This fortnight’s link roundup: ancient music, carnivorous sponges, copyright, evaluating information, and a lot more.
Arts and sciences:
- What did Babylonian music sound like? (Some links and discussion.)
- Flowers of the Sky : depictions of astronomy through history. (I found out about it via Metafilter, and for those of you in Boston, there’s a comment there from the curator of an exhibit at the Houghton Library at Harvard of the Starry Messangers exhibit that runs through early May.)
- Ira Glass on Storytelling (typographic video)
- Newly discovered animals of 2014. Carnivorous sponges! Elephant shrews (more closely related to the former than the latter.) (Note: linked post from there has pictures of bugs if you do not like that sort of thing.)
- How Good Science Turns Into Bad Reporting (This is by a friend whose commentary on other topics is also excellent: she’s planning more posts for that site about science reporting issues.)
- Being in love with a star.
- Identifying gender data in large data sets ethically and responsibly – this post lays out a number of the issues, considerations, and things to bear in mind.
- Parchment as a reservoir for next-generation gene sequencing.
Libraries and related topics:
- Io9 has a roundup of copyright and other intellectual property rights information (including some interesting bits you might not know about. As noted, don’t take it for legal advice.)
- Other sources for info besides Google (via Lifehacker)
- What could have entered the public domain this year if we were still working under the copyright laws before 1978?
- A good roundup of conversation about the Creative Commons and Flickr thing a few weeks ago.
- Foz Meadows on fanfiction.
Interesting geekery:
- A fascinating clock: What Color Is It? (I actually prefer the alternate, linked in that comment thread, here)
- 25 Apps to make your life easier, a list from the folks at TED.
- A nice overview of GMail Labs you might want to enable if you haven’t already.
- Google has tips on how to use their various tools nicely gathered in one place.
- A roundup of the best ask-the-reader posts from Ask A Manager.
- A chart of maximally contrasting colors for color coding calendars/etc.
- What happens if you download the top 10 apps on download.com
Reading and watching:
Lots of comfort reading and viewing, both. I’ve been cheerfully watching The Librarians (more on that in the near future), catching up on the most recent season of Midsomer Murders (always excellent knitting viewing) and rereading various old Barbara Michaels books because I find them soothing.
