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

The benefits of early money-laundering via Prospero by M.J.
Renaissance-era Florence is remembered not for its bankers but for its beauty. Yet the city is now hosting a splendid exhibition that reaffirms the important link between the two. High finance not only funded high art, but its money and movement helped to fuel the humanist ideals that inspired the Renaissance. This show, curated by Tim Parks, a British writer based in Italy, and Ludovica Sebregondi, an Italian art historian, considers the influence of 15th-century financiers on Italian art and culture.
“Money and Beauty: Bankers, Botticelli and the Bonfire of the Vanities” is at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence until January 22nd 2012
In lieu of being able to go to Florence (I wish) I Googled the exhibition title. Most of the upmarket journals have very similar text to that used by The Economist’s Prospero but the pictures are vastly different. 

Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Epicureanism is not about heedless hedonism, says Stephen Greenblatt. Rather, it is an antidote to the allure of limitless power... more

A surprising theory about global variations in intelligence via 3quarksdaily by Abbas Raza
Christopher Eppig in Scientific American:

A great deal of research has shown that average IQ varies around the world, both across nations and within them. The cause of this variation has been of great interest to scientists for many years. At the heart of this debate is whether these differences are due to genetics, environment or both.
Higher IQ predicts a wide range of important factors, including better grades in school, a higher level of education, better health, better job performance, higher wages, and reduced risk of obesity. So having a better understanding of variations in intelligence might yield a greater understanding of these other issues as well.

More here

.High Heels: Take Two via Britannica Blog by Debra Mancoff and Michal Raz-Russo
Can you walk in high heels? Marilyn Monroe certainly knew how to do it. Think of that scene in Niagara (1953; dir. Henry Hathaway), when as Rose Loomis, the frustrated wife of a jealous man, she strolls away from the camera, her shapely hips swaying side to side.
Or what about Sarah Jessica Parker who, as sprightly single gal Carrie Bradshaw in the HBO series Sex in the City (1998-2004), convinced her women viewers that they too could leap over puddles and trip down the streets of the Upper East Side of Manhattan in towering Manolo Blahniks and sky-high Jimmy Choos?
But the logistics of moving in high heels are far more complicated. Parker is a trained ballerina who got to remove those shoes as soon as the director called cut. And Monroe aided the undulation of her signature walk by wearing a specially altered pair of shoes, with one heel shaved a fraction of an inch lower than the other. Yet, season after season, we look to the runways for new innovations in shoe design that will lift our spirits as well as give us more height.
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Fascinating. How to wear stilettos – and I can still remember how to do it even if the arthritis no longer allows me to! 

via Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
In the West, graffiti is an empty, often clichéd visual commodity. In the rest of the world, it’s the lingua franca of political revolt...more...more


Edison’s Secret Spirit Experiments via HOW TO BE A RETRONAUT by Chris
See the evidence thanks to Modern Mechanix
I had not thought to see a practical inventor such as Edison playing around with trying to contact the spirits of dead people but …

UK atomic clock is most accurate via BBC News - Technology
Tests show that the UK’s atomic clock at the National Physical Laboratory boasts the highest long-term accuracy in the world.
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via Arts and Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
India's love for correction fluid and carbon paper endures in the computer age. "Bicycles survived cars. Why not typewriters?"... more

The Concentration Camp via Eurozine articles by Richard Overy
The concentration camp is still popularly viewed as a distinctly national-socialist phenomenon. Yet the first camps were established well before the Third Reich, Richard Overy argues, and were widespread geographically.
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Human disease kills coral via Boing Boing by Maggie Koerth-Baker
In news that would be completely fascinating, were it not so damn depressing: One of the causes behind Caribbean coral die-offs seems to be a bacteria, spread from humans to the coral through sewage. It’s the first time that a human disease has ever been shown to kill an invertebrate.