Friday links from Chisinau!

 

Random Friday links from Moldova, for the first time ever!

I absolutely love this graphic.  It's the kind of thing that could never have worked in a book.  (A poster, maybe.  But I don't think anyone ever did one.)  When I get home, I want to show it to the boys.

This post asks a really interesting question: Is it an accident that Earth's oceans almost exactly fill Earth's ocean basins?  Or is there some underlying reason?  -- Apparently Earth's mantle contains a lot of water, dissolved in the hot rock.  "A lot" being somewhere between about half as much and several times as much as is found in all the oceans.  If all that water were out on the surface, there might not be much land.  But this hasn't happened.  Accident?

David asked me whether sharks could come into rivers.  The answer is, yes and yes.  That is, there's at least one species of shark -- the bull shark -- that tolerates fresh water pretty well, and that can swim quite far inland.  Bull sharks can grow big and can get fairly aggressive, so they can attack people hundreds of miles up a river.  But!  There are also actual river sharks, which spend all their lives in fresh water.  But they're rare, shy, and cryptic, and not much is known about them.  There are several species, none of which are well documented, and some of which are known from just one single specimen.

Last week I posted this link (long!) about the British Libertarian Party on Facebook.  Old friend Vlatko Juric-Kokic of Croatia said that it reminded him of Ostap Bendery.  I said, who?  and went off to look it up.  One doesn't generally associate the Stalinist period with light, fun, satirical literature.  There's The Master and Margarita, which is satirical, but I wouldn't call it light or fun -- and it didn't get published in Russia until the 1970s.  Ilif and Petrov were bestsellers under Stalin.  Also, they went on an American road trip.  Go figure.

This is a very depressing link.  Carlos sent it to me.  Not everything from Carlos is depressing as hell, but this is.  It's history, and history is always interesting, but... if you're feeling a little blue already, don't click.  Seriously.  Skip to the next link.

The next link: this is my two-year-old daughter's absolute favorite video clip.  (It's the tail that does it for me.  He knows he's being messed with, but he can't help himself.)

 

Comments

[Peter]

The rabbits-in-Auschwitz link is so ... surrealistic that it isn't truly depressing.

Peter

[Bruce]

Huh. River sharks. Learn something new every day...

Stephen Baxter's "Flood" stories are based on the premise that the water does get out of the mantle somehow.

The heights-to-depths graphic is quite cool, but I think it would be improved by adding a picture or two of deep ocean life: as it is, one would get the impression there isn't any below 16,000 feet.

[Tony Zbaraschuk]

Interesting, particularly the big graphic.

[Stephanie]

That cat, oh my god, my girls were howling!!!!

[seinean]

And one more link:

http://www.timpul.md/articol/familia-muir-o-mini-europa-intr-un-chisinau-ce-se-vrea-european-23087.html

Making news in "Timpul" !