinea, mothering isn’t something that comes “naturally” to women who give birth; it’s a form of power (There’s a link to a longer paper at the bottom of the article, under the “Resources” heading): https://tinyurl.com/y35stqaj

Through his meticulously rendered portraits, Santa Cruz-born artist Kajahl subverts the tradition of Blackamoor—a highly stylized European aesthetic that visualized people of color, particularly African men, in exoticized forms and subservient roles—by instead depicting Black subjects in valorized positions: https://tinyurl.com/y58w7a2o

This is what aliens would ‘hear’ if they flew by Earth: https://tinyurl.com/y55p3uh3

Are you weirdly fascinated by landslides? Then you’ll probably enjoy Dave Petley’s landslide blog: https://tinyurl.com/yxf4586b

This first documented occurrence of a plant evolving to avoid humans: https://tinyurl.com/y6mjnapf

Musing about the precision stonework of the Inca: https://tinyurl.com/y5jah2le

Last year, seven of Canada’s greatest performing arts stars and champions were awarded a Governor General’s Performing Arts Award, a prestigious annual distinction presented in collaboration with the National Arts Center: https://tinyurl.com/y6l392pm

I love Alessandro Gallo’s weird & wonderful human-animal hybrid sculptures: https://tinyurl.com/y5c83yde

The United Farm Workers Twitter account shares clips of how America’s favorite thanksgiving dinner ingredients are harvested: https://tinyurl.com/y6nnrqno

Between 1956 and 1963, the Maralinga site in Australia was used for nuclear weapons testing. The testing wasn’t just to see how the bombs worked, it was also to see how they affected the land, the animals, and the people in the area. Now a new virtual reality project lets visitors experience what it was like to live at ground zero: https://tinyurl.com/ydyxbthp

For a cool $2.2 million this could all be yours. I hope you like Christmas decorations: https://tinyurl.com/y4xch6b6

Researchers are still learning just how expertly Native Americans used and managed the lands and resources in North America before Europeans came: https://tinyurl.com/y5ok4pcu

A brief visual tour of the Constellation we know as Orion: https://tinyurl.com/yyhjwdfn

Rap, 1940s gospel style: https://tinyurl.com/yxtq75ot

For architecture fans, take a look at the winners of the 2020 Architecture MasterPrize: https://tinyurl.com/y3ndju2u

At long last you can write love letters, complaints to the manager, and passive-aggressive notes to your roommates in cuneiform!: https://tinyurl.com/y6c7vvp8

Linkdump #82

The PX3 State of the World 2020 photo contest winners (You can click on each photo to read more about the subject): https://tinyurl.com/y2d32q73

If you’re feeling extra nerdy, learn about the math and science of shell patterns in the online book “The Algorithmic Beauty of Sea Shells” by Hans Meinhardt. The site may pop up in Italian, but you can choose your preferred language. It’ll also ask you to allow cookies, which is annoying but, eh, every website is doing it: https://tinyurl.com/y4848m64

Cyanotype is a photographic printing process that produces a cyan-blue print. Engineers used the process well into the 20th century as a simple and low-cost process to produce copies of drawings, referred to as blueprints. The process uses two chemicals: ferric ammonium citrate and potassium ferricyanidet: https://tinyurl.com/y3vcdqw3

NASA presents The Sinister Sounds of the Solar System: https://tinyurl.com/yxofk99b

The weird and fascinating phenomenon known as Auto-Activation Deficit leaves people nearly incapable of acting on their own, but fully capable when someone else prompts them to act: https://tinyurl.com/y5l23h9v

In 2005 archaeologists discovered a 30,000 year old burial in Austria containing three infants. Recently, DNA has shown that two of the infants were identical twins: https://tinyurl.com/y3bkpgkp

A beautifully immersive botanical installation by Swiss artists Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger: https://tinyurl.com/y6m5assl

Text-to-speech is a wonderful tool that translates written language into sound for the hearing impaired. It can also make Godzilla movies hilarious: https://tinyurl.com/yyju7nog

