Kangaroo Island: a photographic report

For six days beginning on Thursday 14 March, my parents and I visited Kangaroo Island, a tourism hotspot located 100-200km from my home. I’ve visited the island once before, but I was ten years old then and don’t remember much.

Before the trip, I’d obtained a copy of the Island Intrigue CD, which contains audio tracks about the wildlife, history and key locations on the island, with an accompanying map that shows the best places to listen to each track. It’s designed to be listened to in the car as you drive from place to place. I also did most of the research on where to go.

This blog post is a report on what we did there, but for the most part I’ll be brief with my descriptions and let the photographs tell the story. Kangaroo Island is renowned for its photogeniality, and the pictures you see below are only a fraction of the ones I have. If you’d like to see additional pictures of certain places, then I may be able to oblige.

— Day One —

We took the 6pm ferry from Cape Jervis to Penneshaw, and it was a good ride.

The photographs below show: (a) View from inside the cafe as the ferry arrives outside; (b) A dramatic view over the upper deck of the ferry from on board; (c) A piece of Kangaroo Island as seen from behind the ferry as we enter the bay; (d) Our efforts to stir up seagulls after arriving in Penneshaw.

From the ferry I saw one dolphin leap from the water, but missed its photograph.

To obtain the fourth picture, Mum threw chips for the seagulls and I snapped photographs as they dived for the food. I have shots featuring as many as seven seagulls in the air, but I like this one better.

Here is a ten-minute video from the ferry ride, which is as long as my camera would allow:

From Penneshaw we drove to Kingscote, Kangaroo Island’s largest town and our base for the next few days.

— Day Two —

Friday 15th was our first full day on the island, which we began by driving to its northwest corner and doing the Ravine des Casoars hike, which I enjoyed very much.

The following three pictures show a natural bridge structure near the beginning of the trail, and a riverbed near the end.

  

Here’s a video that I took as I was walking, representing the terrain and plantlife to be seen along most of the trail. I recorded it somewhere between the two locations photographed above.

The trail ends at a beach, with some outstanding sea caves in the northern headland. The concentrated ocean waves on this beach were also very dramatic. I’ve done my best to capture the place in the following eight photographs.

After returning to the carpark, we travelled east, departing north from the Playford Highway to visit Western River Cove and then take the scenic coastal road to Stokes Bay.

We stopped briefly at Western River Cove, where I took the following two shots.

The coastal road goes up and down over several hills and is not suitable for large vehicles, but is a recommended drive for a family car. Clearly visible are the small islands south of Innes National Park on Yorke Peninsula.

The Stokes Bay Bush Garden is what you get when a gardening enthusiast and plant collector turns their extensive backyard into a minor tourist attraction. It wasn’t really my thing, but it was Mum’s, and I enjoyed taking her there (in that I did the research and put it on the destination list). Here’s a photo of Mum walking through the garden recording the names of her favourite plants.

After visiting the bush garden, we went back to Stokes Bay for refreshments at the Rockpool Cafe and a walk on the beach. Stokes Bay is as photogenic a beach as any — with a natural tunnel passing all the way through the headland and a sharp contrast between the beaches on either side — but I don’t have any pictures, partly because my camera was running low on batteries (I’d neglected to charge it the night before) and partly because I left it in the car.

The whole day was well paced in my opinion, and I would recommend the overall plan to others (i.e. allowing one day to tour the north coast of Kangaroo Island from Ravine des Casoars to Stokes Bay).

— Day Three —

On Saturday we toured the central portion of the south coast, starting at Seal Bay and travelling east. Seal Bay is purported to be the island’s most popular attraction, and is certainly in the top three. It is ironically named, as the animals to be found here are sealions and not seals (the seals are elsewhere on the island). We saw a lot of kangaroos on the way there, drinking water from puddles in the road after a recent rainfall.

