Athanasius Kircher was a 17th century German scholar, priest, inventor and polymath, whose life was spent harvesting the world's knowledge and republishing prodigious amounts of texts on his research (in total, 44 books and countless other manuscripts). When not designing early machines, theorizing the existence of disease-causing micro-organisms or lowering himself down into active volcanos, he could be found producing magnificently detailed and beautiful illustrations of his ideas.

One such idea was the notion of a parabolic horn which could amplify sound waves for the enjoyment of listeners - a thought which eventually proved exceedingly popular.

A collection of Kircher's illustrations has recently been published in beautiful hardback form. Online, Stanford offer a huge archive of his works; unfortunately, it's locked away in the widely unsupported DjVu format, with buggy browser plugins not helping proceedings. Better is this Flickr stream, which collects a great deal of images in decent resolution.

Until recently, there existed an Athanasius Kircher Society, which collected together esoterica of Kircher's ilk. Now defunct, a new and equally exciting endeavour has risen in its place: Atlas Obscura, a compendium of the world's wonders, curiosities and esoterica. Kind of like a geographical Taryn Simon, it's a distributed, visually rich investigation into weird locations around the world.

rososo is one of those rarities: a Web 2.0 offshoot that actually increases productivity, rather than serving to blithely gnaw away at those spare minutes. Unlike a normal RSS reader which syndicates entire sets of feed entries, this simply provide you with a list of sites that have most recently been updated. After each link is followed, is is removed until next modified. Transparent, instantaneous, and zen-like in its simplicity.

This approach also avoids my main bugbear with other RSS content syndicators; a site's content is presented in the context that was intended by its author, rather than stripping away the stylings to become a raw data stream, a la Google Reader et al.

The only downer is the occasional sluggishness of Rososo's servers, but with luck this is something induced by its recent popularity and will be ironed out as their capacity expands...

24th March has been declared Ada Lovelace day (twitter), a blogospheric event to draw attention to groundbreaking work being done by women in technology, in homage to Babbage's undersung partner (though it must be said she has become a cause celebre in recent years). I've committed to writing something for it, which only seems fitting after the heavy influence that Sadie Plant's techno-feminist tome Zeroes and Ones had on Subtext. Many thrilling possibilities, and a good motivation to write.

Garfield Minus Garfield is a sublime take on the abject loneliness of American suburbia.