Have you ever seen a peatslide? Well, it might be a peatslide, or maybe the Republic of Ireland has figured out an extremely clever way of sneaking into Northern Ireland: https://tinyurl.com/y2caekn7

Gorgeous competitive gardening on wheels!: https://tinyurl.com/y2ovqux7

I’m not entirely sure how it works, but here’s an Apollo guidance computer simulator: https://tinyurl.com/y4ho8yzg

For the jazz fans. Alice Coltrane, also known by her adopted Sanskrit name Turiyasangitananda or Turiya Alice Coltrane, was an American jazz musician and composer, and in her later years a swamini: https://tinyurl.com/y5vpsuan

A team of astrophysicists uses AI to figure out which clusters of stars merged to become our galaxy: https://tinyurl.com/yyy8d4xt

The striking prints of of the best known and most acclaimed Inuit artists of the last 50 years, Kenojuak Ashevak: https://tinyurl.com/yy277hmw

How conservators treat the 300 year old mattresses of Queen Caroline, wife of King George II: https://tinyurl.com/y2u5otxu

Ada Blackjack was an Inupiaq woman, born in rural Alaska, who survived for two years as a castaway after an ill-fated expedition: https://tinyurl.com/yab5db2j

If you’re a fan of model making, maybe you’ll enjoy watching an architect build a miniature version of the house from the movie Parasite: https://tinyurl.com/yxzrwm6f

Messy Messy Chic introduces us to eight real-life Black princesses: https://tinyurl.com/y4c7wh79

An amazing x-ray skull mural by Shok-1: https://tinyurl.com/y3uzet4m

A look inside Carabinieri Tutela Patrimonio Culturale, a Roman police vault of stolen art: https://tinyurl.com/yxjkdhwj

The science of how red sprites and blue jets form over thunderstorms: https://tinyurl.com/y76kzlyn

The AuthaGraph map is the most accurate world map you’ll ever see: https://tinyurl.com/y32b5w3x

Surreal art diagrams by Minjeong An: https://tinyurl.com/yxrgbukg

Bold and graphic linocut prints by Ieuan Edwards: https://tinyurl.com/y3v5zmlk

Not a pleasant topic at all, but for those interested in forensic reconstructions of disasters, here is an extremely well done breakdown of the tragic and widely televised August 4th explosion in Beirut: https://tinyurl.com/y525jxur

The art and craft of creating that stunning Dior pleating: https://tinyurl.com/y3vbouqr

Major Martin Manhoff spent more than two years in Moscow in the early 1950s as a US army attaché. His post off Red Square gave him an excellent vantage point to capture hundreds of images of everyday life in the U.S.S.R., as well as the only known independent footage of Stalin’s funeral procession: https://tinyurl.com/yagofmw8

Linkdump #81

We American 80s kids remember the birth of the phenomenon known as the Mall Tour, and how it brought us the wonder that was, and still remains, the one and only Tiffany: https://tinyurl.com/y44hcv9b

Whales are awesome, yes, but they can also kill you very easily without even meaning to: https://tinyurl.com/y3qzkj8q

“We as System Of A Down have just released new music for the first time in 15 years. The time to do this is now, as together, the four of us have something extremely important to say as a unified voice. These two songs, “Protect The Land” and “Genocidal Humanoidz” both speak of a dire and serious war being perpetrated upon our cultural homelands of Artsakh and Armenia”: https://tinyurl.com/yx9rgge6

A mission atop a Hawaiian volcano shows humans still have much to learn before they set foot on another world: https://tinyurl.com/y6rdxlz3

PTSD is not a new thing by any means, as shown by evidence from ancient Mesopotamia: https://tinyurl.com/yxwmv7n5

From pumpkin spice lattes to apple pies, ’tis the season for cinnamon. But, as linguist and historian Andrew Dalby makes clear, our obsession with the flavor today is nothing compared with Europeans’, who centuries ago went to extreme and horrific lengths in search of the spice: https://tinyurl.com/y2z84y8f

