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

Celebrating the wartime pleasure of getting loaded and cleaning your guns via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow

This wartime ad from Life encourages you to get loaded on fine booze at home while cleaning your guns, to leave the roads and railways clear for Our Boys.
Life, October 16, 1944

Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Carrie Nation is dead, but prohibitionism lives on, despite a history of hypocrisy and failure. Self-righteousness, it seems, never goes out of style... more

Ironclads, 1859-1899 via Retronaut by Chris
“Ironclads were steam-propelled warships protected by armour plates. The rapid pace of change in the ironclad period meant that many ships were obsolete as soon as they were complete.” – Wikipedia
See all the images here – I gave up trying to decide which one to include as I’m not that much into ships.

Georgette Heyer: the queen of romance via Reading Copy Book Blog by Richard Davies
Unless you are a fan of historical romance, then there is a good chance that you will be unfamiliar with Georgette Heyer. Who is she? For a start, she’s one of AbeBooks’ top 10 best-selling authors during the 16-year history of this company.
Last time we looked she was behind William Shakespeare, C.S. Lewis, Agatha Christie and Stephen King but ahead of J.K. Rowling, Charles Dickens and James Patterson.
Read more about Georgette Heyer and her literary legacy.

Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Few questions divide the classical-music world as starkly as this: Philip Glass – mind-numbing bore or bliss-inducing genius?... more
My money is on the former – but I have not listened to everything he wrote and my all-time favourite composer, Mahler, wrote some things I don’t like. You pays your money and takes your choice!

Why Online Dating Sites Don’t Work via Big Think by Orion Jones
In an analysis of 313 studies on established relationships, psychologists found that the metrics measured by online dating sites, such as personality traits and attitudes, had virtually no effect on relationship well-being.
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Sleepy or Drunk? You’re Ready to Problem Solve! via Big Think by Orion Jones
In a scientific study, college students were asked to solve a brain teaser early in the morning and late at night to measure problem solving abilities relative to alertness levels. Prior to answering the riddle, most students self-identified as night owls, implying ...
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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
The adolescent brain. Children are reaching puberty earlier and entering adulthood later. The result: Considerable weirdness... more

Out of the lethal mouths of babes via Prospero by F.C. | New York

In a crisis, we rely on our ability to communicate. But what if speech made people ill? In The Flame Alphabet, a new novel from Ben Marcus, the voices of children are fatal to adults. It is a sudden, mysterious epidemic, which taxes the bonds of families and forces parents to make impossible choices. The story is narrated by Sam, a father in a small Jewish community, who recounts the toxic effects of his teenage daughter’s speech on himself and his ailing wife Claire. Fighting time, he begins experimenting on children in order to save himself and his family. For spiritual reserve, he and Claire tune in to underground radio dispatches from a religious figure of mysterious identity.
Mr Marcus’s previous novels have pushed at the limits of the form, earning him a reputation for work that is smart, experimental and not widely read. In The Flame Alphabet he has delivered a book that is both aesthetically interesting and a pleasure to read. 

Full article
The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus is published by Knopf and out now.
Book trailer

Toy-sized quadrotors flying in formation via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow
Researchers from GRASP Lab at the University of Pennsylvania developed software to allow toy-sized nano quadrotors to fly in tight, precise and eerie formation. Gmoke sez, “William Gibson dreams of a mass of these things comprising a flying skyscraper. I imagine them as surveillance and policing drones ready to stop the OWS action or Arab Spring before it can start.”
A Swarm of Nano Quadrotors (Thanks, Gmoke!)