3D maps of all London Underground tube stations
29 June 2022
Ian Mansfield has posted axonometric diagrams of every station on the London tube, or underground rail network, which were released by Transport for London.
Axonometric diagrams?
They are technically axonometric diagrams, which is 3D-like, but not to scale, which becomes obvious when you see some of the vertiginous descents offered on some stairs and escalators.
Balham station is exactly as I remember it, as is Brixton.
RELATED CONTENT
2022 Melbourne Writers Festival early line-up announcement
29 June 2022
The program for the 2022 Melbourne Writers Festival — which runs from 8 to 11 September 2022 — will be unveiled on Wednesday 27 July.
In the meantime festival organisers have announced American actor, comedian, and author Jenny Slate, Scottish actor Brian Cox, British Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid, and British musician, and former Pulp front-man Jarvis Cocker, will be part of the show.
These four incredible artists are just the beginning of an extraordinary line-up that we can’t wait to bring to Melbourne audiences this year after the pandemic kept us away for so long.
RELATED CONTENT
Australia today, some highlights from the August 2021 Census
28 June 2022
The Australian Bureau of Statistics has begun releasing Census data which was collected in August 2021. Items catching my eye included the revelation there are now as many Millennials, people generally aged 25 to 39, as there are Baby boomers, who are aged 55-74.
There’s also been a significant increase in people stating they have no religious affiliation, with the figure up almost ten percent on the previous Census in 2016. Here’s a rundown of these, plus other, highlights:
- Sydney is Australia’s largest city by population, with 5.2 million inhabitants
- NSW is Australia’s largest state by population, with almost 8.1 million inhabitants
- Australia’s total population is 25.5 million. It has doubled since 1971, when there were 12.4 million inhabitants
- Australians have a median age of 38 years
- There are now almost as many Millennials, 5.4 million people, as there are Baby Boomers
- Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people make up 3.2% of the population
- English, Australian, Irish, Scottish, and Chinese, make up the top five ancestries of Australians today
- Mandarin, Arabic, Vietnamese, and Cantonese are the top languages spoken after English
- Almost 39% of Australians have no religious affiliation, up from 30% in 2016
- About 44% identify as Christian, down from about 52% in 2016
- Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Judaism are the top religions after Christianity
- There are over one million single parent families in Australia
- There are almost 25,000 same sex marriages
- About 31% of Australians either live in rental accommodation, or outright own their dwelling
RELATED CONTENT
Elvis Presley’s Edge of Reality remixed by Tame Impala
28 June 2022
Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis bio-pic has a lot of talking points. But then again what films by Baz Luhrmann don’t? The near three hour runtime (four for the director’s cut apparently), and the accent Tom Hanks uses in his portrayal of Colonel Tom Parker, for starters.
Then there’s the contemporary remixes of Presley’s classic hits, including Edge of Reality, reimagined by Perth based Australian one-person act Tame Impala. Plenty to talk about here.
RELATED CONTENT
Baz Luhrmann, film, music, Tame Impala
COVID infection may result in long term cognitive decline
28 June 2022
A specialist medical team at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney, Australia, have been monitoring the health of one hundred and twenty-eight people who were infected with the original COVID-19 Alpha strain in the early months of 2020.
Study participants experienced varying degrees of infection, with a small number requiring hospitalisation. But the findings of the study — to date — are unsettling to say the least.
Around one quarter of the ADAPT study’s participants were experiencing noticeable cognitive decline a year after getting COVID. And, some sort of cognitive decline was recorded in almost all of the participants, regardless of the severity of the initial infection. “When we look over time, across the 12 months of the study, we see that even the people who have performance within a normal expectation do also have a mild cognitive decline,” says neuropsychologist and associate professor Lucette Cysique.
However, Dr Cysique noted that in most cases cognitive decline was mild, and few people would notice, unless they found themselves in a “very cognitively demanding situation.”
I’m not sure I find that particularly reassuring. COVID strikes me as being a disease best avoided. If that is at all possible.