Firework cross sections are almost as beautiful as the final product ignited, depending on what you find “beautiful” of course: https://tinyurl.com/y3fo5a3p

Before Terry Gilliam joined the British comedy group Monty Python, he created odd animations for the UK series Do Not Adjust Your Set. Using old photographs and illustrations he also created some of the most memorable moments of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. In this video he explains how it was done: https://tinyurl.com/y5hcxgoe

Presenting the Shining Sunbeam Hummingbird. SO SHINY!: https://tinyurl.com/y42m5bsg

The weird and often horrifying randomness of “This Recipe Does Not Exist”: https://tinyurl.com/yxc96fc2

For his short film The Five-Minute Museum (2015), the UK director Paul Bush was given access to objects in some of the premier historical museums of Europe, including the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the Bern Historical Museum in Switzerland. The resulting short video provides a whirlwind survey of human history, from arrowheads to plastic toys (Warning – there’s an almost strobe-like effect in parts of the video that may negatively affect some people): https://tinyurl.com/y3tfyxpf

Delightful and inviting prints by Heather Cox: https://tinyurl.com/y5zkzt2s

If you were just thinking “this year’s Thanksgiving would be WAY better if a I had an absurdly complex and labor-intensive turkey recipe!”, you’re in luck!: https://tinyurl.com/yyryn4t3

The late, great Janis Joplin: https://tinyurl.com/y4q7bw44

The chemistry that’s threatening the murals of Pompeii: https://tinyurl.com/y344fler

The Mahabharata is a tale for our times. The plot of the ancient Indian epic centres around corrupt politics, ill-behaved men and warfare. In this dark tale, things get worse and worse, until an era of unprecedented depravity, the Kali Yuga, dawns. According to the Mahabharata, we’re still living in the horrific Kali era, which will unleash new horrors on us until the world ends: https://tinyurl.com/yyy5dhvk

The encompassing art of sound: https://tinyurl.com/y3pugxfv

This won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, but I really enjoyed this video of various professionals talking about their work with DNA in the field of Archaeology. It reminds me of being back in school when I was working toward my Archaeology degree: https://tinyurl.com/y4qqqtfq

All Things Fall – A hypnotic 3D printed zoetrope by Mat Collishaw: https://tinyurl.com/oau773t

The Forth and Bargy dialect, also known as Yola, is an extinct Anglic language once spoken in the baronies of Forth and Bargy in County Wexford, Ireland. It is thought to have evolved from Middle English, which was brought to Ireland during the Norman invasion, beginning in 1169: https://tinyurl.com/y3q325c5

The Greek, Roman, Irish, Slavic, Baltic, Norse, Anglo-Saxon, and Hindu sky-father gods are (probably) all connected, and descended from an ancient sky-father god worshiped 6000 years ago: https://tinyurl.com/y6p8nwk6

The otherworldly art of Marc Potts (some pieces are mildly NSFW): https://tinyurl.com/y4eog45l

Ah yes, those bygone glory days before building codes existed: https://tinyurl.com/yxr4fp5c

Marzhan Kapsamat plays the dombra in Lake Köbeituz: https://tinyurl.com/yy55p5js

“When Kids Ran the World: A Forgotten History of the Junior Republic Movement”: https://tinyurl.com/y5rxp7ss

The Japanese dog that protects humans and bears: https://tinyurl.com/y5kcgynb

Obviously this type of pine needle isn’t available everywhere, but if you live in a region where these trees grow, how about learning to make pine needle baskets in between Zoom meetings. Or during Zoom meetings, since likely as not the meeting could have been an email: https://tinyurl.com/y4zw695e

So…..what IS a hole?: https://tinyurl.com/y535voyj

Linkdump #80

Counting all the deaths in the Sharknado franchise (Includes gore, obviously): https://tinyurl.com/yyutbjuw

You may have seen the TikTok videos where comedian Christian Hull tries to guess the color of the paint that’s being mixed. Well now you can test your own color-guessing skills with this new video game: https://tinyurl.com/yx97k4b5

