And yet more trivia

Europeans were not the first painters to use oils
via 3quarksdaily by Abbas Raza on 26 April
from John Cartwright in Physics World
Europeans are often a little too eager to take credit for innovation. Copernicus may have formalized the heliocentric model of the solar system in the early 1500s, for example, but the Pole only did so with the help of vast tables of astronomical measurements taken 200 years earlier in Iran. Even the scientific method itself, often thought to have emerged from Galileo's experiments in Italy around the same time, has its roots with Arab scientists of the 11th century.
Brilliant -- there's nothing new under the sun!

Frith Photo Library
via Intute: Social Sciences Research Tools and Methods gateway on 6 May
Over 360,000 photographs of towns, villages and other geographical locations in the UK allowing then and now comparisons.
Take care to check out the copyright information.


Arts & Letters Daily on 27 April
As a student, Tony Judt was an ardent backer of Labor Zionism, worked on a kibbutz and volunteered in the 1967 war. But times change, and so did he... more


Interrogating the CIA
via Mr Bojangles by Tom Ilube on 22 April
Yesterday afternoon I joined a small group of men in grey suits in a nondescript building in central London to meet with and ask searching questions of the CIA. No, no, no! Not THAT CIA, you silly billy. I mean Kim Cameron, the jovial, highly respected Chief Identity Architect of Microsoft Corp.


The impact of the hive mind -- all of us are smarter than one of us
via TechRepublic Blogs by Tricia Liebert on 14 April
With the growth of the Internet and human beings' natural desire to group together, the "hive mind" has become a reality. Now all we have to do is figure out all the myriad applications of that mind.

BBC plotted to strangle ITV with "Archers"
Archives show that the BBC manipulated the storyline of its long-running radio soap opera to draw attention away from the launch of commercial television in 1955
Read more » from the Financial Times

Arts & Letters Daily 4 May 2008
Classical music: abandoned, left behind sulking in its tent as culture moves on, with the action happening somewhere else... more

A Music-Recognition Breakthrough
via Pogue's Posts by David Pogue on 22 April
O.K., whoa. I just read about a new computer program that can listen to a recorded chord in music and figure out what notes are in it. May not sound like much, but it’s never been done before.

Friday fun
via Intute's Science, Engineering & Technology Blog by Anne on 9 May
Another fun website this week. The Exploratorium is a museum of science, art and human perception located in San Francisco. Its website has many interesting resources and activities including the science of cooking, the science behind your favourite sports, earthquakes, climate change and frogs.


What Happened At the Old Bailey?
via ResearchBuzz by admin on 28 April
If you have English ancestry, an interest in your family's history, and some patience, do I have a site for you. It's a website aggregating the proceeding of the trials at the Old Bailey (the Central Criminal Court in England) from 1674-1913.