📰 Noteworthy stories for today #20
How deep is the deepest place on Earth? A mother's call from the mountain top & ahead of the curve with corona virus.
This week has been a strangely busy one but none the less here is this weekend’s long reads round-up, enjoy. (And if you do enjoy it, share it!)
Dive: Original
Amazingly, 80% of the ocean is still unmapped, it’s one of the last great unexplored mysteries of our planet and to me the most alluring discovery is The Mariana Trench. This enormous contour runs along the archipelago of the Mariana Islands in the Pacific as one tectonic plate grinds above the other creating a lip where the two meet.
Towards the south is a gap between the two plates called the Challenger Deep - the deepest place discovered in the ocean, named after the ship that the discovered it. So how deep is it?
The Art of Suffering
As someone who has never scaled a mountain I don’t think I’ll ever know the allure and pull of doing something so dangerous even though I find it intensely inspiring and exciting. What does the call of the mountain and the ice sound like - sometimes it sounds like the voice of your mother. Read on Victory Journal about a son’s journey to get closer to his mother the famous Alison Hargreaves who died after scaling K2.
Ahead of the Curve
One of the interesting micro-industries around elections is forecast modelling or in layman’s terms trying to predict the future. Millions of people click through to try and understand which way and election might swing, how a county might vote or in the case of Covid-19 - how many people might die. It’s a morbid obsession that’s become a big part of our lives these days and in 2020 there was a scramble to create the most accurate covid forecast. Enter stage left, one guy with no experience in medicine or viruses who built a forecast model that beat out every hundred-dollar-backed institute to predict deaths due to corona virus with in 5 cases. Read how he did so on Bloomberg Businessweek.