Here are some photographs from Seal Bay, including close-ups of the sealions, wider shots of the beach, and a scene with sealion and seagulls interacting. We didn’t go onto the beach itself because you need to book a tour to do that and we chose not to, so I took these pictures from the wooden platforms above the sandhills.

After Seal Bay we visited Raptor Domain, which features a twice-daily interactive bird show. Here’s a photo of Mum with a barn owl on her knee, followed by six shots of one of the presenters with a wedge-tailed eagle. Several other birds were presented, but the eagle was the indisputable star of the show.

I bought a holographic seahorse fridge magnet here (also available from other souvineer shops on the island).

We then visited the Little Sahara, a region of inland sand dunes that’s famous for looking like a desert. It’s a rather well-known site, but badly signposted and curiously absent from prominent tourism websites.

In the following photographs and video, I’ve tried to show the extent of the illusion so that readers can judge how well its name is earned.

 

Travelling on, Mum spotted a juvenile echidna at the side of the road and I got a few snaps.

Our next stop was the Rustic Blue Gallery and Cafe, where we had refreshments and I bought a $600 painting (Southern Swell by Suzanne Trethewey), which will be delivered to my Adelaide home sometime after Easter. I don’t often buy paintings but this one will be a good memento. (No photographs yet.)

We arrived at the Kelly Hill Caves just in time for the final (4:15) tour of the day. Here is a video I compiled from three short clips of the tour.

This day was also well paced in my opinion, and I would recommend it as a model for others: touring the island from Seal Bay to Kelly Hill Caves takes up about one full day. (I would also suggest a contingency plan in case it takes a little longer, given that we only just had time to fit everything in.)

— Day Four —

Sunday was a quiet day spent around Kingscote, visiting local attractions mostly on foot. I don’t have a lot to say about it — Kingscote is more of a place to travel from rather than to — but I did buy a beeswax candle from the Island Beehive.

— Day Five —

We spent most of Monday in Flinders Chase National Park, in the southwest corner of the island. Here are located two extremely popular attractions: Admirals Arch and Remarkable Rocks. The latter especially is so well-known that it ranks highly in lists of popular tourist destinations across the whole of Australia.

From the visitors’ centre at the park entrance, I bought a couple of shirts (as yet unworn), and a bottle of honey liqueur. (Also, lunch.)

Here are two shots of the Casuarina Islets taken from the walkway down to Admirals Arch. Notice the waves.

The view from Admirals Arch towards Remarkable Rocks (which can be seen as a bump on the end of the distant headland).

Admirals Arch itself, photographed from a few different angles.

A close-up of seals playing at Admirals Arch, followed by the view towards Remarkable Rocks as we get nearer.

Now for my photographs of Remarkable Rocks. Everyone with a camera loves this place, even if the other tourists get in the way of the picture you’re trying to take.

(Incidentally, there’d been an accident when we arrived — someone had tried to climb one of the rocks and broken their leg — the emergency helicopter arrived as we were leaving.)

Having spent enough time looking at the prime attractions, we explored a few of the lesser-known walks.

Below are some shots of one of the lakes at Platypus Waterholes, where we didn’t see any platypuses but did see plenty of the bubbles they make from under the water (see the fourth photo). This is the only region in South Australia where platypuses can be found, and they were (re)introduced here for conservation purposes in the first half of the 20th century.

The Rocky River walk takes you the long way from Platypus Waterholes back to the visitors centre. Ironically there is hardly a rock to be seen along this segment of the river, but we did see a large goanna, which obliged us by walking along the same trail in the same direction so that I could take lots of photographs and a video.

The final walk for the day — which we barely had time for and my parents didn’t come with me all the way — was the Snake Lagoon walk, which unlike the Rocky River walk, follows a part of the riverbed that is actually rocky. In hindsight I’d recommend going here before the Platypus Waterholes etc, because the Snake Lagoon walk is all about the geography (which is always there to be photographed), whereas the other walks were about chance encounters with wildlife (which are much less reliable). If you don’t have time for everything, then in my opinion it’s better to miss out on something you might not have seen anyway than on something that never moves.

