Links from a long journey

I realised the other day that when I was using posterous as a blogging engine I posted a lot more links to things I found interesting. This was mostly because posterous made it really easy to include paragraphs or images from the linked to page. Now I am using telegr.am I have to put in the extra effort to write a post. And apparently I’m too lazy to do that.

Yesterday, I spent 11+ hours on trains/replacement bus service, and so had plenty of time to catch up on my instapaper backlog. I thought it might be interesting to post some of the articles I shared via my twitter account, or via email to specific people. They cover all sorts of topics, from crafting, through science to cartography. But, here goes :

• “Most people have jobs where they are part of a machine, but they never see the beginning, the middle and the end and take responsibility for the whole thing. With knitting, you start something, sort out the problems and finish it. There is a great sense of achievement.” from Granny skills help revival of wool industry

• “Appreciating what we have, be it things, time or the people around us, is definitely a better way to live” from Over-Wired Americans Are Richer Than They Realize

• “never forget that pixels don’t care” from Pixel’s don’t care via styledeficit bits and bobs

• “Their goal is a system that will safely store the equivalent of one million CDs in a gram of DNA for 10,000 years.” from A Conversation with Nick Goldman: Double Helix Serves Double Duty

• “The khipu were knotted-string devices that were used for recording both statistical and narrative information” from Wikipedia on Quipu

• “The online giant is creating thousands of UK jobs, so why are some employees less than happy?” from Amazon unpacked

• “reaching a Kickstarter funding goal only to realize that the funding can’t come close to covering your costs” from This Is Why Your Kickstarter Project Is Late

and then finally a link to an interesting podcast:

• Maps: we hear about the man who made New York a grid, find out why Swiss prefer a relief, and learn about Beirut through one of it’s first maps. I stumbled across The Urbanist via a tweet the other week, and I’m really enjoying the mixture of stories and architecture around an urban setting.

There were other articles read, but those were the highlights, and I also spent time reading The immortal life of Henrietta Lacks which so far I’m finding really interesting and for me, again so far - I’m a third of the way through it, is a good balance between story and science.

I’m not sure how often I’ll do posts like this, depends if anyone likes it I guess, or whether I find it useful to have it in blog form rather than in a twitter/email archive. But, regardless, here’s what I spent my day thinking about. That, and how much I’d like teleportation to be a thing.