The BBC website has a cool new feature called Dimensions where you can take "important places, events, and things, and overlay them onto a map of where you are". This is cooler than it sounds once you see it. Way cooler. For example....
The Floods in Pakistan. "Oh yeah," right? "No, I've totally been reading about the flooding, it's teeeerrrible". Indeed. Indeed. But I was surprised how far out one had to zoom to fit this area into the Easter Seaboard of North America.... :(
...And how about this! Today's Athens marathon follows the same route as the first Olympic Games back in 1896, and commemorated the 26 miles the soldier Pheidippides ran in 409 BC. He ran from Athens to Sparta to bring news of the Greek victory over the Persian army, and legend has it that he collapsed and died after giving the news.
If I ran all that way to get to Laval, I might not think his reaction such a bad idea...
This is a neat one: the Kola Superdeep Borehole (Russian: Кольская сверхглубокая скважина) is the result of a scientific drilling project of the former USSR. The project attempted to drill as deep as possible into the Earth's crust. Drilling began on 24 May 1970 (incidentally, Bob Dylan's 29th birthday) on the Kola Peninsula, using the Uralmash-4E, and later the Uralmash-15000 series drilling rig. A number of boreholes were drilled by branching from a central hole. The deepest, SG-3, reached 12,262 metres (40,230 ft) in 1989, and is the deepest hole ever drilled, and the deepest artificial point on the earth. Here is its depth transposed onto New York City.
Anyway, it's well worth exploring and enjoying.
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