Looking at the abandoned ruins of Gunkanjima, the island in Nagasaki Prefecture seen in movies such as Skyfall, Battle Royale II, and the live-action Attack on Titan, it can be hard to imagine anyone living there. The structures, deteriorating even as their remains become overgrown with vegetation, have such an atmosphere of oppressive emptiness that it’s easy to forget it really wasn’t all that long ago that Gunkanjima, or Battleship Island, was home to a thriving coal mining community.
http://en.rocketnews24.com/2016/02/06/50-year-old-video-of-japans-battleship-island-shows-life-in-the-deserted-isles-glory-days-%E3%80%90video%E3%80%91/
http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2015/12/03/how-a-5-ounce-bird-stores-10000-maps-in-its-head/
It’s been burying seeds since August. It’s hidden so many (one study says almost 100,000 seeds) in the forest, meadows, and tree nooks that it can now fly up, look down, and see little x’s marking those spots—here, here, not there, but here—and do this for maybe a couple of miles around. It will remember these x’s for the next nine months.
Sometimes they peck little holes in the topsoil or under the leaf litter. Sometimes they leave seeds in nooks high up on trees. Most deposits have two or three seeds, so that by the time November comes around, a single bird has created 5,000 to 20,000 hiding places. They don’t stop until it gets too cold.
Nobody knows exactly how the birds manage this, but the best guess is that when a nutcracker digs its hole, it will notice two or three permanent objects at the site: an irregular rock, a bush, a tree stump. The objects, or markers, will be at different angles from the hiding place.
Next, they measure. This seed cache, they note, “is a certain distance from object one, a certain distance from object two, a certain distance from object three,” says Tomback. “What they’re doing is triangulating. They’re kind of taking a photograph with their minds to find these objects” using reference points.
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20160128-a-a-milne-and-the-curse-of-pooh-bear
A. A. Milne, and son Christopher Robin
It was only after a frustrated period of fruitless job-searching after
university that Christopher came to feel real resentment – toward both
the stories and his father.
“He had made his own way by his own efforts
and he had left behind him no path that could be followed."
“In pessimistic moments, when I was trudging London in search of
an employer wanting to make use of such talents as I could offer, it
seemed to me, almost, that my father had got to where he was by climbing
upon my infant shoulders, that he had filched from me my good name and
had left me with nothing but the empty fame of being his son.”
