Post-holiday link dump

After getting back from Europe on September 10, I started catching up with what had been happening on the Internet while I was away. Following that, I had to catch up with what had been happening on the Internet while I was catching up with what had been happening on the Internet. And so on. The process took some time, but Achilles has caught his tortoise and I’m finally up to date.

From while I was away:

• From August, this post by Mike Brown, looking back on the fifth anniversary of Pluto’s reclassification.
• Meanwhile, astronomers found a potentially habitable planet around another star. (I’ve updated my 2008 blog post Our Place in the Sky to show how aliens from HD85512, if they looked towards our Sun, would see a cosmic duck.)
• Video of Astronomy Photographer of the Year finalists, with commentary. (And to think I was in Greenwich only a few days before.)
• Intriguing idea that subatomic particles could be cubic under high enough pressure.
• There are two types of Nile crocodile. More here.
• Essay on Permian fossils of doom.
• From serious science to frivolous fun, a page about clothes inspired by children’s drawings. Includes slidey things to move back and forth.
• I can’t do this! I think the video must come from some alternative universe where Murphy’s Law doesn’t apply.
• According to this test, I have perfect colour vision (I got a score of zero).
• This optical illusion is not particularly mysterious in my opinion, but very effective.

A couple of more personal items:

• From my graphic design work: this public talk advertisement is not entirely my own, but does contain some of my contributions.
• Via Pam Marlow, I have a personal connection to the creators of this iPhone app, an Australian phonics training tool for English learners. (Free version here.) I don’t have an iPhone, so I haven’t actually seen it in action.

From after I got back, but before I’d caught up:

• Movie clips reconstructed from the brains of people who watched them.
• The recent sequencing of an Aboriginal genome is an important puzzle piece in understanding humanity’s spread across the globe.
• Miracle fruit. Something I’d never heard of before.
• Springtails and the scientific marvel which is their skin.
• Measurements of deuterium confirm the theory that our oceans come from comets.
• Some delightful dog puppetry.

That will do.

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