Here are some photographs from the Snake Lagoon walk; you can well imagine how dramatic it would look at a wetter time of year, with lots of small waterfalls. I didn’t go onto the beach itself, knowing that my parents were waiting some distance behind.

— Day Six —

The previous day we’d booked a morning boat tour with Kangaroo Island Marine Adventures, but it was cancelled because of the wind. Disappointing, of course, but the weather can’t be helped.

We’d planned to go home the following morning, but feeling we’d pretty much seen everything we came to see, we brought our return ferry ride forward to this (Tuesday) afternoon. Our excursion for the day, therefore, consisted, in taking the scenic route back to Penneshaw.

Here are some views from Prospect Hill, which was climbed by Matthew Flinders in search of bearings in 1802. It’s a large sandhill near the narrowest point of the island, from which water on both sides is visible (see the third photo). I took some of these photos from the lookout on top of the hill, and others from the way up.

We also visited nearby Flour Cask Bay, where I took the following pictures.

Finally, we made our leisurely way back to Penneshaw via minor roads (in order to take in some scenery from the eastern end of the island). At Penneshaw we bought our last meal on the island, and then Mum and I visited Granny Stirling’s Art and Craft while Dad finalised the ferry arrangements. I bought some sample jars of exotic native-fruit jams (which were also available elsewhere on the island, but rarely as well stocked). Then we all took a walk on the beach before boarding the ferry and having a surprise encounter with old friends.

I was seasick on the ferry. Then we arrived on the mainland, and all that remained was the drive home.

Links: Early March 2013

These are the best of my online reading over approximately the last month.

I’ve filed more items under delightful than under interesting this month, but some of the delightful items are, in fact, also interesting. It’s just that their delightfulness is primary, in my opinion.

Interesting

• A link between immunity and intelligence.
• Discovering what lies on the surface of Europa.

Delightful

• I expect this 3D craft pen will find a place on many gift lists.
• Outstanding timelapse from the International Space Station, with effects.
• This paint-your-requests thing is cool (if compromised by the need to have a Tumblr account to submit requests).
• Tree-climbing wild cat. Watch the video in full screen HD. (It would be better for a tighter edit, but is still worth your time.)
• Jane Goodall writes about her enthusiasm for plants.
• Proteins re-imagined as pictures (with an interesting introduction to ribbon diagrams).
• Love these close-up photographs of coral. A different perspective than we usually see. Would make a nice calendar.
• Halloween dessert idea: jelly worms in crushed biscuit soil.

Personal

• I entered a competition to compress a paragraph into a tweet. I didn’t win, but mine is the third entry quoted under “the shortlist”.

I have a new Internet account!

Just a quick notification to the effect that I have a new Internet account and with it a new email address. My primary public email address is now goldhoarder@internode.on.net (same username as my Twitter account). The old address should still work, but will be phased out and eventually expire.

(I’ve also changed my commenting name from “Flesh-eating Dragon” to plain old “Adrian Morgan” in order to be more consistent across platforms.)

Musical relay game

Here’s something to try. Call it a game, or an experiment, or a project — it’s interesting and fun no matter how you describe it. You need two players, each with a passion for listening to music, reasonably broad tastes, and a completely different selection of albums.

The rules

To begin, send your partner a track from your personal music collection, having agreed beforehand on a protocol for how to do so. Don’t trouble yourself with thoughts of copyright, because this is private correspondence and nobody cares. It’s almost optimised to lead to extra sales.

Your partner should listen to the song you selected (I use the word “song” to avoid the formality of overusing “track”, not to imply that all the tracks should have lyrics) and after careful reflection, send you back a song that, in their opinion, resonates with the one they received. By resonance I mean a subjective sense that the two songs fit together somehow — that they have something in common which unites them — so that a transition from one to the other feels as smooth as possible. It has to be defined intuitively rather than mechanically.