RELATED CONTENT
The Fall of Númenor, Middle-earth’s Second Age explored
28 June 2022
The Fall of Númenor (published by HarperCollins on 10 November 2022), edited by English writer Brian Sibley, explores the Second Age of Middle-earth, based on what J.R.R. Tolkien — author of the The Lord of the Rings, which, incidentally, is set in the Third Age — wrote of the era.
It was not until Christopher Tolkien published The Silmarillion after his father’s death that a fuller story could be told. Although much of the book’s content concerned the First Age of Middle-earth, there were at its close two key works that revealed the tumultuous events concerning the rise and fall of the island of Númenor. Raised out of the Great Sea and gifted to the Men of Middle-earth as a reward for aiding the angelic Valar and the Elves in the defeat and capture of the Dark Lord Morgoth, the kingdom became a seat of influence and wealth; but as the Númenóreans’ power increased, the seed of their downfall would inevitably be sown, culminating in the Last Alliance of Elves and Men.
RELATED CONTENT
J. R. R. Tolkien, literature, writing
Ringo Starr, maybe not a drumming genius, but a drumming genius
28 June 2022
One for fans of the Beatles, and in particular, the drumming of Ringo Starr, here’s their 1966 track She Said, She Said, with isolated bass and drum lines. Compared to the likes of John Bonham, Hannah Welton, Charlie Watts, or Dave Grohl, Starr may not have been a master keeper of time, but he could sure play a fill.
Via Far Out Magazine.
And on a related note, footage of Paul McCartney performing at the Glastonbury Festival last week with John Lennon. Yes, indeed.
RELATED CONTENT
Photos of the construction of Sydney Opera House
27 June 2022
A collection of incredible photos of the Sydney Opera House, taken during its construction. Today the Opera House is one of the most recognisable buildings in the world, but it seems Sydneysiders were not enamoured by the iconic structure while it was being built.
Today the building is loved, yet while it was under construction attitudes were very different. The local press continually attacked its cost, its delays, and its architect; headline writers gave the now familiar white shell roof nicknames such as ‘the concrete camel’, ‘copulating terrapins’ and ‘the hunchback of Bennelong Point’.
What’s also compelling about these photos is both how much has changed, and how much has remained the same, when looking at the areas surrounding the land the Opera House stands on.
Via Things Magazine.
RELATED CONTENT
Australia, history, photos, Sydney
Notes feature will transform Twitter to content creation platform
27 June 2022
Social networking service Twitter looks set to make the transition from microblogging platform to content creation platform, with the trailing of a new notes feature. Twitter notes — currently being tested by users in Canada, Ghana, Britain, and America — allows posts of up to two thousand five hundred words at a time to be written.
It reminds me a little of the notes feature Facebook used to offer, that I used early on, when I still used Facebook. It’s a smart move on Twitter’s part, as it stands to significantly increase engagement on the platform. Presently users need to direct followers to external resources, such as their blog, if they want them to read posts exceeding two hundred and eighty characters.
Writers who do not have a website of their own look to particularly benefit from the notes feature, should Twitter decide to roll it out.
RELATED CONTENT
content production, social media, Twitter
How locks, including the unpickable Enclave lock, work
27 June 2022
The Enclave lock, designed by Andrew Magill, comes with the claim that it cannot be picked. This might be the news the security conscious have been waiting for.
Some locks are more difficult to pick than others. Some have more perfect tolerances, or more positions, or keyways that are more difficult to fit tools into, or parts that move in unusual ways, or parts designed to mislead pickers, and so on. But these are only incremental improvements, and don’t address the fundamental flaw. The solution is to make it so that the two steps- accepting input, and testing that input- can never happen at the same time. When those two steps cannot interact with each other, a well-designed lock will never reveal information about the correct positions of its individual parts, nor can they be made to ‘fall into’ their unlocked positions through manipulation.
Watch the video clip for the Enclave lock though. As well as demonstrating Magill’s new lock, it also shows how conventional locks work. Quite fascinating.
RELATED CONTENT