this blog has moved
Still on Tumblr, just hopped accounts so it’s no longer categorized as my personal blog.
this blog has moved
Still on Tumblr, just hopped accounts so it’s no longer categorized as my personal blog.
Deskchair Traveler has officially relocated/upgraded.
Slowly improving this thing. Please excuse just a little spamming about the new location over the next week, so as to reach different followers.
(FAO hoverers: It’s still on Tumblr, just got a redirect.)
Happy birthday, Golden Gate Bridge.
A doodle from New York! This couple was walking along holding hands when their path was blocked by an old man with an ice cream cone. Instead of letting go of each others’ hands, they London-Bridged over him and he squatted down to let them pass.
I love this.
City of (Sunspot) Lights
Sunspot AR1476 (photographed above over the Eiffel Tower) has been monitored all week, as the Jupiter-sized coronal “active region” has been pointed squarely at Earth, ready to release a wave of magnetic energy in the form of a solar flare or coronal mass ejection. Last night, a CME was detected, racing toward Earth at over 1,000 km/s.
This awesome animation from the Goddard Space Weather Lab demonstrates the forecasted wave and glancing blow we await on Earth (we aren’t in any danger, but satellites may be disrupted):
Above, the sunspot is photographed Thursday evening over the Eiffel Tower by VegaStar Carpentier.
Hey, followers.
I think I’m jumping accounts. When I started Deskchair Traveler, I didn’t think I’d have any other blogs, let alone a personal one, so it’s set up as my personal, and now things are getting a bit messy. Plus it turned into so much of a reblog blog, and I really want to do more original content, and I may want to be able to add other authors, et cetera. (Also, I’m totally changing the name if I can think of something better—suggestions welcome.) Watch this space for the new version when it happens, as well as new versions of Disposable World, Fuck Yeah Biomimicry, and my personal, probably.
Scottish Highlands by Luis del Río | National Geographic
Using last.fm Data to Map Geographic Flow of Music
By tapping into the last.fm API, these Irish researchers modeled the geographic flow of musical influence. They were able to identify where certain tastes frequently originated, and draw a hierarchy of influential cities (like the chart shown above for North America).
Surprisingly, the size of a city doesn’t associate very strongly with how influential it is. That means that despite its enormous size, NYC isn’t that much more influential than Portland or Austin. There are prevailing theories that large cities are the drivers of cultural invention, but this seems to show (for music, at least) that a connected online world is leveling that playing field.
Also, they have a graph displaying “Normalized Radiohead vs. Normalized Coldplay”, which has to go down as one of the best figures in a research paper, ever.
(via arXiv)
This is cool.
Nile, Egypt, Israel, Arabian Peninsula, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey. Sunrise in the east.
(via realfakescientist)