In turn, you should send back a song that resonates with the one you received, and so on, back and forth, until you’ve sent each other six tracks each. That’s enough for a twelve-track album, and a satisfying length for a game.

Some advice: Occasionally a specific song may come to mind straight away, but usually you’ll have to hunt for a bit. Try starting with an album that might provide a match, and listen to a few seconds of each track to refresh your memory. Aim for a track that resembles its predecessor in multiple respects, but if you can’t find a good match, do the best you can. In my experience you can always find something that will fit, even if it’s a song you don’t normally pay attention to because it’s overshadowed by other tracks on the same album.

Different people relate to music differently, and you must accept your partner’s subjective opinion of what resonates with what.

An example

I recently played this with a friend, Dan, and below I’ll describe in detail how this particular experiment went. Dan’s choices will appear in magenta and mine in orange so they stand out. I’ll include commentary, but in most cases won’t spell out what the tracks have in common — the reader is welcome try and identify these as an exercise.

Dan picked the first song. Rather than send tracks (or even links), he opted to confine himself to songs I could find on Youtube and let me search for them. His opening play was Birima by Youssou N’Dour [video].

My method for sending songs was to upload them to Box and send links by email (I deleted each track after Dan acknowledged its receipt). In answer to Dan’s first play I chose Iamagit by Telek. Here’s a thirty-second sample, and here’s a really bad video in which a couple of Russian boys mime rather pathetically to a recording (also, the first few beats are missing). The similarity between the song title — a word in one of the languages of Papua New Guinea — and the English phrase “I am a git” rather amuses me. You may sometimes see the song referred to as Lamagit (due to an ambiguous font on the album), but Iamagit is correct.

Dan struggled to find a match, and after a few days decided to let his subconscious do the work and simply choose the first song that came into his head. He picked Mr Wendal by Arrested Development [video]. This is a very different song from Iamagit, and I struggled to see any similarity. Dan, in retrospect, thinks it was a bad choice too. Eventually I realised the connection must lie in the metre: Iamagit goes something like /x/x x/// on the bass in bars without lyrics, while Mr Wendal goes /x/x x//x on the drums through the whole song.

In reply, I chose On The Edge by Oysterband. Here’s a thirty-second sample, but the only videos I can find are from an inferior live performance that really will not do (it leaves out half of the instruments). Dan says that of all my choices, this is the only one where he struggles to see the connection to its predecessor, but here are some thoughts. First, occasional use of a rather tinkly-sounding guitar or other instrument adds texture to both songs. Second, I don’t listen to hiphop-style songs with lyrics spoken rather than sung, but On The Edge provides some approximation in that there are often several consecutive syllables at the same pitch, and many syllables between pauses. Third, both songs contain a lot of very harsh sounds plus a strong beat, and fourth, both have lyrics about social inequality. Together I think these qualities combine to make it a reasonable match.

Dan responded with Have You Ever Seen The Rain by Creedence Clearwater Revival [video], commenting that he’d settled on the strategy of choosing the first song that comes to mind. This is, of course, by far the most well-known song in our exchange. As a match, I felt it was mediocre — it didn’t clash with On The Edge (as Mr Wendal did with Iamagit), but nothing about it seemed particularly connected, either. The main link I can see is that both songs have a downward-tending riff between parts.

My next choice was Ubeyneihem by Meir Banai [video], a Hebrew song about being content in both urban and rural environments. The chorus (according to my sources), translates as: “And in between them, and in between them, I go and then come back. I have in me some of one and some of the other; I have some of both.” Just for your interest.

