- 16,500 year old cemetery reveals the pets we kept before dogs
- [io9 - Alasdair Wilkins]
A burial site recently uncovered in Jordan is the oldest ever discovered in the Middle East, at least 1,500 years older than any other cemetery previously discovered. But it's not just its great age that makes it special – the cemetery also reveals what animals humans kept as pets long before the domestication of dogs.
- Neil Gaiman’s 1994 safe sex PSA starring Death from Sandman and John Constantine
- [io9 - Cyriaque Lamar]
In 1994, Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean of Sandman created this HIV awareness PSA comic designed for a high school readership. The comic starred everyone's favorite goth anthropomorphic depiction of Death, an abashed John Constantine, and a banana.
[Hahaha, I remember this. Good times. -L]
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- Hugs Obey the Three-Second Rule
- With the help of an independent observer, Nagy observed over 188 hugs during the 2008 Olympics. From this, she concluded that, on average, hugs last about three seconds.
Apparently this fits a larger pattern, with three seconds as a “basic temporal unit.” As surprising as this information is, it’s apparently not all that new.
…Nagy and others take this a step further, saying that three seconds might be key to our understanding of “now-ness.”
- Path dependency: why we still use rockets
- [Futurismic - Paul Raven]
Very interesting piece by ubergeek Neal Stephenson over at Slate, where he wonders why it is that we’re still stuck in the rocket paradigm of space launch tech. In two words: path dependency…
It’s this sort of thinking that makes Stephenson’s novels so fascinating to me…
A fascinating and provocative read: go see the whole thing.
- Rule of Cuteness #48 Tiny Tongues are Cute
- [Cute Overload - Meg]
[In case it needs to be said: I don't agree with every word of everything I link to. Signal boosts are awesome! --L.]
The Of interest (Thu, Feb 3rd, 4pm) by Lee Salazar, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at leesalazar.com.