Links Ahoy! (9) - The Before-You-leave-For-The-Summer Version

Human Rights, Etc

A really informative blog from Philip Spagnoli, which discusses some fundamentals of human rights. It is updated almost everyday, and all the articles are a very nice read.

[LINK]



The Mountain by Terje Sorgjerd 

Terje Sorgjerd filmed this video between 4th and 11th April 2011, on top of Spain's highest mountain (3718 m), El Teide.

The goal was to capture the Milky Way galaxy, but a large sandstorm hit the Sahara Desert on 9th April and he thought that the whole film was going to be ruined, but the effects turned out to be even more beautiful.



[LINK]



Should We Clone Neanderthals?

The 50,000-year-old skull of a Neanderthal from the site of Shanidar in Iran (top)
has a prominent browridge and more projecting face than the
40,000-year-old Homo sapiens skull found at Pestera cu Oase in Romania.
(photo credit: Erik Trinkaus via link)

Neanderthals are the closest extinct relatives of our species. Over the past 4 years, their genetic sequences have been well collected and verified.

This absorbing article discusses the scientific, legal, and ethical obstacles to cloning a Neanderthal. A large part is also dedicated to discussing how cumbersome it was to collect all these genetic sequences - which I found very surprising, because it is not as easy as simply cutting up some old bone and doing a DNA test on it.

[LINK]



Nearly 100 Fantastic Pieces of Journalism

Conor Friedersdorf, associate editor at The Atlantic, compiled this list of articles which he thinks are the best of written journalism from the past year (2010). It is a well-sorted list, with articles in a diverse number of categories. Also, I found the article above from this very list.

[LINK]



Handbook of Journalism (Reuters)

The Reuters news source should be free from bias and any other form of opinion - the aim is to achieve complete neutrality and only providing facts. This is an online edition of the Handbook of Journalism by dozens of journalists from text, television, pictures and from domestic as well as international services.

I haven't read through all of it, but it sure does seem to be good advice from one of the best news sources in the world.

[LINK]



Ver Sacrum, 1898

via {feuilleton} 

via {feuilleton} 

Thanks to {feuilleton} for the link and pointer to this. This is an archive of the Austrian magazine Ver Sacrum (Sacred Spring), which consists of design contributions by Koloman Moser, Alfred Roller, Josef Hoffmann and Gustav Klimt. It showcases the Austrian development of the Art Nouveau style, and the overlap between Art Nouveau and the final flourishes of the Symbolist movement.

I cannot read or understand German, but it is worth looking around just for the sake of the high quality layout and art work.

The first link takes to the list of all the issues in this volume. The second link is the same website, but is easier to browse.

Note that these pages are in German. If you are using Chrome, the page will automatically be translated, but if you are using another browser, please use Google Translate to navigate.

[LINK] [LINK2]



St Peter's Basilica Panoramic Views

I am a sucky college student, hence I cannot afford to go on a 6 month long trip to Italy to explore all these wonderful sites. The St Peter's Basilica is a Late Renaissance church located within the Vatican City and it has the largest interior of any Christian church in the world.

It looks gorgeous and I would so love to explore it in real life. But since I cannot, I am left with the closest thing I can get - a wonderfully compiled panoramic view of certain sites in the church (by Jonas Carlson). You can look at a total of 12 sites within the church, just click on the little blue circles on the map to go to each different site.

[LINK]



Monoface

Click on each different part of of face to make all sorts of different faces. There are over 759,000 possible different faces you can make.

[LINK]



Google Image Swirl

A cool tool from Google Labs, which returns categorised image results, based on similarity between the images.

[LINK]