Category: Daily Links

The inventive language created by doctors the world over to insult their patients – or each other – is in danger of becoming extinct.

‘The world’s first skaters are likely to have taken to the ice about 4,000 years ago on the frozen lakes of Finland’

‘This striking composite image follows the Sun’s path through the December Solstice day of 2005 in a beautiful blue sky, looking down the Tyrrhenian Sea coast from Santa Severa toward Fiumicino, Italy.’

via Zoe Strauss. In a long but interesting essay, Errol Morris analyses a famous photograph from the Crimean War.

via VVORK: ‘The whitest frame from 1500 different cinematic explosions has been taken and compiled together to make a minute long white flickering movie the sound track has become an agitated micro sound due to the editing process.’

‘Scroll right and journey from horizon to horizon [..] through the zenith in the night sky over Beg-Meil, France… the panorama covers 210 degrees in 21 separate exposures, beginning on the beach with bright star Sirius rising in the southeast.’

via Coudal: ‘In honor of the 300th birthday of Carl Linnaeus, the Department of Phanerogamic Botany at the Swedish Museum of Natural History has made 4000 of his herbarium specimens available online. ‘

Gotta be worth a squiz. Via kottke.org

via Metafilter: ‘Interesting project by photographer Francois Brunelle. A collection of photographic portraits of North American and European look-alikes. Each photo features two look-alikes, who are not related, side by side.’

I really worry sometimes that the forces of madness are winning; that we’ve entered the decline and fall, and the Dark Ages are just around the corner.

weird Japanese squishy pig toy

‘When I met the group on Monday morning, two weeks later, I proposed that we run a poetry stand, which would be like a country lemonade stand, except that people would be coming for poems. Whatever customers asked for, the students would write.’

Origami with banknotes.

‘Despite the inaccuracy of the title and the rather unsophisticated (yet charming) illustrations within, ‘Flora Sinensis’ is in fact one of the rarest and most important botanical works ever produced.’ Really gorgeous illustrations.