Discoveries

“From next year the heavily contaminated area around the Chernobyl power plant will be officially open to tourists with an interest in post-apocalyptic vistas, late-period Soviet history, or both. […] Ukraine’s emergency situations ministry said today that visitors would be offered tours inside the 30-mile exclusion zone set up after reactor four at the plant exploded on 26 April 1986, showering northern Europe in radioactive fallout. […] While the area remains heavily contaminated, a ministry spokeswoman said, tourism routes had been drawn up which would cover the main sights while steering clear of the dangerous spots.”

See also: Tarkovsky’s incredible film Stalker: “…a tiny town on the outskirts of the Zone, a wilderness area which has been cordoned off by the government. The film’s main character, the Stalker, works as a guide to bring people in and out of the Zone, to ‘the Room’, which is said to grant the deepest, innermost wishes of anyone who steps inside. Residual effects of an undefined previous occurrence have transformed an otherwise mundane rural area scattered with ruined buildings into an area where the normal laws of physics no longer apply.” Wikipedia

“Now of all the things presented for the inspection of that faithful servant of the public, the museum curator, the most romantic, and the least likely to be true, is ambergris. I say inspection, because identification is preconceived in the mind of the finder. His treasure, stumbled upon along the sea beach, recognized with the sudden surmise that dawns like knowledge from a previous incarnation, is encountered where ambergris belongs; it looks, and feels, and smells as ambergris should and, since it bears no resemblance to anything familiar, it follows that riches are already within his grasp.”

“Somebody decided to make the world just a little bit more interesting, and three red swings appeared on the BART Public Transit System in San Francisco for the public to enjoy.”

“Recontextualizing the 10-point type of a scientific report published in 1870, Shinn has produced sleekly refined, micro-detailed vector drawings by eye, without the assistance of scans, thus presenting an ironic critique of the way in which mechanical imagery beguiles us with the trite veracity of simulacra.”

“Very little of the world’s land can now be thought of as inaccessible, according to a new map of connectedness. The maps are based on a model which calculated how long it would take to travel to the nearest city of 50,000 or more people by land or water. […] Less than 10% of the world’s land is more than 48 hours of ground-based travel from the nearest city.”

“The problem goes back more than a decade, to the mid-1990s, when Brazilian radio technicians discovered they could jump on the UHF frequencies dedicated to satellites in the Navy’s Fleet Satellite Communication system, or FLTSATCOM” … “Nearly illiterate men rigged a radio in less than one minute, rolling wire on a coil.”

A beautiful, mesmerizing video about the Faraday-encaged linemen of the sky. Please do watch it.