A good overview of the use, battling and development of naval vessel from around the world.
Interesting tidbit: Original night telescopes showed the image upside-down because the extra lens needed to flip the image would degrade the image too much.
Blog
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Mark Earls and Alex Bentley: I’ll Have What She’s Having: Mapping social behaviour
Remarkably, humans generally spend their lifetimes mimicking others. Even when we are adults and think that we are making our own “big” choices when we are still generally following social cues.
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Susan Cain: The power of introverts
Cain challenges us to respect the power of introverts instead of expecting or worse, pushing, them to be extroverts.
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The Epic of Gilgamesh
I was recently watching some old Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes and watched a highly acclaimed (though not particularly liked by me) episode called “Darmok”. In this episode, Darmok (the alien) is trying to teach Picard how to converse. Darmok’s people use stories to communicate everything which makes it very difficult for Picard to understand because the stories mean nothing to him. To overcome this, they tell each other cultural stories:
I used to hate this episode… then Picard mentioned Gilgamesh. Then I read several versions of The Epic of Gilgamesh. Then I decided that this episode was alright. -
Thoughts on dinosaurs
Do you remember that part in Jurassic Park when the little boy is teasing Dr. Grant about his book not being very thick? Then the doctor’s wife chimes in, “Yours was fully illustrated.” I love illustrated books (mostly anyway, some things should just be left to the imagination). Especially if they are about something really cool like dinosaurs.
I guess I am still on a dinosaur kick. I have two more thoughts on the subject.
One should always catch on dinosaur reading before trying to answer questions about them. A lot has changed in the past decade alone. Things that used to be considered “wild speculation” about them are now taught as fact. Brontosaur and apatosaurus are the same thing… Birds are dinosaurs… Dinosaurs were killed by a meteor… We know some of their colors…
Second, I am still not sure which is more terrifying:
The giant velociraptors that Jurassic Park wrongly depicts (Based of the size, I think they were actually showing deinonychus:
4-5 foot tall deinonychus 
2-3 foot tall velociraptor but who I am to question Steven Spielberg. Graphics from Wikipedia.org)
Or… that velociraptors were covered in feathers, vastly improving their jumping capabilities.