Monday Links from the Gap Between Teams Meetings vol. DCCLXI

[NickFitz]

It's getting hot out, so you probably want to settle back indoors next to a big fan and read this lot instead - if I can get it to post

• Emma Carey: The skydiver who survived a 14,000-foot fall - ”She glides through the streets of Denver on a steaming summer day last July telling her remarkable life story. There's a little bit of a hitch in her gait, where her legs are just a tad mechanical going up and down. But it's not even noticeable… In June 2013, Carey went skydiving for the first time and fell 14,000 feet out of a helicopter into an empty cow pasture in Switzerland, with two tangled parachutes and her instructor passed out on her back.” Remarkably, the instructor also survived
• Coal’s importance for solar panel manufacturing - HT to DoctorStrangelove for this: ”Coal is not the favorite ‘child’ these days. It seems that almost the entire western political world has sworn to send coal to its grave… So why are coal and solar so closely interlinked? Why is it that solar panel manufacturing is impossible without coal?”
• Chimpanzees gesture back and forth quickly like in human conversations - ”When people are having a conversation, they rapidly take turns speaking and sometimes even interrupt. Now, researchers who have collected the largest ever dataset of chimpanzee ‘conversations’ have found that they communicate back and forth using gestures following the same rapid-fire pattern.” The full paper is Chimpanzee gestural exchanges share temporal structure with human language. Remember, chimps are people too!
• Miracle Plant Used in Ancient Greece Rediscovered After 2,000 Years - ”The ‘miracle’ plant Silphium consumed by Ancient Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians, which was thought to have become extinct two thousand years ago, has recently been rediscovered in Turkey by a professor, who thinks he’s found a botanical survivor.”
• The Watershed Pollution Map - ”Wondering what’s in your water? Now you can find out. The Watershed Pollution Map reveals a huge range of potential pollution sources that can harm rivers, lakes, groundwater, coasts and more.” Look like my long-standing policy of not falling in the local river (again) has a sound basis
• ‘We pledged not to eat each other’: the family that was shipwrecked for 38 days - ”In 1972, while travelling the world, the Robertsons’ boat was attacked by whales. They found themselves adrift for weeks on a tiny raft, forced to drink turtle blood, kill sharks and use enemas to stay hydrated, while fighting for their lives.” I quite liked the idea of sailing the seven seas when I was young, but here’s yet another reminder that I’m better off staying at home and reading Arthur Ransome instead
• The Big Board - Alex Wellerstein on the maps made to show the end of the world, in movies and in reality: ”Last week, I took a look the War Room set from Stanley Kubrick’s classic, Dr. Strangelove, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). One of the great features of production designer Ken Adam’s set is The Big Board, the massive maps that show the progress of American bombers on their ill-fated attack run… It’s justly a classic set piece, and allows the characters (and the audience) to vividly see the scope of what they are up against.”
• The philosophical genius of P.G. Wodehouse - ”Although P.G. Wodehouse's books were comical, they were far from frivolous. He displays a deep appreciation of serious philosophical questions around human agency, fate and the existence of free will.” Best steer clear of Nietzsche, as Jeeves advises
• How 1950s bombsites in the UK were turned into adventure playgrounds - ”In 1944, Marie Paneth, an Austrian-born art therapist, imagined a scheme whereby London’s bombsites would be used by local children for building huts and caves and for growing vegetables which they could then sell. Paneth saw the children as the future landlords of these damaged grounds, with minimal adult intervention.” There were still a lot of “bombies” around the centre of Liverpool when I was a kid in the 1960s, though it was hard to tell the difference between them and the areas where the slums had been cleared
• How The Beatles’ London looks today: 60 years of A Hard Day’s Night - ”We went in search of the swinging London locations featured in The Beatles’ pop movie milestone A Hard Day’s Night.” They wouldn’t have run past if there’d been a Greggs in Marylebone back then
  
  

Happy invoicing!

[NickFitz]

Bonus Beatles at the BFI: A Hard Day’s Night at 60: how The Beatles made the movies pop

[eek]

Marylebone was always used as a film location as it's limited services (at the time High Wycombe / Aylesbury / Banbury) meant it was available for filming in ways no other station was.

And looking at the view in that photo all that space is completely dead space apart from Shops and an exit at the far end to the original Underground station entrance (which was moved when escalators were installed replacing the lifts). There is a Travelodge there now (it's not bad and the Landmark does a very good breakfast provided you are vaguely smart).