“After a prank Facebook event goes viral, thousands flock to the disappearing town of Rachel, Nevada — twenty-seven miles north of Area 51 — seeking knowledge, thrills, and common ground. Against the brutal backdrop of the American desert, hopes, doubts, beliefs, and real experiences are related in testimony from locals and travelers alike”: https://tinyurl.com/y4s9lm4x

Slap-sole shoes were developed in the early 1600’s as a means to protect the shoe from sinking into the ground: https://tinyurl.com/y6ces6uo

“Meet the Customer Service Reps for Disney and Airbnb Who Have to Pay to Talk to You”: https://tinyurl.com/y5cfkutp

The Slow Mo Guys take on pinball machines: https://tinyurl.com/y3v5xhkc

With planning for manned and unmanned missions to the Moon, Mars, and many asteroids underway, engineers are using numerical simulations to understand how spacecraft thrusters interact with planetary surfaces: https://tinyurl.com/y4mgx9v6

Do you love maps full of data you never knew you needed? ENJOY!: https://tinyurl.com/gozb8dt

An appaloosa with “peacock spots”: https://tinyurl.com/y3aqrwou

Turns out that the platypus is one of only three fur-bearing species who exhibit biofluorescence (this link has a cool pic of the glowiness): https://tinyurl.com/yyxxsk4j

The geometry of ballet: https://tinyurl.com/ycb9dlna

The technology that’s replacing the green screen: https://tinyurl.com/y4ew73tv

If you like spooky comics, Dora Mitchell shares her in-progress comic about a youngster in a very strange little town: https://tinyurl.com/y6kprkh5

Take a break and play with this origami simulator (Make sure to try out the options under the “Examples” tab): https://tinyurl.com/yyyd4wun

Dark & dreamy illustrations by Rovina Cai: https://tinyurl.com/y6zag7jc

(Slightly NSFW depending on the workplace) Amazing body painting/SFX art by Amazing Studio JUR: https://tinyurl.com/yxed8h4x

“Free Tibet is at the forefront of a global campaign to save Larung Gar, the largest centre for the study of Tibetan Buddhism anywhere in the world. Thousands of monks and nuns are being forcibly evicted from the site as their homes are demolished behind them”: https://tinyurl.com/y2rek48d

A digital library of cocktail recipes dating from as far back as 1753: https://tinyurl.com/yy2zp92v

An up-close look at the unexpectedly lovely journey of the western toad tadpole: https://tinyurl.com/yyfl87co

The mystery of the “Mostly Harmless” hiker: https://tinyurl.com/y65ywxl7

A new Amazon patent describes a poetic way to deal with toxicity in online games: https://tinyurl.com/y4pgfkbd

The bewitching self portraits of South African artist Zanele Muholi: https://tinyurl.com/y48f6rj9

“In this dazzling short animation by the Brothers Quay, learn about the illusionistic technique known as anamorphosis, in which a hidden image only becomes visible when viewed from a different angle or in a curved mirror”: https://tinyurl.com/y3xzskwj

Breaking down why The Cure’s “Just Like Heaven” is so great: https://tinyurl.com/y6okyqjo

The colorful science of jewel beetles: https://tinyurl.com/y2c8np8a

“Artist Roma Durov captures contemporary Russia on a patchwork canvas, depicting the sordid and the silly side-by-side. Otherwise known as 9cyka, Durov paints scenes of police injustice, abuse, and overbearing orthodoxy with the striking naivety of a child sticking out his tongue to those in charge”: https://tinyurl.com/y5e6m5fl

Born in 1973 in Osaka, Tanabe Chiku’unsai is a bamboo artist and craftsman that has been carrying on a family legacy that spans 4 generations: https://tinyurl.com/y398bcxd

“A war pilot crash-lands through his apartment window. When his wife returns from work, she discovers that her husband’s face has been replaced by an airplane turbine. He’s also fallen in love with their kitchen ceiling fan. To save their faltering marriage, his wife decides she will no longer let her humanity get in the way of love”: https://tinyurl.com/y3d8w2vv

