Link Feast - April 19, 2008

I haven't done a link feast in a while.

• Marja-Leena Rathje, a Finnish-Canadian artist, has a post about a Finnish snow artist.

• 360 degree panorama of the Great Wall.

• You can get mesmerized playing with the stringwave.

• When we're hiking, I love finding traces of old, overgrown roads.  BLDBLOG has an interesting post on Ancient Roads.

...The article refers to one local, a lawyer, who explains that "he loved getting out and looking for hints of ancient roads: parallel stone walls or rows of old-growth trees about 50 feet apart. Old culverts are clues, too, as are cellar holes that suggest people lived there; if so, a road probably passed nearby."
Think of it as landscape hermeneutics: hunting down traces of a disappeared landscape...

• Also from BLDBLOG, The Sound of Evolution - how the constant noise in cities affects songbirds.

• For Star Wars fans:  The making of a Star Destroyer.

• For Pixar Fans, /Film has a post on future Pixar movies.

• In Cicada Magic, Bug Girl's Blog shows a video of a moulting cicada (sped up), courtesy of Ugly Overload.

• Musical Roller Coaster (hat tip to Musical Assumptions).

• For Trekkies:  Analytics According to Captain Kirk - how to survive in a red shirt (hint, your chances are better if Kirk's got a romance).  (Hat tip to Noli Irritare Leones)

• At The Hathor Legacy: The search of good female characters - If male actors had to be as blandly perfect as female ones...:

...if we bumped male requirements up to something as specific as the requirements for women, the US film and TV industry would lose all its leading men overnight (just “underweight” wipes out the whole brigade, though I’m sure some of them would be willing to starve if their careers were on the line). And wouldn’t that be a pity for all those women, including me, who find quite a few American lead actors attractive despite their “flaws”? Or because of them? 

• Self-Styled Siren (with a great banner photo) has a tribute to the late Charlton Heston, pointing out aspects of his work that I had forgotten:

...This week will undoubtedly witness a great deal of back and forth and back again about Heston's politics, given that most people last saw him not in character but at the podium of NRA rallies. But during his career Heston was an actor who approached each role with deep seriousness, repeatedly returning to the stage in between films until the lines would no longer stay in his memory...

• In a post about dating tall women at Megan McArdle's Blog, one commenter says (emphasis mine):

...assuming there is any talking to be done, act like size doesn't matter much... what would you do differently if she was only 5'? There are logistics differences in sweeping women off their feet, but making her the only important being in the room covers most of them, IMHO.

Good advice.

• Last, but definitely not least, Toddled Dredge has a very thoughtful post on community, I don't love the grouches yet, but I'm trying.