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A few months ago I started my review of Lansing’s Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage with these words: Of all the stories of maritime adventures I’ve read, that of the Endurance, masterfully told by Alfred Lansing in this book, is the most incredible and shocking. And I meant that. As the book’s title suggests, that story is simply unbelievable, yet true. Imagine my astonishment this morning at the news that the Endurance was found in the depths of the Antarctic. ...

Quoting [Nelson’s weblog][3]: Goodreads lost my entire account last week. Nine years as a user, some 600 books and 250 carefully written reviews all deleted and unrecoverable. Their support has not been helpful. In 35 years of being online I’ve never encountered a company with such callous disregard for their users’ data. Ouch. A lesson learned the hard way: My plan now is to host my own blog-like collection of all my reading notes like [Tom does][2]. ...

In 2014, James Somers sat down to write a beautiful, entertaining lament about the state of today’s dictionaries and an argument in favor of the adoption of Noah Webster’s 1913 edition. I don’t want you to conclude that it’s just a matter of aesthetics. Yes, Webster’s definitions are prettier. But they are also better. They’re so much better that to use another dictionary is to keep yourself forever at arm’s length from the actual language. ...

Kottke reports this juicy excerpt from Jonny Greenwood’s interview at npr: Thom [Yorke]’s band had a keyboard player — [whom] I think they didn’t get on with because he played his keyboard so loud. And so when I got the chance to play with them, the first thing I did was make sure my keyboard was turned off … I must have done months of rehearsals with them with this keyboard, and they didn’t know that I’d already turned it off. ...

Chelsea Wald in Nature: Scientists say that urine diversion would have huge environmental and public-health benefits if deployed on a large scale around the world. That’s in part because urine is rich in nutrients that, instead of polluting water bodies, could go towards fertilizing crops or feed into industrial processes. According to Simha’s estimates, humans produce enough urine to replace about one-quarter of current nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers worldwide; it also contains potassium and many micronutrients (see ‘What’s in urine’). On top of that, not flushing urine down the drain could save vast amounts of water and reduce some of the strain on ageing and overloaded sewer systems. ...

Reddit is currently the most popular search engine. The only people who don’t know that are the team at Reddit, who can’t be bothered to build a decent search interface. So instead we resort to using Google, and appending the word “reddit” to the end of our queries. […] Why are people searching Reddit specifically? The short answer is that Google search results are clearly dying. The long answer is that most of the web has become too inauthentic to trust. ...

One of my recent discoveries is A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry by Bret Devereaux, an historian who’s been posting great content over the years. His Fireside Fridays, for example, provide intriguing musings on varied topics. In this week instalment, professor Devereaux takes on the different applications of blockchain technology as seen from a historian’s perspective. Really, this is less about the technologies themselves and more about the nature of states. Because while I can offer no real opinion as to if any of these new technologies will succeed in their technical objectives […], proponents of these technologies typically envisage them eventually producing large social effects, in particular they imagine that blockchain technology will create an economic and social space outside of the control of the state, traditional banking institutions or society at large. And here is a space where a historian’s expertise is valuable and also almost completely lacking among blockchain enthusiasts. ...

A very touching Akhil Sharma in The New Yorker: Not long after we began dating, my now wife, Christine, and I started making up stories about the child we might have. We named the child—or, in the stories we told about him, he named himself—Suzuki Noguchi. Among the things we liked about him was that he was cheerfully indifferent to us. He did not wish to be either Irish (like Christine) or Indian (like me). Suzuki was eight, and he chose this name because he was into Japanese high fashion. When we told him that he couldn’t just go around claiming to be Japanese, Suzuki said that he was a child of God and who were we to say that God was not Japanese. In addition to being a dandy, Suzuki was a criminal. He dealt in yellowcake uranium and trafficked in endangered animals. Sometimes we asked him how his day at school had gone and he would warn, “Do you really want to be an accessory after the fact?” We imagined him banging on our bedroom door when we were having sex and shouting, “Stop! You can’t get any child better than me.” ...

I had a hunch that old songs were taking over music streaming platforms—but even I was shocked when I saw the most recent numbers. According to MRC Data, old songs now represent 70% of the US music market. Those who make a living from new music—especially that endangered species known as the working musician—have to look at these figures with fear and trembling. But the news gets worse. I can’t say I can relate as my kids of ages 21, 18, and 16 do their best to stay clear from the music I like, but anyways, Ted Gioia’s latest piece on recent music trends is super-interesting. ...

It’s now old news that the James Webb Telescope was successfully launched on Christmas Day. But last Saturday marked another historic moment for this incredible human artifact: After a quarter-century of effort by tens of thousands of people, more than $10 billion in taxpayer funding, and some 350 deployment mechanisms that had to go just so, the James Webb Space Telescope fully unfurled its wings. The massive spacecraft completed its final deployments, and, by God, the process went smoothly. ...