The Canadian government announced yesterday that it had discovered one of the lost ships from Franklin’s Expedition, the British Arctic exploration voyage led by Captain Sir John Franklin that disappeared in the 1840s. While it is still unknown whether the shipwreck is that of HMS Erebus or HMS Terror, it is pretty clear that one of the two vessels has been found by an remotely operated underwater vehicle using side-scan sonar.
Continue reading “Another maritime mystery closer to being solved”
Regular readers will know that I use the Free section on Craigslist to amuse myself. As today is a sort of vacation day for me, I popped over there just now to see if there was anything funny worth tweeting. I found something absolutely totally and completely NOT worth tweeting. It was so awful, especially in light of all of the horrible racist atrocities happening in Ferguson, MO and elsewhere right now, that it merited its own blog post.
What could possibly be that bad you might ask? I’ll show you. Be prepared.
a fairly sizable asteroid has been spotted on a trajectory that gives it a fairly decent chance (about 1 in 4,000) of striking the Earth. That is actually better odds than the chance you will get killed in a traffic accident any time you get in a car (1 in 6,700). At one point the odds were actually being calculated at 1 in 300. So this particular object has raised a few eyebrows, to put it mildly. Enough that some people think it would be time to call the drilling crew together. Or something.
Kelly and I were dumbstruck when we heard that Robin Williams died.
And we are not alone. Our fellow Bostonians have spontaneously created a memorial to him in the Public Garden, on and around the bench where he sat during one of the most pivotal scenes in the movie Good Will Hunting.
The 16th century Swedish shipwreck Mars the Magnificent will now be explored thanks to a grant by the National Geographic Society. Like similar wrecks (the Vasa comes to mind immediately) the wreck of the Mars is expected to yield all sorts of artifacts and give historians and archaeologists a detailed view of what is a fairly famous ship in the history of Sweden.
Continue reading “Well-preserved wreck in Baltic Sea to be explored”
Somerville, formerly known as “Slummerville” has the most artists per-capita of any city in the US second only to NYC. That’s not bad considering Somerville is a suburb of Boston (though functionally it is as much a part of Boston as Cambridge.)
If you’re a resident of Somerville, if you work in the ‘ville, or if you make art, play in a band there, or spend a lot of time doing Somerville related things, this post is for you. (If not, you should read it anyway, it’s about communities and people working together.)
Continue reading “Live, Work, or Play in Somerville? Wanna be on TV?”
Feminism does not exist because women want special treatment or special rights. It exists because even after nearly a century of suffrage and other societal reforms, women still do not have a truly equal position in our society. Not an opinion, fact. There are still a lot of people out there convinced that women should not have any roles in society outside the kitchen or the bedroom: they shouldn’t vote or run for office; that they shouldn’t be in the military or serve in combat; that they shouldn’t get an education; that they shouldn’t be single mothers; they they shouldn’t be able to practice birth control; that they shouldn’t be in the workplace, much less executives or political leaders; and that they should always be subservient to men.
Go ahead, Google any of these ideas and concepts I just listed and see what you find. See the kinds of people defending these ideas. Be prepared to turn over a few rocks and see what’s underneath.
I don’t recommend doing it on a full stomach.
Any of you people reading this blog, please go read this magnificent commentary in the Daily Beast by Arthur Chu (a fellow geek and historian famous for his Jeopardy appearances). It says so much that I could not possibly put into words myself, especially touching on the horrible event on that college campus in California and some of the strikingly awful responses to it generated by people who are overwhelmingly white, male, and angry, not to mention misogynistic on a scale that is literally hard for me to even comprehend.
If you are a nerd, and especially if you are a male nerd, you really must read it.
Continue reading “Please, please read this Arthur Chu piece on “misogyny, entitlement and nerds””
A recording of J. R. R. Tolkien made at a “Hobbit Dinner” in the Netherlands in 1958 is going to be remastered and released later this year.
Wow. Just… wow.
I love the idea of Tolkien himself attending a feast inspired by his own writings. Makes me think of how Sariann and Chelsea did something similar with GRRM when he came to Boston for his book tour. I also love that Tolkien was apparently delighted by the whole thing and really enjoyed himself (as did GRRM). As a huge fan of Tolkien and GRRM and of creating food inspired by fantasy books, I can hardly wait to hear the whole recording.
It also makes me a little sad that I never had the opportunity to meet Tolkien, this warm, brilliant, remarkable man, before he passed away. I was only a toddler when he died. But I am hopeful for the opportunity that perhaps one day I will have the chance to meet George R.R. Martin. Maybe on his book tour for The Winds of Winter.
-Geoff
Yes, I guess you could say that geology is a hobby of ours. There are certainly some aspects of geology that interest me more than others, just as there are some that interest Kelly more. And one of the things about geology that really really interests me is studying impact craters, and there have been some interesting developments in recent weeks.