Dan then selected King Without A Crown by Matisyahu [video], which has nothing in common with Ubeyneihem except that one is sung in Hebrew and the other has lyrics with Jewish themes. Moreover, Dan wouldn’t have even known that Ubeyneihem was in Hebrew if I hadn’t mentioned it. Talking about this after the game was over, he wrote: “I think up until this point, I was approaching this as a bit of game rather building an album. And it was as much about introducing new songs and bands to each other. And from this point of view a cultural link between two songs is just as valid as a musical link. Even though the cultural link in this example is pretty skin deep too. Thus from this song onwards, when I started to think about the musical connections a bit more carefully, I think the album becomes a lot more coherent.“

In my view it is a game, but one in which the challenge lies in finding the best match you can from your own collection of music. If played well, a coherent album emerges as a side effect (in which a listener can experience the stepwise evolution from each song to the next).

Now entering the second half, I picked Tine Lasta by Kíla [video]. (Note: some of the Youtube videos I’m linking to contain someone else’s — e.g. the uploader’s –  theme tune added to the beginning and/or end of the track, and just to warn you, this one is particularly obnoxious. Ignore it.) This was Dan’s favourite of all the tracks I shared, and Kíla by far his favourite artist; despite being Irish himself he had not previously heard of them.

Dan’s next selection was Me Gustas Tu by Manu Chao [video]. By this point he was, as indicated earlier, putting more thought into his choices.

I then chose Aguas Claras by Surkuy. I can’t find a video or sample of Surkuy’s version, but here is someone else’s cover of the same song, which I assume is traditional.

Dan’s final pick was Hora Zero by Rodrigo y Gabriela [video].

We’d agreed to exchange six tracks each, and now it was now my turn to pick the final song. I had wanted to avoid including more than one track by the same artist, but the only match that felt right to me was Ríl A Do by Kíla [video]. At least it’s from a different album.

Our post-experiment discussion covered topics like which connections were least obvious, what we thought of each other’s songs in their own right, whether we were content with the variety covered, and so on. Regarding the variety, my only caveat was that we’d exchanged nothing that was carried more by the melody than by the beat, since Dan tended to choose songs with a very strong beat which I had to match. It can be interesting to observe how different people relate to music, and Dan clearly pays more attention to the drumbeat of a song than I do (an observation he confirmed).

Postscript

It’s a fun exercise to try, and for friends reading this blog post, I am definitely open to doing a musical relay with you at some point. Not in the immediate future — I need a breather — but let me know if you’re interested in doing so at some point.

I also welcome comments of all sorts, as ever. Feel free to add any perspective you have, from a whimsical reply to something I mentioned in passing to a thoughtful analysis of our playlist.

Links: Early February 2013

The Pulp-O-Mizer is an Internet website/meme that’s been doing the rounds lately. It’s a lot of fun, and involves choosing a combination of image elements and text format options to create your own magazine cover in the style of 1950s pulp science fiction. Best results come from taking the time to play around and get a handle on its capabilities.

The most obvious idea is combine your personal favourites (favourite foreground image, background image, title, etc), making compromises when your first choices don’t work well together. Here’s one I did, reflecting my own tastes.

Another idea is to take something in the real world (a book, perhaps, or even your own blog), and create the cover it would have if it were a 1950s pulp science fiction magazine. I did this on Twitter with Mike Brown’s How I Killed Pluto And Why It Had It Coming, and Mike retweeted it!

The site does not have a public gallery, unfortunately, so you have to upload your generated image yourself. (But definitely worth it.) If you are willing, please post links to your creations in the comments.

Now here are the other links I wish to share:

Interesting:

• Leprosy converts nerve cells into stem cells.
• Tsetse fly repellant made from Essence of Waterbuck.
• Looking inside the brain of a fish in a swim simulator.
• Polynesians visited South America 1000 years ago and took home a souvineer.
• $60,000 eye implant to treat retinal damage blindness (on my list because my grandfather had macular degeneration).
• Ultra-fast archery. Pity about the video quality, but this is fascinating and I’d like to learn more.
• Story of a Russian family isolated in remote Siberia. (Particularly charmed by the bit about satellites.)
• Daniel Loxton’s history of the skeptical movement contains much meat to chew on.
• On the British Library’s digitisation of medieval manuscripts: an article and a blog.

