I’ve run across quite a few stories about this very neat website over the past week or so and thought that TBTP followers would be interested.
How Far Can You Go By Train in 5h? is an interactive map which shows you how far you can travel from any European rail station in less than five hours. Hover over any location on this map (within the highlighted area in Europe) and you can view an isochrome layer which shows you how far you can travel by train in hourly increments. The nearest train station (from which travel times are calculated) is highlighted on the map in black.
The travel time data used to power the isochrone layers comes from direkt.bahn.guru. The map assumes that any interchange between two different trains is a blanket 20 minutes and that travel between two interchange stations will be undertaken at a little over walking speed.
h/t to Maps Mania for this little trip down the rabbit hole.
I continue to be amazed by the spectactular land art created by the French mural artist known as Saype. He recently unveiled unveiled a new artwork in the Swiss Alps, near Villars-sur-Ollon, called “’Vers l’équilibre” (Towards balance) which depicts a little girl stacking a pile of books.
His enormous murals are created with biodradable products that are environmentally friendly. Like most of Saype’s work, this piece near the summit of the Grand Chamossaire mountain, above the alpine resort of Villars-sur-Ollon, Switzerland, is best viewed by drone.
Over recent months, it seems that there has been a story about tourists in Yellowstone National Park being gored by bison, mauled by bears, bitten by wolves, or scalded by steaming pools every week. In most cases the deaths and injuries have been the result of foolhardy visitors who don’t follow park rules. Americans have devolved into a traveling circus of rubes, yahoos, and morons who seem to view everyplace as an extension of Disney World. Now, on the occasion of Yellowstone National Park’s 150th anniversary, Cowboy State Daily published a map and list of maulings, scaldings, and murders that have occurred at the park. The stories of fatal accidents are mostly gleaned from the book Death in Yellowstone: Accidents and Foolhardiness in the First National Park.
Yellowstone has many dangerous attractions, especially the geothermal features like geysers and boiling hot springs that tourists fall into and sometimes jump into. Others want to get close to the bison or the bears, with deadly results. Sometimes hikers and camper simply fail to take recommended precautions with dire results. You can read about some of the mayhem, and download the map here.
Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don’t know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It’s that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don’t know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.
This week I ran across a press release for a new web-based “publishing” company that is now selling a form of ebooks as NFTs. After reading the press release (see below) and checking out the website my initial reaction to the concept is simply a big why? . While not a scam, it seems redundant to sell block chain ebooks of titles that already exist as free downloadable ebooks. Please take a look at the press release for Book Token, their Youtube video, and the website Booktoken.io and let me know what Im missing.
DALLAS, July 27, 2022 /PRNewswire/ – The Dallas-based startup, Book Token (Booktoken.io), has brought books to the blockchain. On July 20th, the technology company launched their first eBook, the Gutenberg Bible – in recognition of the printing press technology created by Johannes Gutenberg- selling over $100,000 dollars worth of the book in the first 24 hours, with zero dollars spent on marketing the sale. The company created 10K NFT eBooks, all with unique computer generated cover art based on an original, a video inside the book, over 70 high-resolution images, and over 650K words. These “unburnable” books, will live forever on the blockchain, do not degrade over time, and can be transferred around the world in mere seconds. Books can be read in Book Token’s anonymous browser-based reading dApp(decentralized application.)
With over 1.1 Billion people estimated to read digitally in 2023, this is an incredible step forward for blockchain utility. At launch time, Joshua Stone, CEO, noted that “This is revolutionary for digital book ownership. Until now, digital books have been handled by licensing models by centralized retailers. Today, people truly own their eBooks for the first time. Today is also the birth of the secondary eBook market.” Within four hours of launch, Book Token was also collecting royalties from second-hand book sales from book owners selling their books on 3rd party NFT marketplaces around the world.
Web3 startup BookToken.io launched eBooks on the blockchain and sold over $100,000 the first day.Tweet this
Unlike other NFTs on blockchains which are publicly viewable, these eBooks are Decentralized Encrypted Assets (DEAs), meaning that only the owner of the NFT can open and see the contents of the book. These NFTs represent a whole new asset class, able to securely move all types of media – video, audio, text – on the blockchain.
“The promise of web3 is ownership and decentralization,” Mr. Stone added, “and today we believe we took a massive step in the right direction to fulfill that promise.”
Book Token, whose C-Level team previously built and sold an eBook startup that had over 6 million users, has an audacious mission: To decentralize and incentivize knowledge.
The company has plans to work with major publishers and independent authors and will continue to build out its platform to accomplish its goals. They also plan to rollout mobile reading apps, a full marketplace to buy and resell books, and look to release audiobooks by year’s end.
Even if you don’t geek out over illuminated manuscripts as much as I do, there’s a good chance that you will be entertained by the short video below. It’s likely that you’ve seen images from medieval manuscripts depicting both real and imaginary creatures in the margins. While these images may appear quite humorous to us, they often were symbolic representations of cultural and political issues of the times. In 1962, historian Lilian Randall published a book on the illustrations found in the margins of illuminated manuscripts. A section of the book, Images in the Margins of Gothic Manuscripts , is highlighted in the video below which explores the surprising number of snails appearing inthese texts.
NB: If the video does not appear in your email version of TBTP, please click on the link here for the home page.
Smaller than a breadbox, bigger than a TV remote, the average book fits into the human hand with a seductive nestling, a kiss of texture, whether of cover cloth, glazed jacket, or flexible paperback. – John Updike
Today is international Paperback Book Day. The cause for the celebration today is that British publisher Allen Lane launched what would become Penguin Books, and they released their first paperback book on July 30, 1935. The video below offers a pithy historical take on the birth of the Penguin paperback line. It’s no spoiler to mention that Lane and Penguin didn’t create the paperback book, but they do derserve credit for popularizing the very portable reads.
President Barack Obama has released his annual summer reading list. On Facebook, he wrote, “I’ve read his summer reading list. “I’ve read a couple of great books this year and wanted to share some of my favorites so far. What have you been reading this summer?” Obama’s list:
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel Why We’re Polarized by Ezra Klein The Candy House by Jennifer Egan A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance by Hanif Abdurraqib To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara Silverview by John Le Carré Black Cake by Charmaine Wilkerson Family Chao by Lan Samantha Chang Velvet Was the Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia Mouth to Mouth by Antoine Wilson The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure by Yascha Mounk The School for Good Mothers by Jessamine Chan Razorblade Tears by S.A. Cosby Blood in the Garden: The Flagrant History of the 1990s New York Knicks by Chris Herring
I’ve only read three of the books, but had four others on my TBR list already. President Obama has never steered me wrong yet.
When I saw this street art mural I was reminded of a comforting quote from the great writer Kurt Vonnegut:
Nothing I can say can have any effect, except to say to somebody else, “You’re not alone.” That’s as far as it goes.
Of course when I went looking for the specific Vonnegut quotation quite a few others popped up:
And how should we behave during this Apocalypse? We should be unusually kind to one another, certainly. But we should also stop being so serious. Jokes help a lot. And get a dog, if you don’t already have one.
We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
I want to stay as close on the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center… Big, undreamed-of things — the people on the edge see them first.
Let others bring order to chaos. I will bring chaos to order. If all writers would do that, then perhaps everyone will understand that there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.
We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane
Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.
I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, “If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.”
Travel Between The Pages 