10 non-work-related items that I found fun or interesting

Cartoon Library & Museum via Librarians’ Internet Index: New This Week
Website for this library and museum that houses “more than 400,000 original works of [cartoon] art”. Features a description of major collections (and browsable lists of clipping file subjects and topics), a cartoon image database with selected scanned images from the collection, digital albums (such as of Lyonel Feininger's 1906 comic strip and Nell Brinkley's “Brinkley Girls&amp”), digital exhibits, and related material.
From The Ohio State University Libraries.

via Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Did our Neolithic ancestors start to grow crops so they could bake bread? Perhaps not: maybe the real point of agriculture was beer...more and more

via Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Forgive everybody everything. So say the self-help gurus. Maybe they’re right. But should forgiveness be reduced to something passive and empty, a sanctimonious way of simply moving on?...more

via Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Where does our sense of right and wrong come from? Is it a gift from God? From innate human reason? Moral naturalists take a different approach, says David Brooks...more

via Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
The voracious scavenging of vultures has long helped prevent the spread of disease in India. But at the carcass dump on the outskirts of Bikaner, the sky is empty...more

via Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
If God were a gardener, what kind of garden would he cultivate? How, given the garden, might we tell the difference between his presence and his absence? Anthony Gottlieb wonders... more

Walhalla is a department store
via Eurozine articles by Thomas Lenz
When they emerged in imperial Germany, department stores were admired as technological achievements yet feared for their corrosive effect on the state. This was typical of the “reactionary modernity” that went on to form the core of Nazism, writes Thomas Lenz.
More (sorry, German only available for the full article and auto-translation doesn’t read well to me).

via Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
The collapse of the Soviet Union was startling, but today it's clear that Russia is inching toward another perestroika moment... more

via Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Harun Yahya's media empire spans the Muslim world. His message is clear and influential: Darwinism is a "satanic plot"... more
When Europe was in the Dark Ages Arabic/Muslim science flourished. Why the reversal today?

via Red Ferret Journal
Clockwords
Beautifully crafted, addictively entertaining, tremendous fun. What more do you need to know? To play – type in long words as fast as you can, to shoot down nasty spiders intent on doing you harm. Fab.[Via Metafilter]

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