(Roughly) Daily

All one needs to know about why the Superbowl played out as it did…

“Fritzcrate,” a Swedish music blogger, found himself with some down time, and then put it to good use:

Yesterday RyanAir changed my plans. Today I changed my plans, too. I did not feel fit enough to start building my SoundCloud / Echonest comment based remix machine and hacked around, but did nothing real this morning. After reading about the new Metreo Charts in last.fm’s API I finally built “My City vs. Your City“– a JavaScript based app that compares to what artists people listen to in different cities.

One can give it a whirl– comparing any two cities from a long and global list– here.

As we celebrate the rich and diverse pageant that is life, we might spare a grateful thought for the extraordinary Jules Verne– originator of last Thursday’s Almanac item and imaginative writer non pareil.  He was born in Nantes on this date in 1828.

Best known for his novels A Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), From the Earth to the Moon (1865), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1869–1870), Around the World in Eighty Days (1873) and The Mysterious Island (1875), Verne is the second most translated (individual) author of all time, behind Agatha Christie.  He is considered, with H.G. Wells, the founder of science fiction.

Verne was startlingly prescient: Paris in the 20th Century, for example, describes air conditioning, automobiles, the Internet, television, even electricity, and other modern conveniences very similar to their real world counterparts, developed years– in many cases, decades– later.   From the Earth to the Moon, apart from using a space gun instead of a rocket, is uncannily similar to the real Apollo Program: three astronauts are launched from the Florida peninsula– from “Tampa Town” ( only 130 miles from NASA’s Cape Canaveral)– and recovered through a splash landing.  And in other works, he predicted helicopters, submarines, projectors, jukeboxes, and the existence of underwater hydrothermal vents that were not invented/discovered until long after he wrote about them.

Jules Verne