I’m going to start taking notes of a few interesting articles/websites that I find each week in order to share them with others and preserve them for myself. And so begins Week One. Links will cover any article that I find interesting, but will largely be grounded in science and technology.

  1. An awesome time-lapse video of night skies was posted the other day (embedded above). I love stunning videos of nature and this is no exception.

  2. Some scientists as part of a Russian research team have reportedly managed to germinate seeds that were found under 124 feet (38 meters) of permafrost (annoyingly, it doesn’t link to the source journal article), which were determined to be around 32,000 years old by radiocarbon dating. The article describes how knowledge of unfreezing and re-cultivating these seeds could benefit places such as the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.

  3. A new experimental plugin for Firefox called Collision that allows you to visualise the connections between services that websites use to track you while you are online. It’s certainly quite eye-opening about the number of websites that record your usage data and statistics. Mozilla writes: Not all tracking is bad. Many services rely on user data to provide relevant content and enhance your online experience. But most tracking happens without users’ consent and without their knowledge. That’s not okay. It should be you who decides when, how and if you want to be tracked. Collusion will be a powerful tool to help you do that

  4. The Raspberry Pi foundation also recently announced that they have started shipping A and B model Raspberry Pis, although they are currently out of stock in both RS and Farnell. Using these distributors allows for a much higher production rate that scales to demand, and will help reduce shipping costs for people due to worldwide distribution networks. Can’t wait until they are back in stock.

  5. A scary post that describes a fish parasite that enters the gills of a fish, devours its tongue, then positions itself in place of the tongue. Just the picture alone is creepy! Nature is awesome.

  6. A BBC Horizon show about what exercise really does and the best ways of getting the maximum benefit (probably UK only). This is coupled with a post from DiscoverMagazine on a new study that suggests healthy people will develop higher blood sugar after only three days of a sedentary lifestyle.

  7. A post from Mark Shuttleworth that shows the new HUD functionality coming in Ubuntu 12.04.

  8. A good collection of 30 books that everyone in the software business should read and why. I know that five or six of these are already on my Amazon wishlist for when I have the time, and it’s definitely a list worth looking at.

  9. An interesting explanation of why the bin, sbin, usr/bin, and usr/sbin folders exist in Unix as well as why the programs located in each exist where they do.

  10. A detailed and very interesting article describing Tumblr’s scalable architecture and how it allows them to serve ‘500 million page views a day, a peak rate of ~40k requests per second, ~3TB of new data to store a day, all running on 1000+ servers’.