After a decade of hair growth, artist Tadas Maksimovas decided to collaborate with violinist Eimantas Belickas to produce an experimental music piece, using a violin strung with his own hair, and it actually sounds pretty good: https://tinyurl.com/yyo8nsr9

Image source: http://www.lithiccastinglab.com/gallery-pages/2010septembertussingereccentricspage1.htm

Linkdump #79

If you love playing with online music toys, come create some disco jams with Superlooper: https://tinyurl.com/lyre6v6

Ever feel like you just need to let out a scream? In Iceland? But you can’t afford the airfare? GOOD NEWS! (You’ll need to use a computer/device with a microphone): https://tinyurl.com/y62lqe2y

Atlas Obscura presents 10 mythical monsters from around the world: https://tinyurl.com/y6gqlgzy

More news in the ongoing search for knowledge about when and how humans and dogs first started hanging out together: https://tinyurl.com/y6pwyedd

AI tries to create high-visibility Halloween costumes: https://tinyurl.com/y4j4n3c7

California writers have created a rich tradition of social protest novels: https://tinyurl.com/yy3h8uwd

Turns out the Maya had sophisticated water filtration systems long before Europe did: https://tinyurl.com/y2ohq4fg

Some images and stories of the 1906 San Francisco quake that I hadn’t seen before: https://tinyurl.com/y2btfy86

Cyriak’s dancing skeletons, just in time for spooky season: https://tinyurl.com/y2qgpo47

Japanese artist, Kitao Masayoshi (1764-1824) had a unique, almost modern style: https://tinyurl.com/y2k2zvwv

Manual Student journalists obtained a PowerPoint used in Kentucky State police training. These slides quote historical figures such as Hitler and Robert E. Lee and encourage police to be “ruthless killer[s].” Because that’s toooootally normal and fine: https://tinyurl.com/y5odg2ft

Shoppers at a new Lidl store in Dublin will get a unique insight into the city’s medieval past. The remains of an 11th century house are clearly visible beneath a glass section of the floor of the store on Aungier Street in the city centre: https://tinyurl.com/y39lywnf

A breakdown of 11 influential vacuum tubes: https://tinyurl.com/y235hzo3

A short video from a highly significant archaeological site in South Africa: https://tinyurl.com/yygc7sqe

What would your city skyline look like if there was no light pollution?: https://tinyurl.com/yytssm5n

In this special animation video essay, we take a deep dive on the technical and creative aspects of 1988’s anime masterpiece, “Akira”: https://tinyurl.com/y2bhh4c9

If videos of people cleaning/restoring things is your jam, you might enjoy this YouTube channel: https://tinyurl.com/y4rkmyq4

The weird & wonderful nature-inspired ceramic sculptures of Kate Macdowell: https://tinyurl.com/ycytxq5

Dang, that’s a LOT of mines: https://tinyurl.com/y3q7c987

“We’re the office that handles the paperwork for the graffiti artist Banksy.”: https://tinyurl.com/yxk6brqe

(NSFW) Wang Saen Suk Monastery Garden (also known as Wang Saen Suk Hell Garden and Thailand Hell Horror Park) is a Buddhist temple located in Bang Saen city, Thailand. A popular tourist attraction, it is meant to describe and depict Naraka (Buddhist hell): https://tinyurl.com/yx98k4t2

Take a peek at some of the skeletal wonders in the collection of Steve Huskey, biologist and associate professor of functional morphology at Western Kentucky University: https://tinyurl.com/y2ejaelo

Smells Like Teen Spirit in Classical Latin, perfect for your next socially distanced historian house party: https://tinyurl.com/y5uyzjp6

The Lost Media Wiki is a heck of a rabbit hole: https://tinyurl.com/ybgc736c

Astrophysicists try to imagine what dark matter would look like: https://tinyurl.com/y33lt8hn