Encyclopedia of Life

I’ve been waiting for Edward O. Wilson’s Encyclopia of Life to open for about a year, and the wait is finally over.

From the website:

The Encyclopedia of Life (EOL) is an ambitious, even audacious project to organize and make available via the Internet virtually all information about life present on Earth…

The EOL dynamically synthesizes biodiversity knowledge about all known species, including their taxonomy, geographic distribution, collections, genetics, evolutionary history, morphology, behavior, ecological relationships, and importance for human well being, and distribute this information through the Internet. It serves as a primary resource for a wide audience that includes scientists, natural resource managers, conservationists, teachers, and students around the world.

There isn’t a ton of content yet, but the site has some nice features such as presenting information for a general audience, or for experts. A sliding bar on each page lets you reduce or increase the amount of information presented to you on a single page. Also, the photographs are all either under a creative commons license, or have no license at all.

Self Portraits

In the last six months I’ve taken to occationally photocopying my face and doing a charcoal drawing of it. I recently decided this project was finished and will hopefully be moving on to drawing other things. So here are the photocopies and the drawing made from them. Unfortunately, I think I lost the photocopy for the second image.

Weird Aviation Videos

Hey, a new post!

I found a bunch of weird aviation videos on a website for Alexis Park Inn, an aviation themed hotel here in Iowa City. The videos are in various formats, but I took the liberty of uploading a few to YouTube.

You can access all the videos here.

Man sucked into a jet intake:

Military airdrops gone wrong:

Dog in zero-G: