Wikipedia

Animal house

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    Random #Wikipedia browsing brought me to this: wild horses.

    Wild horses live in herds with a social hierarchy, formed by a dominant adult male or sometimes multiple males (harem stallions), as well as several mares and their offspring. The harem stallion aggressively defends his herd/harem against rival males.

    Sure, that’s about what you’d expect.

    Upon reaching adulthood, both male and female horses disperse to other herds to avoid inbreeding, with young adult males also forming bachelor groups when they are around 3 years of age. In bachelor groups male horses engage in play and ritual behavior, with the group forming a hierarchy.

    …apparently wild horses have frats.

    (To be fair, the frat bros I knew in college behaved pretty much like wild horses, so this may not be the revelation I think it is.)

    Desert Bunds

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    Any video that’s about somebody seeing something weird on Google Maps and digging into it fascinates me. Christophe Haubursin’s show Tunnel Vision investigates the purpose behind some odd patterns in the Iranian desert.

    Something about the style of the video felt strangely familiar to me, so I looked over the other videos Haubursin—a senior producer for #Vox’s video team—created for Vox. Sure enough, he did What’s inside this crater in Madagascar?, which is also highly worth watching.

    I think the satellite and street-view imagery provided by Google Maps is one of the most under-appreciated resources on the internet. Similar to #Wikipedia, most of us probably use it primarily when we need to look up something specific, but you really could—and I do—spend hours just browsing it. It’s a view of the world—the entire planet!—that even just forty years ago would have seemed near-godlike in scope and power.