More than 300 years ago, a man thought lost at sea re-appeared in Italy with accounts of a civilization inhabiting the interior sea of an undiscovered southern continent. Giuseppe Cognomi composed numerous volumes on this advanced and isolated culture - which he called The Linians - and the singular environment they inhabited at the bottom of the world. Though widely disregarded by the scientific community, the tradition of Linian scholarship has been kept alive through the years by a devoted few. The Society for Linian Studies is the first organized attempt to preserve Cognomi's legacy and progress his research.

Via Boing Boing. These guys sure are going to be pissed that we messed up all their ice.

Strange Maps is just about exactly what it sounds like, but it's also the most fun specialty blog I've visited in a good while. Where else are you going to find the the Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map of the World, which proves Sweden's status as secular paradise in graph form, plus a mapping of Middle-Earth onto Regular-Europe, a mapping of how evolution is taught in the U.S., the world as seen from 9th Avenue, Tatooine, and the most generic country ever? At right: Inside the Hollow Earth.

Via Cynical-C, which this morning also brings us "Smells Like Teen Spirit" as performed by choir.