Delightful:

• Electronic game to play with pigs, but I’d like to see more evidence that the pigs enjoy it. (Are the flashy firework displays really rewarding to them?)
• Two pieces of online art on the theme of unlimited zoom [1], [2].
• The Out of Eden Walk has started, and we’ll see how it goes. (I linked to this article in December.)
• Indoor kite-flying — essentially a form of dance.

Useful:

• Adding 24timezones.com to my list of bookmarked utility sites. Accurate-to-the-second time with a great interface.

If we are designing flags…

Every so often, the prospect of changing the Australian flag crops up in the media. Politically, I don’t much care: there are more important things than some piece of cloth on a pole. But creatively, if people are designing flags, then I want in on the action.

The latest revival of the conversation was triggered by a rather hideous design that’s not worth linking to (it’s only a catalyst, anyway). A better design along a similar line was Brendan Jones’s 1995 Reconciliation Flag, of which my only criticism is that the white line looks rather too divisive. I think it was the first I ever saw that involved the use of a boomerang.

Here’s a link to a list of 100 flags proposed by the public in the late 90s.

It’s been a while since we last had a flag debate in Australia, and likewise, a while since I last had a go at designing one of my own. Now, I happen to work as part of a graphic design team these days, but at home I don’t have access to the software we use at work, so I had to try and sketch a design using Windows Paintbrush.

So bearing in mind that this is better thought of as a rough sketch than a finished design, here is the best idea I came up with. [Update: I've fiddled a bit since the original upload, but still using Paintbrush.]

Every flag tells a story, and I took as my inspiration the rarely-sung second verse of Australia’s national anthem.

• “Beneath our radiant Southern Cross, we’ll toil with hearts and hands“
  So I’ve depicted the Southern Cross, which is also depicted on our current flag. The number of points on the stars is irrelevant, but five points is easiest in Paintbrush, so I went with that.
• “To make this Commonwealth of ours renowned through all the lands“
  The red boomerang (an idea borrowed from the Reconciliation Flag and others like it) is firstly a distinctly Australian symbol but also doubles as an upward-pointing arrow for ambition. More evocatively, picture a boomerang being tossed into the night sky, to fly amidst the stars of the Southern Cross.
• “For those who come across the seas, we’ve boundless plains to share“
  I’ve included blue for the ocean on both sides of the design. As for sharing boundless plains, it has to be said that Australian politics right now is anything but welcoming to outsiders. But personally, I like the idea of national symbols that can be used to shame us, by expressing values we’re supposed to have but seem to have forgotten.

The one thing obviously missing is any representation of Australia’s individual states and territories. But flags are supposed to be simple, and one must make decisions about what to put in and what to leave out. There is no rule that requires a country’s flag to indicate the number of states and territories it has, so I decided that this design would not. (An advantage is that if ever Australians decide to alter the number of states, it can be done independently of the flag.)

To defend the design from another perspective — without the boomerang, you’d have a simple flag with the Southern Cross in the middle, and colours representing the water and land of our island continent. Surveys show that many people would like to retain the Southern Cross on a new flag, although here it appears in a simplified, more abstract form. On the other hand, the main argument against using the Southern Cross is that it is not distinctly Australian, as the flags of New Zealand and Papua New Guinea also share the feature. The boomerang adds precisely that Australian element, and is integrated with everything else.

I sketched this for fun, and won’t try to convince anyone that we should adopt it as a nation. This blog post is simply my humble contribution to the national discussion. If you have some flag-related ideas you’d like to share with me — whether you’re Australian or not, whether you think we need a new flag or not — then you are welcome to continue that discussion in the comments.

