Category: Evolution

Meet the relatives

It is an interesting fact that, to the best of our knowledge, all life on Earth is related, we are all part of the same family tree (yes, even arsenic munching bacteria from California). So when we looked at publishing content about Dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasties it seemed obvious, and far more useful and interesting, to extend Wildlife Finder rather than build a whole new site. And that’s just what we’ve done.

Hillis Plot

You can now watch video clips and discover BBC news stories about prehistoric life on Earth. We’ve published the best bits from TV series such as Walking with Dinosaurs and Walking with Beasts as well as episodes from Horizon and of course we’re also linking to relevant radio programmes and news stories. Continue reading “Meet the relatives” →

Interesting stuff from around the web 2009-02-04

Hippos are more closely related to their whale cousins than they (hippos) are to anything else
Hippos are more closely related to their whale cousins than they (hippos) are to anything else

Tree of Life – evolution interactive – Darwin 200 – Wellcome Trust
Want to know the concestor of two species then this is for you. And they have obviously spent time on the visual and interaction design and it’s great they have released it under a Creative Commons license. But, but because they haven’t provided URLs for each of the taxa it’s lost to the web, which is such a shame.

Google Latitude – see where you friends are in realtime [Google]
A service for sharing (primarily via your mobile phone) your location with friends and family and as such it’s similar to BrightKite and FireEagle. If Google integrate this into existing services, that is it becomes a service sat behind Google search and maps, then this could be a bit of a killer if only because that’s where people’s attention is. That said FireEagle is a generative location exchanging service.

How Twitter Was Born [140 Characters]
Interesting read about the birth and early days of Twitter.

Visualising our SVN commit history [whomwah]
Deeply cool.

Listen to Yourself [xkcd]
YouTube comments are a mess — this could the be answer, so might making the site about people and their videos rather than videos with some comments.

Interesting stuff from around the web 2008-09-21

Eadward Muybridge’s 1878 investigation into whether horses’ feet were actually all off the ground at once during a trot.
Eadward Muybridge’s 1878 investigation into whether horses’ feet were actually all off the ground at once during a trot.

Born To Run – Human Evolution [DISCOVER Magazine]
Biomechanical research reveals a surprising key to the survival of our species: Humans are built to outrun nearly every other animal on the planet over long distances.

Prisoner’s Dilemma Visualisation [James Alliban]
Nice visualisation of the Prisoner’s Dilemma (a classic example of game theory) using Processing.

More Google news

Google Visualization API [Google Code]
The Google Visualization API lets you access multiple sources of structured data that you can display, choosing from a large selection of visualizations.

GAudi – Google’s new audio index [Official Google Blog]
It’s currently in Google Labs and is restricted to content from political sources but it still looks interesting. In addition to being able to search for terms you can also jump directly to the point in the video where the keyword is mentioned.

The social web: All about the small stuff [Official Google Blog]
The promise of the social web is about making it easy to share the small stuff – to make it effortless and rebuild that feeling of connectedness that comes from knowing the details.

More background on Matt’s hack: streaming content to iTunes

Things to do with /programmes #431: iTunes! [BBC Radio Labs]
Matt’s write up of his work on streaming iPlayer content through iTunes.

Very surprised the blog sphere hasn’t picked up on the implications of this hack but there you go.