A New Stroke: Why Australian crawl is on its last laps

Up-and-coming swimmer Bada Choi, along with his unorthodox support team, is poised to disrupt the entire sport of freestyle swimming. We investigate Bada, the minds behind his success, and the novel machine-learning code that has enabled it.

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A Vanished City

The superb city of Aresen stands in the highlands of Isol, set inland from the harbours that feed it. A stream of airship traffic shuffles about the multi-towered citadel of the skyport. Skyscrapers of glittering crystal and steel and stone line parkways teeming with exotic plants and sessile tentacled animals, appendages drifting lazily.

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On Terrors from the Deep and Other Oceanic Mysteries - The Journal of Anther Strein

Hauled to the surface with this equipment was an endlessly fascinating parade of oddity, of which angler fish and giant isopods were the least; creatures with vast, gazing eyes and long, needle-like teeth; pale-skinned fish with immense, unfolding jaws and horrific grimaces; crabs with legspans as great as a Maragana is tall. And, on the largest of these animals, tooth or beak wounds that could only have been inflicted by creatures of much greater size.

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Fourth Year Blues

Schedule: Fourth Year, Semester 2

Week 3

Monday

  • Produce a spreadsheet of your grades for the semester to calculate a running mark. Fiddle with the pending assignment marks to determine the minimum required for a distinction. Reason that Excel is an important workplace skill and that this is not a waste of time. Suppress the anxiety of looming assignments.

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The Marine Platypus and an Ancestry Unveiled - The Journal of Anther Strein

The marine platypus keeps mainly to the warmer waters surrounding northern Proesus, as it lacks an insulating layer--like the blubber of the marspeel or the dense waterproofed feathers of the scalade--significant enough to engage in its lifestyle in the colder climes. Relative to its size, its laying burrows are much smaller and simpler than those of, say, the upriver platypus, Dulaiwarrung yemisibi; those elaborate tunnels are frequently found at tens of heights in length, equipped with blind ends to confuse intruders, plugs against flooding, and a lining of dead leaves for insulation.

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Getting a PhD, Week 9: On Passion and Talent

Coming into the research year of my Masters, I was full of uncertainty. If I was either naturally talented or highly motivated - preferably both, as it seems the scientists that surround me are - I knew that I could do it, could become a true scientist. For the previous six months or so I hadn't felt either.

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The Clever, Cooperative Cruelty of the Occisor - The Journal of Anther Strein

As with other chireks, one might well be charmed by the curiosity and playfulness of the occisor--until one has seen the cruelty and efficiency with which they dismantle their prey, often with that very same merriment.

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Getting a PhD, Week 5: The Joy of Sextractor

I love programming. There is little more satisfying than watching your hard-written program cascade into reality. It's the closest I've ever come to feeling like a god. However, this rarely - perhaps never - happens on the first try. I present the following as an example of the numerous frustrations that can encumber scientific research.

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A Fierce Marine Rivalry and a Curious Resemblance - The Journal of Anther Strein

Another naturalist once called the ocean 'the greatest desert of all'. Pithy ironies aside, his analogy would approach accuracy only if the desert was teeming with life underground, presenting the semblance of lifelessness only at the surface. There is actually some truth to this, but not to the extent required of the metaphor. For, as I am now steadily learning, the ocean is utterly laden with life, rich at every layer with hidden activity. If one judges by the fleeting glimpses offered at the surface, one will be sorely misled.

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Getting a PhD, Week 1: Indexing Starts at Zero

My name is Lachlan Marnoch, and I have just begun a PhD - the degree of a Doctor of Philosophy, an antiquated title from back when philosophy was anything that involved deep thinking about any topic. The specific flavour of thinking which I’ll be doing is on astrophysics. What that means is that I will use physics to try and make sense of information from the night sky. As with my Masters, I’ll be studying fast radio bursts - very brief, very mysterious bursts of radio waves originating from other galaxies. They’re pretty fascinating, and I’ll get to explaining more about them soon.

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At Sea with the Remarkable Maragana - The Journal of Anther Strein

In order to facilitate my observations, Captain Naaki has provided me with a remarkable diving suit, one designed for Paluchard use. It is equipped with a canister of magically-compressed air and a complicated apparatus for delivering it to the mouth as needed. Add to that a pair of strange airtight glasses--Paluchard can see adequately in water, but the salt of the ocean stings the eyes--and I was ready to accompany the crew on their fishing dives, so long as I stayed out of their way.

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A Journey Amended in Delta City - The Journal of Anther Strein

The various branches of the bayou re-combined into the river's single fantastic trunk, and then divided once more as it streamed into the Great Delta. Seabirds begin to appear overhead; the rainforest’s eucalypts, palms and raintrees give way gradually to mangrove, and mangrove then to kelp forest and open ocean. It is into this vast body of water, the West Spine Ocean, that the Veduka River finally pours, but not before filtering through the islands of the Great Delta. Such is the force of this outpouring that, for much of the year, the waters remain unsalted for some distance, and can be spotted by vessels approaching from the north or east long before land is visible. Such ships often take the muddied water as their first sign of impending land, and use it to guide their way to Delta Harbour. Assisting in this task are the great light-towers of Delta City, one of which I sit in the shadow of while writing these words.

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A Tour of the Veduka River, Part II - The Journal of Anther Strein

My sole prior visit to Bayou was on that first journey to Forum. It was, at that time, the most people I had ever seen in a single place. The city has changed since then, its engorged suburbs now sprawling from the islands onto the River’s southern banks. Although certainly larger, in reality, than it was when I first passed through, it seems somehow far smaller than in my memory. The world is vast, and the more I see of it the lesser seems all it contains – especially the works of sapient hands. Beside a great mountain or a vast desert, how can a mere city compare?

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A Tour of the Veduka River, Part I - The Journal of Anther Strein

Home to a huge variety of fish and other wildlife, starting at the tiny and spanning to the vast, the River is the lifeblood of the rainforest kingdoms. It traces a sinuous, winding route from its glacial sources in the Crown Mountains all the way to distant Delta, where it pours into the Spine Ocean – at every step, accumulating a greater flow from its many tributaries. Even at its narrowest points, and during the dry season, the river is wide enough to swallow a large erefal tree laid length-way across its stream.

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