Basic Science
It’s the weekend, the sky is blue and a light wind is blowing. What better time to kick back and buff up your basic science skills. Check out these Ballads from the Age of Science.
Via Medpundit.
Science
There’s More to Know
PZ Myers notes that the latest edition of The Tangled Bank is hosted at Invasive Species.
Go learn a bit about 17 year circadas, iron fertilization, growth cones, Formentera lizards, and other neat science stuff.
Infrastructure Mapping
The gallery at Geoge Mason University’s Infrastructure Mapping Project has some great visualizations of various parts of North American critical infrastructures, e.g., long haul fiber, the electic power grid, and gaspipelines:
The Infrastructure Mapping Project’s goal is to provide meaningful analysis of critical infrastructure and its interdependencies with vital sectors of the US and global economy. In this pursuit we map a wide variety of networks and phenomena ranging from the Internet the power grid and spam.
Their related research papers are listed here.
Chernobyl – A Ghost Town
Who needs Friday wierdness when reality is so fascinating and horrifying.
Via Michael Caldwell via Jim Henly.
Faster Reading
Very much faster then I have been. Eugene Volokh has already finished Stephenson’s The Confusion.
I’m still crawling through Quicksilver which I have been enjoying for much longer then I anticipated as noted here. In fact I’ve been enjoying Quicksilver enough that I already have The Confusion waiting on the bookshelf (I wanted needed to have a 1st edition).
I’d feel bad if my only reading over the past year had been several hundred pages of Quicksilver but I’ve been able to sneak in other reading at the rate of about 1 book for every 9 pages of Quicksilver and, of course, uncounted blog postings.
Update: Via Catallarchy a pointer to this Salon interview with Neal Stephenson (I had to visit a one screen add to get to the premium content).