via Shorpy Historical Photo Archive – Vintage Fine Art Prints by Dave
New York circa 1917
“Skyscrapers, looking north toward towers of Woolworth and Singer buildings”
Double-barreled tower in the foreground is the Adams Express Building
8x10 glass negative, Detroit Publishing Co.
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What a Peahen Really Watches When a Peacock Tries to Impress Her
from Wired by Greg Miller via 3 Quarks Daily
When a peacock fans his plumage and struts his stuff, it’s an impressive sight. Or so it appears to us humans. What really matters, of course, is what the female he’s trying to impress makes of it. In a new study, scientists mounted tiny eye-tracking cameras on the heads of peahens to try to get inside their minds as they watched males’ courtship displays.
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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Against smart. We need less of TED, NPR, and the Ivies, and more punk rock, transcribed traffic reports, hunches, and intuition… more
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Tiny pink Stormtrooper
via BoingBoing by Cory Doctorow
Stephanie sent this pic of a tiny pink Stormtrooper cosplayer to Fashionably Geek. They say it was a little girl in there, but that seems to be citing facts not in evidence. In any event, this kid is hella cute.
Little Girl Proves Stormtroopers Look Good In Pink [Cosplay] [Amy Ratcliffe/Fashionably Geek]
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via Big Think by Sam McKerney
A paradox of selling technology in the 21st century is that it’s often more difficult to convince users that they need the latest gadget, even if that gadget is more advanced. The original iPhone was a marvel, but despite lavish improvements, each rendition somehow seems less impressive.
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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
The curious heresy of Shakespeare denial. Does historical evidence even matter to those who insist that the Bard was not the Bard?… more
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Dream a Little Bigger via Walk You Home
Toshiko Horiuchi-MacAdam is a crochet artist from Japan who makes gigantic crochet installations that act as both art and playgrounds. Toshiko’s installation art, once mistaken by children for a playground, suddenly found new life and she began working on many playgrounds in Japan.
To learn more, visit Toshiko Horiuchi-MacAdam’s bio.
More pictures here
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Ovid in Exile
via 3QuarksDaily
Publius Ovidius Naso invented exile the way Charles Dickens invented Christmas. Of course, the institution was there before, but it had not been given a definitive literary and cultural codification, a reference point for all subsequent experience. Exile in the ancient world was bound up in the identity of what we would call the individual with his or her community – not so much “family” in the ancestral sense of Native Americans and East Asians, but what we’ve come to think of as “the polity”, the city.
The power of exile as punishment is a construct of urban life. Exile is always exile from – and the community left behind has to remain a powerful element in the exile’s life, or else the dispossessed suffers only emigration. When an ancient was thrust into exile, he or she (yes – think of Dido) carried the City on his or her back; and the foundations of “daughter” cities traced back to the labourious expulsion from parents.
But all this was in the realm of legend, mythology, history. With Ovid, for the first time, we hear the voice of an exile in psychological and social depth – exulis hæc vox est: præbet mihi littera linguam, / et si non liceat scribere, mutus ero – “This is the voice of an exile: a letter serves as my tongue, / and if not permitted to write, I will be dumb.”
[1] Ovid would have appreciated the pun available in English translation but not to him: In Latin, littera, a letter of the alphabet, is a different word from epistula, a missive.
more from J. Kates at Harvard Review here
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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Alchemy, astrology, Egyptian magic. The occult was more than pseudoscience during the Enlightenment. It promised self-transcendence… more
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A lion: Joseph Paxton in the nineteenth century and today
via OUPblog by Tatiana Holway
Two hundred years ago today, on 3 August 1813, [201 years and a bit] Joseph Paxton turned ten. In a farm hand’s family of nine children, this was likely to have been a non-event. A decade after that, the day would also have come and gone like any other. At twenty, Paxton was pretty much on his own, working here and there in some outdoor capacity or other on nearby estates. While considering enrolling as an apprentice at the London Horticultural Society, the opportunity to train for an occupation as a gardener looked quite promising to a young man who otherwise had no prospects. Accepted at Chatsworth as a labourer later in 1823, Paxton was promoted to under-gardener within a couple of years. Then, after a few more months, the Duke of Devonshire proposed that he assume the post of head gardener. What this meant, apart from a fantastic break for Paxton, was that one hundred acres of pleasure grounds of one of the greatest of England’s great estates would come under the charge of a twenty-two-year-old greenhorn. The Duke, who leased land to the Horticultural Society, had happened to notice Paxton and find him agreeable. The officers of the society shrugged.
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