Documenting

Quirks and Quarks17:24How documenting the disappearance of the great auk led to the discovery of extinctionWhen species cease to exist, we often say they went "the way of the dodo." But it might be more fitting to say they went "the way of the great auk" because it was the Icelandic bird's disappearance that led to the discovery that humans activities could make a species go extinct.In his book The Last of Its Kind: The Search for the Great Auk and the Discovery of Extinction, Gísli Pálsson retraces a 1858 trip two…

At the start of the Chilean documentary The Eternal Memory, a woman asks her husband, who has Alzheimer’s, if he likes his life. He beams back at her. “I love life.” The couple will be instantly recognisable to audiences in Chile. He is Augusto Góngora, a journalist who was part of an underground television news service during the Pinochet dictatorship. Out on the streets he filmed the reality of life under military rule – at huge personal risk. The group’s bulletins, recorded on VHS tapes, were passed from house to house…

Google has launched a new help page that documents what Google calls the most common visual elements on the search results page. Here Google has laid out visually 22 elements found on the search results page, explaining what the elements look like, what they are called, and whether you can optimize your site for them. Visual Elements gallery of Google Search. You can find this new document over here in the Google help area. It helps you identify the most common and “impactful…

From the start of their 28-year friendship, Eliane Henri knew trumpeter Roy Hargrove was a genius. “I was 17 when I went to see his first show in LA and it was like nothing I’d experienced before,” Henri says. “Jazz was this old music to me and listening to it used to be like eating your vegetables, but here was this 20-year-old guy with a totally fresh, fully formed sound already. It was like having Miles Davis walk among us.”In the years since that debut show in the early 90s, Hargrove’s star ascended. Winning two…

Emperor Palpatine is arguably the most important character in the Star Wars mythos. His sinister machinations shaped the Skywalker saga: manipulating the events of the prequel trilogy from behind-the-scenes, ruling the galaxy in the original trilogy, and eventually executing an unlikely resurrection in the last of Disney’s sequels. But what about the man under the hood? Much of Palpatine’s life remains a mystery. We know he was born Sheev Palpatine on Naboo eighty-two years before the Battle of Yavin to a noble…