looking and trying to see

Twitter is getting bigger:

Internet marketing company HubSpot, in a “State of the Twittersphere” report, said 70 percent of the estimated four to five million people using Twitter have signed up in 2008 and 20 percent have joined in the last 60 days.

It said the average user has been on the real-time short-messaging service for about 275 days.

(via PhysOrg.com)

Charlotte Higgins has a good piece about Herodotus in the culture section of The Guardian:

[Herodotus] was written off by Thucydides, who poured scorn on what he characterises as Herodotus’s fanciful, romantic view of the world.  The criticism stuck. Herodotus’s account of the Persian wars of 481-479BC takes six books out of nine (or 300-odd pages of Robin Waterfield’s excellent English translation) even to begin on the Battle of Marathon; for many it is a rambling, rather disappointing try-out for the academic discipline that history would later become.

And what nonsense he includes.  Along the way we have a bearded priestess; a description of the embalming techniques of the Egyptians; a great number of mouthy women (including Atossa, the wife of Darius, whose pillow talk is supposed to have convinced the Persian king to turn his attention towards a Greek conquest); and the curious giant ants of India, bigger than foxes but smaller than dogs, who tunnel deep underground to harvest gold.  That’s not to mention the steppe-dwelling Scythians, who wear coats made from human scalps; the musician Arion, whose life is saved by a dolphin; and the sheep of Arabia, whose tails are so long they drag them on little carts.

Higgins has also written a post on her blog about the “gossipy” historian, restating her argument that in these times of “uncertainty and anxiety”, there is much we to be learned from Herodotus.  The works of Herodotus can be found in electronic form on Manybooks.net, if you fancy taking a look (I’m interested in the curious ants and the scalp-wearing Scythians, and will be looking imminently).

The Astronomy Picture of the Day for the 29th of December is a marvel:

Here is the caption from the APOD page:

Grand spiral galaxies often seem to get all the glory, flaunting their young, bright, blue star clusters in beautiful, symmetric spiral arms. But small, irregular galaxies form stars too.  In fact, as pictured here, dwarf galaxy NGC 1569 is apparently undergoing a burst of star forming activity, thought to have begun over 25 million years ago.  The resulting turbulent environment is fed by supernova explosions as the cosmic detonations spew out material and trigger further star formation.  Two massive star clusters - youthful counterparts to globular star clusters in our own spiral Milky Way galaxy - are seen left of center in the gorgeous Hubble Space Telescope image.  The above picture spans about 8,000 light-years across NGC 1569.  A mere 11 million light-years distant, this relatively close starburst galaxy offers astronomers an excellent opportunity to study stellar populations in rapidly evolving galaxies.  NGC 1569 lies in the long-necked constellation Camelopardalis.

I’m becoming fascinated with the history of Kilwa Kisiwani:

Documentary evidence suggests that [Kilwa Kisiwani] was established in the 11th century with the spread of Shirazi Islam along the East African coast.  Conceived and propagated by descendants of Pastoral-Cushitic settlers of the East African northern coast, Shirazi Islam was an East African variant of the Middle Eastern Islam, and it provided the basis for the formation of Swahili culture.

These two photographs come from an article entitled ‘Misikiti ya Zanzibar’:

There’s some good background information on the place and its history on Wikipedia, in the archaeology section of About.com, on the official UNESCO site, and on the unofficial, but useful, World Heritage Site. If you know of any interesting articles or essays on the subject, let me know: I want to find out more.

One day I’d like to visit Pantanal, a tropical wetland spread across Brazil, Bolivia, and Paraguay.  This is a photograph by Joel Sartore of a freshwater stingray living in part of this massive, beautiful ecosystem:

I found the image in ‘Brazil’s Wild Wet’, an interesting (albeit brief) article on the National Geographic website.  You can find some more information about the Pantanal wetlands here and here.

The two portraits above (portraits of Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, respectively) were taken by Eliot Elisofon, a photographer I first encountered while searching for photographs of Africa in the Life Magazine photo archive that is currently being hosted by Google.  If you’re interested in finding out more about Elisofon, there is an extensive biographical sketch and a lengthy introductory essay on the website of the Harry Ransom Center.

I found the two photographs above in High in Shangrila, a series on Flickr by a photographer known only as foxbox.  Not all of the photographs are good, and the series doesn’t seem to have been structured to tell any particular story, but there are enough gems, and enough variety, to make browsing worth the effort, if you have the time.

I like this song:

This is wonderful:

For more than 50 years, NORAD and its predecessor, the Continental Air Defense Command (CONAD) have tracked Santa’s Christmas Eve flight.

The tradition began in 1955 after a Colorado Springs-based Sears Roebuck & Co. advertisement for children to call Santa misprinted the telephone number.  Instead of reaching Santa, the phone number put kids through to the CONAD Commander-in-Chief’s operations “hotline.”  The Director of Operations at the time, Colonel Harry Shoup, had his staff check radar for indications of Santa making his way south from the North Pole.  Children who called were given updates on his location, and a tradition was born.  To listen to Colonel Shoup talk about the experience, click here.

In 1958, the governments of Canada and the United States created a bi-national air defense command for North America called the North American Aerospace Defense Command, also known as NORAD.  NORAD inherited the tradition of tracking Santa.

Since that time, NORAD men, women, family and friends have selflessly volunteered their time to personally respond to Christmas Eve phone calls and emails from children.  In addition, we now track Santa using the internet.  Last year, millions of people who wanted to know Santa’s whereabouts visited the NORAD Tracks Santa website.

Finally, media from all over the world rely on NORAD as a trusted source to provide Christmas Eve updates on Santa’s journey.

I hope everyone gets a visit from Santa this year.

In his ‘A Year in Reading’ piece for The Millions, Jim Shepard recommends a book (well, two books really; or, most accurately, perhaps, one book spread over two volumes) I think I’d enjoy reading:

2007-2008 was announced to be the International Polar Year, or something like that, and we might as well have done what we could to celebrate, given that, as Elizabeth Kolbert pointed out in her introduction to The Ends of the Earth (Volume 1: The Arctic) the polar regions are being wiped off the planet, and given that when they go, they’re going to take our status quo with them.  Volume 2 is The Antarctic, edited by Francis Spufford, and together they’re a very cool anthology, top-heavy on just that combination I love: misery and awe.  The whole thing ended up leaving me open-mouthed with its jaw-dropping early explorers’ accounts of otherworldly spectacle and suffering.  What’s not to like in a collection that includes Ernest Shackleton, Robert Falcon Scott, H. P. Lovecraft, Andrea Barrett, Barry Lopez, and Tete-Michel Kpomassie?

Julian Gough, a writer I’ve not previously encountered, has written an excellent piece for Prospect about Clive James, a writer I’ve encountered innumerable times in both print and on the radio. It’s worth a read.  (And if you’ve never read James, I’d recommend giving him a try.)

I find that I sink into the photographs of Eris Yo: they don’t so much have an effect on me, in the instant I see them, as affect me, slowly and potently; and they more often than not require second and third viewings.

Here are two photographs of hers I sank into today while drafting this post:

She has a Flickr photostream, a website, and a blog.

(via headingeast)