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

Ecological Specialization and Vulnerability of Coral-Feeding Butterflyfish (Science Up Front)
via Britannica Blog by Kara Rogers
Eating just one type of food when that food source is in decline might not seem like the best idea. But for the chevron butterflyfish (Chaetodon trifascialis), which specializes in eating only a few species of Acropora corals, all of which are in decline, researchers in Australia have found that the vulnerability that comes with dietary specialization may be counteracted by genetics and specifically the process of gene flow – the migration of genes between different populations of the same species.

Read more fascinating information here

via Arts and Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Jane Austen produced frivolous “feminine tosh”, says V.S. Naipaul. But the key to understanding Austen is not her gender, but her genius … more

Parents of the past paid hefty tuition fees via SocietyGuardian - news, comment and analysis on the public and voluntary sectors | guardian.co.uk by Stephen Bates
Families of 200 years ago had to pay exorbitant tuition fees to get their children trained, records of 500,000 apprentices from the 18th century show.
Dan Jones, of the Ancestry UK website which has put the records of apprenticeships online today, says: “The role was integral to the British way of life for centuries – so important that parents would often pay vast sums to have their child educated by the master seen as the best in his field.”
Read more of this fascinating article here.

How sex with Neanderthals made us stronger via 3quarksdaily by Azra Raza
From Science on MSNBC.com

Having a Neanderthal for a boyfriend wasn't always a bad thing. This is replica of an old Neanderthal man at the Neanderthal Museum in Mettmann, Germany.
Mating with Neanderthals and another group of extinct hominids, Denisovans, strengthened the human immune system and left behind evidence in the DNA of people today, according to new research. The findings add to the growing body of evidence that modern humans who left Africa around 65,000 years ago mated with Neanderthals and Denisovans — two archaic species that lived in Europe and Asia.More here.

via Arts and Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Marx was wrong: Capitalism, not communism, killed the bourgeoisie. Now there's no escaping the mercurial market forces. Prepare for further upheaval... more

If You Liked the “Bios Urn”, You'll Love “The Spirit Tree” via Big Think by Daniel Honan
In a previous post, Teddy Zareva wrote about a biodegradable urn made by the Spanish designer Martin Azua that turns you into a tree when you die. Big Think readers quickly warmed to this romantic notion of life after death in the form of “an eco solution”, and the post went viral. One big thinker …
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Always happy to consider anything ecologically sound but for me that does not mean expelling masses of CO₂ into the atmosphere with cremation and then trying to find a way of using my ashes. No, I intend to have a green burial – cardboard or wicker coffin buried in consecrated woodland. 
My chosen site is only 21 miles from home. By the time I leave this life there may be somewhere nearer but heck …

The lost city of Ugarit
I read an interesting article at 3QuarksDaily recently. [I’d advise skipping the first half of the video unless you have an interest in modern Syria in 2001 as opposed to the information about the history and archaeology.]
Anyway, as one does when hitting on something that interests you but about which you know nuffink you go to Wikipedia and, lo and behold, there is an entry about Ugarit.

via Arts and Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
For David Hume, conversation – the exchange of ideas, the free play of wit – contributed to “an increase of humanity”. But conversation is one thing; online chat is another … more

The people's coastline via Prospero by Intelligent Life
The seaside the English like to be beside looks different depending on who’s doing the looking. “King Lear” conjures up the coast of Albion as a place of epic scale and dizzying perspectives. Vera Lynn made the white cliffs of Dover a wartime symbol of home. There’s another coast that is altogether more domesticated and slipshod: bawdy in Donald McGill’s postcards, seedy in Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, gaudy in the Technicolor snaps of Martin Parr.

In this photo essay in Intelligent Life magazine, Sheila Rock views the English seaside through American eyes, as “a forgotten England”, writes Jasper Rees.
Read more

The Pulp Magazines Project via Peter Scott's Library Blog
The Pulp Magazines Project is an open-access digital archive dedicated to the study and preservation of one of the twentieth century’s most influential literary and artistic forms: the all-fiction pulpwood magazine. The project also provides information on the history of this important but long-neglected medium, along with biographies of pulp authors, artists, and their publishers.

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