Links 27/09/13

'The Tommy Westphall Multiverse is a thought exercise, a parlor game writ large. And it’s tailor made for pop culture obsessives.'

Volume 1 of the Richard Feynman Lectures on Physics is now available free online. Volumes 2 and 3 are to follow.

'In 1881, Edward Charles Pickering, director of the Harvard Observatory, had a problem: the volume of data coming into his observatory was exceeding his staff’s ability to analyze it. He also had doubts about his staff’s competence–especially that of his assistant, who Pickering dubbed inefficient at cataloging. So he did what any scientist of the latter 19th century would have done: he fired his male assistant and replaced him with his maid, Williamina Fleming. Fleming proved so adept at computing and copying that she would work at Harvard for 34 years–eventually managing a large staff of assistants.

'So began an era in Harvard Observatory history where women—more than 80 during Pickering’s tenure, from 1877 to his death in 1919— worked for the director, computing and cataloging data. Some of these women would produce significant work on their own; some would even earn a certain level of fame among followers of female scientists. But the majority are remembered not individually but collectively, by the moniker Pickering's Harem.'

'The paleo-tectonic maps of retired geologist Ronald Blakey are mesmerizing and impossible to forget once you've seen them. Catalogued on his website Colorado Plateau Geosystems, these maps show the world adrift, its landscapes breaking apart and reconnecting again in entirely new forms, where continents are as temporary as the island chains that regularly smash together to create them, on a timescale where even oceans that exist for tens of millions of years can disappear leaving only the subtlest of geological traces.'

'Whole solar systems are needed to generate life, not just terrestrial planets with water.'

The Kawasaki Warehouse amusement game park in Japan 'has been designed as a historical replica of Kowloon ‘Walled’ City, capitalising on the enduring fascination with the lawless metropolis ever since its demolishment in 1980s.'