Monday 22 December 2014

Trivia (should have been 14 September)

Summer Games: 1938
via Shorpy Historical Photo Archive – Vintage Fine Art Prints by Dave
Summer Games: 1938
“New York street scene – boys playing”
Photo by Jack Allison for the Resettlement Administration
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Memories of DOS gaming
via Boing Boing by Rob Beschizza
Were you alive and computery in the early- to mid-1990s? If so, you may have been the second-most elite caste of the gaming master race: a DOS gamer.

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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Paradox of modern parenthood
In our child-centric age, nothing is more suspicious than a parent who doesn’t admit to an occasional urge to flee the home… more

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50 of the Greatest Characters in Literature
via Flavorwire by Emily Temple
One of the things literature does better than almost any other medium is allow us to experience another person’s quality of mind, and sometimes even inhabit it. It follows, then, that every avid reader has a favorite literary character – whether they’re beloved for dastardly deeds, tough-girl antics, sex appeal, or a high snark quotient – and that there are many impossibly good ones out there.
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Interesting choices.

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Movies teach us morals
via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow

Carl Plantinga’s talk, “Spectator Judge: Affect and Ethics in Narrative Film and Television”, delivered to the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image, argues that movies powerfully instill moral values in the people who watch them, by cueing us to “judge, believe, and feel emotions in various ways”. This is the thesis of the novel I’m working on, so I read the summary of the talk with great interest:
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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Steven Pinker on writing
Step aside, Strunk and White. To combat the scourge of bad writing, we need a science of crafting stylish prose. Cue Steven Pinker… more

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The Iris Nebula in a Field of Dust
via Big Think by Big Think editors
Bt_iris_nebula_final
Doesn’t this look like the cosmic equivalent of a field of irises?
Perhaps that’s why this cloud of gas and dust is called the Iris Nebula.
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17th century skull pocket watch
via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz
Skullll
Don’t tell anyone, but I plan to break into the Musée du Louvre and snatch this 17th century skull watch made by Jean Rousseau, grandfather of philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Free to choose?
America is obsessed with choice: myriad TV channels, the tens of thousands of items in the supermarket. At what cost to the national psyche?… more

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We may think we are the first organisms to remake the planet, but life has been transforming the earth for aeons
via 3 Quarks Daily (Robert Hazen in AEON)
Banded iron rock, mineral layers compressed in vibrant colours found in the Hammersley Range, Western Australia. Photo by Mint Images/ Frans Lanting/Getty
One could easily be forgiven for thinking that life bears little connection to rocks. From high-school science curricula to Wikipedia, the institutional separation of geology and biology seems as ingrained today as when the 18th-century Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus first distinguished animals, vegetables, and minerals. After all, what could be more different than a fragrant rose and a cold chunk of granite?
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