Wikipedia: Interesting Articles and Stories from Wiki Trawling.

[Caeli]

I'm sure I'm not the only one who has looked up information on Wikipedia for one reason or another, and in the course of reading through the article, click on another link of interest. And then it happens for the next article. And the next article.

And then one hour later, you find yourself reading about the Teller-Ulam design, when you actually started out reading about the Matsudaira samurai clan.

This article is for sharing those interesting articles or stories of what you discover while surfing through Wikipedia.



I actually found this article (What Night Sky Photographs Will Look Like Over The Next 7 Billion Years) from one of the Tumblrs that I follow.

A bit more Wiki-ing and searching led me to this timeline of the far future and Milkomeda, or the Andromeda-Milky Way collision that is predicted to occur in approximately 4 billion years.

A chance search on Youtube brought up this beautiful simulation of the collision:

Galaxy Collision- The Milky Way vs Andromeda!

And if GIFs don't make your head spin, here is the video collapsed into 5 seconds.

[gaggedLouise]

Wow, that looks stunning - too bad the earth will long since have become an inhabitable, waterless desert by the time Andromeda knocks on the door. The strength of the sun is slowly rising, and in about one or two billion years (long before it actually becomes a red giant) the heat will have ripped out the oceans and destroyed any kind of biological life of the kind we know today. Well, by that time some other things may have changed too...

One very cool bit I came across through WP - or rather, wiki enabled me to find my way further after a chance encounter with a single photo - is the man who produced hundreds of early colour photographs of Russia, both European Russia and its central Asian provinces, a hundred years ago:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prokudin-Gorski 

I stumbled on his work looking for pictures from the Transsiberian railway. There was a good one of a steel bridge on rock-and-brick piers spanning a river, but what got me hooked was the date: 1914! Yes, there were colour pics that early on, even commercial ones. My grandparents had a big photo/postcards album that had come down in the family with hundreds of cards from mostly the U.S. and Scandinavia: they had been sent to and fro between my great-great-grandmother, who spent a couple years in the midwest before the first world war before she returned to Sweden, and some of her friends and relatives. Many of those cards had actual colour photos frontside and their quality struck me at once. At a glance they looked just like any colour pic taken fifty years later. They were achieved by taking three pictures in quick succession, with different colour filters, and then printing from them together - it's too slow to show people in movement with 100% success but it works great for images of buildings, parks, ceremonies and countryside. - Anyway, the pic of the railway bridge had a note about who had photographed it,.so I headed to Wikipedia and found their article about him; it explains his technique, too. His photographs are just amazing, and after they'd been forgotten they have been carefully restored in recent years. If like me you're interested in Russia and in the world before WW1, it's a treasure trove. There are several collections of his pics online, some listed in the WP article and these two could be singled out at once:

http://www.photographium.com/prokudin-gorskii-collection

Library of Congress: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/prok/

and also this blog post gives a very enticing stash of his pictures. The one of the island monastery with all the gleaming cupolas just looks like something out of a fairy-story. I wonder if it's still there? 

(edit seven hours later: yes, apparently it's still standing and once again a monastery!)

[Caeli]

Wow, that looks stunning - too bad the earth will long since have become an inhabitable, waterless desert by the time Andromeda knocks on the door. The strength of the sun is slowly rising, and in about one or two billion years (long before it actually becomes a red giant) the heat will have ripped out the oceans and destroyed any kind of biological life of the kind we know today. Well, by that time some other things may have changed too...

Call me a dreamer (and you're also welcome to attribute this to my lack of knowledge about space travel and life in space in general), but perhaps it will be possible by then to inhabit other planets in this system. Of course, the view will be different - but wow, it would be amazing to witness this collision as it happened.

One very cool bit I came across through WP - or rather, wiki enabled me to find my way further after a chance encounter with a single photo - is the man who produced hundreds of early colour photographs of Russia, both European Russia and its central Asian provinces, a hundred years ago:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prokudin-Gorski

...

Thank you so much for sharing this, Louise. Those photographs are stunning.

Like you said, looking at these photographs is almost like stepping into a time machine.

[gaggedLouise]

Call me a dreamer (and you're also welcome to attribute this to my lack of knowledge about space travel and life in space in general), but perhaps it will be possible by then to inhabit other planets in this system. Of course, the view will be different - but wow, it would be amazing to witness this collision as it happened.

I'd say that if we got any live descendants in four billion years - or even forty million years - they'll probably have colonized planets around other stars. So in the words of Patrick Moore "by that time we shall be somewhere else"...

[Callie Del Noire]

I'd say that if we got any live descendants in four billion years - or even forty million years - they'll probably have colonized planets around other stars. So in the words of Patrick Moore "by that time we shall be somewhere else"...

Depends that is on if we simply don't build the entire solar system into a Shkadov thruster and go sailing off.  Stumbled on the planetary and solar system scale megastructures after reading, believe it or not, an Atomic Robo comic.  (the big bad was a Turing Engine AI built by Alan Turing who projected the extinction of humanity by 2035 and was planing on building several megastructures after it left earth. )

Some of the structures are quite impressive. In concept AND scale.

[Caeli]

Thank you to Oniya for linking the article below in a thread about The Game.

I didn't even realize that this pattern of behavior had a name: ironic process theory.

Not much to comment about it, but I love reading articles and books about psychology, so finding this was my reading gem of the day!

I didn't get too far away from the original article this time, though I did manage to make it to an article about catch-22 situations before I forced myself to stop.

[Caeli]

Seeing an interesting infographic on Tumblr prompted me to look up the triangular theory of love developed by Robert Sternberg. It made for some interesting reading.

[Caeli]

At work, an issue happened in Copenhagen led me to turn to Google for a spell check for the city name, and this page about The Little Mermaid statue came up as one of the city's points of interest in Google. The Mermaid falls into a category of iconic statues that cities have come to regard as mascots, or as embodiments of the spirit of a place.

It has been a major tourist attraction since 1913.



Not only that (or maybe because of that?), but the statue has also been a popular target of defacement by vandals and political activists since the 1960s. The head has been decapitated or has been the target of an attempt at decapitation multiple times, and the statue itself has actually been blown off the base once. It has also been draped in a burqa, Muslim dress, and a head scarf, and has been covered in paint more than once.