For the next few months, twelve British volunteers will live in a house also populated by four domestic robots while a team of researchers observe their experiences. In the house is Sunflower, a medication scheduling and dispensing robot; CareRobot is a servant bot ... Read More
Preserving human history in a National Park via Boing Boing by Maggie Koerth-Baker
Northern Wisconsin, along the coast of Lake Superior, is rural, but it isn’t wild. Farms and orchards have been cleared here for generations. Highways twist through the woods. There are grocery stores and bars. There is Dairy Queen and the Internet. Hippies raise chickens on organic farms. Good old boys buy high-tension fishing line at Wal-Mart. The Oak Ridge Boys are playing at the Indian casino.
But, just a few miles offshore, you can find land where time seems to have stopped a couple of hundred years ago. The Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, a group of 22 islands just North of Chequamegon Bay, are meant to be wilderness. All but one are uninhabited. From a passing boat, or even from the occasional sandy bay, it’s easy to imagine that they were never inhabited at all. Sandstone cliffs make landings difficult. The forests that top the cliffs are thick and deep, broken only by trails carved out by the Park Service. You look at it, and you think that this must be the America that local Ojibwe knew before European colonization – pristine, unchanged.
The truth is far more interesting.
Read more and be astounded by the photographs (13 of them) and the history of these little islands.
via Arts and Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Jews playing Wagner. It happens, though not much in Israel, where the Nazis’ favourite composer is unofficially banned. But music has many anti-Semites – why single out Wagner?…Go and look for yourself – mildly amusing!
Fifth of Brits have lost a mobile phone via PC Advisor News by Carrie-Ann Skinner
A fifth of Britons have lost a mobile phone, yet two-thirds of us don’t bother password-protecting our handsets. Security company Sophos warns users of the dangers of leaving handsets unprotected now that so much personal information is stored on or accessible from them.
Read all about it – and get help to set up your security system.
via Arts and Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
“To be, or not to be” is not original to Shakespeare. In effect, Hamlet is quoting, not thinking. All language carries baggage...more
Vita and Violet: The Greatest Bloomsbury Love Story from The New York Times Book Review via 3quarksdaily by Azra Raza
“Heaven preserve us from all the sleek and dowdy virtues, such as punctuality, conscientiousness, fidelity and smugness!” So wrote Violet Keppel in her unruly call to arms to the great ruling passion of her life, Vita Sackville-West.
Paradoxes of memory via Eurozine articles by Helmut König
Forgetting violence was long seen as a condition for long-term peace after war or civil war. But the amnesty clause is only realistic when certain rules of war were upheld, writes Helmut König. Wherever people cannot forget, only remembrance remains. [English version]
via Arts and Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Ted Hughes, it was said, went through women “like a guy harvesting corn”. Thus Sylvia Plath, the martyred saint of wronged wives. Sounds plausible, but...more
The secret code of the alchemists via Boing Boing by Maggie Koerth-Baker
Science historian Larry Principe studies the European alchemists, proto-chemists who tried to turn base metals into gold by combining mythology, religion, and the beginnings of true science. In this video [see link below], he explains why alchemists’ notebooks – their records of experiments – are so difficult to understand, and how an alchemist might have gone about turning a science experiment into fanciful, analogy-filled secret code.
Video Link
via Arts and Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Agnes de Mille democratized ballet, injecting a dose of pop-art cheekiness into the ordered, insidery world of formal dance...more
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