Update: I found a site that lets you convert a flag image into an animation. Here’s what mine looks like in motion:

Update: I got thinking about how states’ flags might be constructed to match my design for the national flag, and the idea that worked best was to turn the design sideways, put it against the mast, extend the stripes, and add the state’s emblem on the other side. Here’s how that turns out for South Australia.

Update and Postscript: My supervisor at the graphic design place I work at mentioned that he likes Brendan Jones’s other design. It is certainly one of the better conservative proposals (i.e. ones that maintain continuity with the current Australian flag), and I would consider it serviceable — if a little stark for my taste and overreliant on stars. I decided to fiddle with it, creating a modified version with a 2:3 aspect ratio, a brighter shade of blue to contrast better with the black, and stars reduced in size to better fit the new width. (Here it is animated.)

One more post about the holidays

This is my first blog post since the Christmas holidays ended (approximately the month from December 21 to January 21).

A lot of things happened in that time, many of which I’ve mentioned in previous posts. Others include looking after a friend’s corgi puppy, relocating the contents of a damaged costume room at the local town hall, discussing bookmashes with a friend and old schoolteacher over tea one evening, working on a challenging jigsaw puzzle, misplacing my credit card, my cousin’s inception as the new Uniting Church pastor for Southern Yorke Peninsula, etc. You can ask in the comments if you’d like me to extrapolate on anything.

One surprise unveiled at Christmas was that my family is planning a trip to Kangaroo Island later in the year (probably March 14th). I’ve been there once before, but I was ten years old back then.

I’m making good progress on the road to getting rid of my current ISP and switching to a better one. During the holidays I spoke to the computer expert I’ve been getting advice from and got some useful information including prices, etc. Meanwhile my address book is up-to-date and old email cleaned out (i.e. either filed or deleted) until October 2012. After that point, emails are too recent to be worth sorting, and might as well stay in my inbox.

The new year is a good time to experiment with different ways of blogging. For example, you may have noticed that I’m now including entire blog posts on the front page, instead of hiding most of them ‘below the fold’. There may be other changes, but more dramatic ones will wait until my ISP changes — a faster connection should make fiddling with the blog a much more practical prospect.

Below are links to the best articles that I read online during the holidays, for certain values of “read”.  During the holidays I accessed the Internet using my ten-inch netbook, with no ability to print hardcopies. I can’t really digest long texts in those circumstances, so in most cases I browsed them, bookmarked them, and read them properly when I got back. Also, some of these involve pictures and video rather than text.

I’ve divided them into three categories — Interesting, Delightful, Awareness & Personal — depending on whether I recommend them because they’re interesting, because they’re emotionally appealling, because they address important issues in society, or because of some connection I have.

Interesting:

• Falling into a black hole more hazardous than previously believed (more).
• Mapping how concepts are stored in the brain.
• Caught up on Lynne Kelly’s intriguing ideas on Stonehenge.
• A 2007 article about the Codex Seraphinianus.

Delightful:

• Documentary about musical instruments made of recycled parts.
• Weird but strangely alluring fiction.
• Amazing palindromic map.
• Snowballs in medieval paintings.
• I’ve asked certain people to try the Up-Goer Five Text Editor, no response yet. Meanwhile, here’s Mike Brown’s entry.

Awareness:

• Article on the insanity of American life sentences. (Depressing, but with hint of hope.)
• Prominent opponent of genetic modification changes his mind.

Personal:

• I added information to a page about the Australian commercial card game Gone Bush (including a paraphrase of the rules).

P.S. Just for interest, here’s a pie chart showing the number of classifications I’ve contributed to various Zooniverse projects. I won’t link to individual projects because they tend to have a short half-life (Ice Hunters expired long ago), so it’s better to subscribe to the main site if you’re potentially interested. My favourite projects are the ones that don’t require much focus, and can be used to wind down at the end of the day. (I made the Snapshot Serengeti contributions before the holidays, in between cleaning and packing.)