A weekly collection of links lovingly curated by Colin Wright.
Building Telescopes On the Moon Is Becoming An Achievable Goal
“The lunar far side is permanently shielded from the radio signals generated by humans on Earth. During the lunar night, it is also protected from the Sun. These characteristics make it probably the most “radio-quiet” location in the whole solar system, as no other planet or moon has a side that permanently faces away from the Earth. It is, therefore, ideally suited for radio astronomy.”
The Stories of Art History’s Detectives
“Provenance researchers like McAlpine try to uncover information about who owned artworks. While a piece by a 20th-century artist will often come with enough information from artist and dealer archives to tell a researcher exactly where it has been since leaving the studio, older objects often present much harder puzzles. The provenance researcher must be a detective — reading in multiple languages, consulting known sources and locating new ones, and figuring out alternative ways to get at information that auction houses, museums, private collectors, and other major participants in the trade are still all too often unwilling to disclose. ”
The Ancient Order of Bali
“But whenever he came across one particular type of temple—namely the pura tirta, or water temples—these conversations veered off in an unexpected direction. Local farmers batted away questions about myths and rituals and suchlike, and started talking about rice: rice yields, rice pests, rice irrigation. And the farmers weren’t happy. Crops were failing and their livelihoods were under threat. Something was going wrong in their rice terraces, and it was somehow connected to the temples. Lansing knew that the government had recently started to impose Green Revolution changes on the island’s farmers—and an idea was germinating.”
Online Sports Betting In South Asia Has a New Target: Archery
“Every day at 3 p.m., Bankur Goswami’s phone starts buzzing nonstop with payment alerts. These money transfers — that come through apps like Google Pay, Paytm, or WhatsApp — are for betting on teer, an archery game popular in India’s northeastern state of Meghalaya. Goswami is one of around 5,000 licensed teer bookies in Meghalaya, and has been in the business for over 25 years.”
This Evolving 3,000-Mile-Long Park Is Already Improving Cities Along Its Path
“The American Tobacco Trail is just one small stretch of the East Coast Greenway, an evolving network of trails from Calais, Maine down to Key West, Florida. Project leaders at the East Coast Greenway Alliance have been working since 1991 to stitch them together and create new greenways with the goal of establishing a car-free, 3,000-mile route for walking and biking. The Durham Belt Line will add about two more connecting miles to the Greenway’s remaining 2,000 miles. Although it’s a fraction of the path’s full Eastern Seaboard-spanning journey, it will be a critical car-free route for Durham residents on a daily basis.”
Your Robotic Avatar Is Almost Ready
“A robotic avatar system is similar to virtual reality, in that both allow a person located in one place to experience and interact with a different place using technology as an interface. Like VR, an effective robotic avatar enables the user to see, hear, touch, move, and communicate in such a way that they feel like they’re actually somewhere else. But where VR puts a human into a virtual environment, a robotic avatar brings a human into a physical environment, which could be in the next room or thousands of kilometers away.”
Apocalypse Sow: Can Anything Stop the Feral Hog Invasion?
“Even in our carefully ordered world, there remain avenues for chaos to thrive in its purest form: the wild pig. Groups of them, called sounders, cavort across golf courses at night like drunken teenagers. Security cameras catch them careering through suburban neighborhoods, where they dig up gardens and lawns. They create shambolic crop circles in fields—Texas’s agriculture industry alone suffers $118.8 million in damages annually. The most recent estimates suggest that tens of thousands of them are involved in car accidents each year. They affront us even in death, vandalizing graves as they barrel through cemeteries.”
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