Try to Find New Island on a Map: You Can’t, Even Though People Have Lived There for 43,500 Years…
Sounds to me like where Lost takes place. Fascinating story from Annalee Newitz on io9.com:
You can’t find New Island on most maps of the Indian Ocean because its location was a secret for most of the twentieth century. But now one man has chronicled the long, strange history of its ancient inhabitants.
The ruins you see here come from a group known locally as the “Old People,” who probably started living on the island 43,500 years ago. In the modern age, the island was discovered in the late eighteenth century by two convict ships that crashed there on the way to Australia. One of those ships was filled with hundreds of female convicts, who eventually founded their own civilization on the island, based on sexual equality and paganism. Today the island is…
The 7 Somewhat United States of Facebook
Interesting post from Mathew Ingram on GigaOM. He focuses more on the social mobility patterns of various parts of the U.S., but if you look at the source blog Ingram refers to (PeteSearch), you’ll see a quick discussion of some social and cultural patterns he observed with Facebook data. He noted what regions of the country where God tops a Facebooker’s Fan Page, his conclusions are interesting, but no surprise…
So I learned that God actually has a Facebook Fan Page. But only 3.2 millions fans?
There’s another Facebook page calling for 100 Million Christians Who Worship God that’s reached 1 percent of its goal. In all fairness, I’m sure if I poked around more and took the aggregate number of fans from all the “God Fan” Pages that exist, there would be plenty … however, would be interesting to see how much religious diversity exists on Facebook.
Mathew Ingram writes on GigaOM:
Peter Warden, a former Apple engineer, likes to analyze data — so much so that he started scraping public profiles and photos from hundreds of millions of Facebook accounts about a year ago, and now has data collected from more than 200 million around the world. He wrote a fascinating post recently on his personal blog about what that data shows about how interconnected (or disconnected) users in the various American states are.
For $65, Tourists Get Peek at Los Angeles Gangland
SFGate reports:
Only miles from the scenic vistas and celebrity mansions that draw sightseers from around the globe — but a world away from the glitz and glamour — a bus tour is rolling through the dark side of the city’s gang turf.
Passengers paying $65 a head Saturday signed waivers acknowledging they could be crime victims and put their fate in the hands of tattooed ex-gang members who say they have negotiated a cease-fire among rivals in the most violent gangland in America.
Mexico’s Crystal Cave: The Deadliest Place On Earth?
Wondering where the deadliest place on Earth is? It could be Mexico’s Cueva de los Cristales. It’s an underground palace of glittering crystal where the temperature hovers in the 120s and the humidity is 100% — a combination “so deadly that even with respirators and suits of ice you can only survive for 20 minutes before your body starts to fail.”
Originally discovered by accident by miners tunneling deep into the earth, the Cave looks like something out of a Jules Verne story. Explorer Paul Williams went there to shoot footage for a BBC special and posted the resulting photos on his blog.
