The Business of Mining Asteroids via Big Think by Michio Kaku
Recently, a group of Google and Microsoft billionaires, film maker James Cameron, directors of the X-Prize Foundation (Peter Diamandis), founder of the commercial space tourism company Space Adventures (Eric Anderson), former astronauts, etc. have banded together to propose a new, game-changing technology: mining the asteroids.
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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Is atheism futile? Probably. Faith is a natural response to human ignorance. Besides, the history of attempts to destroy religion is littered with the corpses... more
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Bekonscot Model Village, 1930s
via Retronaut by Chris
Source: Bekonscot Model Village
This capsule was curated by Pier Paolo Rinaldi
And here is an idea of what it looks like today.
Want more? Full details here.
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Defaulting to Conservatism via Big Think by Kayt Sukel
The brain is a complex and demanding machine. Given the amount of resources required to run the average brain, it’s no surprise that it takes a few shortcuts when it can. After all, it’s the ultimate multi-tasker—and needs to distribute its energy in a smart and efficient fashion.
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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
The wisest fool. The much-feted postmodern semiotician Umberto Eco is never less than pleased with himself. Did you know that he has 50,000 books “in my various homes”?... more
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Posters for Burlesque Shows, 1890s via Retronaut by Chris
Source: Performing Arts Posters Collection, Library of Congress
See Chris’s selection here
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Pendulum Waves via 3quarksdaily by Abbas Raza
This has to be the most fascinating, mesmerising video I have seen in a very long time.
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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
The Anglosphere in decline? Nonsense. Talk of a debt-saddled, graying, decadent West sliding toward a cliff is exaggerated - wildly... more
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The Price of Sex in South America: A Guide for Secret Service Agents
via Big Think by Marina Adshade
Heading to South America to protect your head of state? Avoid potentially embarrassing conflict with this handy region guide to the price of sexual services prepared by a team of trained economists. Researchers have created a nationally representative data set that includes the per-transaction price of sex workers who are specifically selling sex to wealthy foreign men in nightclubs, bars and brothels.
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Daniel Pinkwater’s Mrs Noodlekugel, a kids’ story that’s as silly and pleasurable as ice-cream via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow
Daniel Pinkwater, a much-loved living treasure of children’s literature, has a new book out. It’s called Mrs Noodlekugel and it is a simple, silly pleasure that feels like the end-product of a lifetime of telling children’s stories, carefully removing all the elements that are extraneous to young readers’ enjoyment until nothing but the essentials remain. I like to think of Pinkwater’s books that way, a kind of skeletal Jenga tower, every extraneous block removed and used to make the structure taller.
Nick and Maxine live in a high-rise apartment building, and one day they discover that one window overlooks a tiny, old fashioned cottage in a small green between their tower and several others. The building’s janitor tells them that this is Mrs Noodlekugel’s house, and when they quiz their parents about it, they are forbidden to go there.
So they go there. And Mrs Noodlekugel is a sweet old lady who has a talking cat and four nearly-blind mice who get the crumbs from their tea-parties, and she is perfectly pleasant and tells them they’re welcome the next day for a gingerbread baking project that the talking cat is undertaking. When the kids tell their parents about this, their parents reveal that they knew all about her, and that she is their new babysitter, and the kids realize they’ve been tricked. But they don't mind. They’ve got Mrs Noodlekugel and the baking. The mice help. And the gingerbread mice – which the real mice roll around on – come to life when they come out of the oven. Everyone’s delighted by this, and then the crows eat them. But that’s OK. They were only gingerbread. And besides, it would be unsanitary to eat cookies that the nearly blind mice rolled around on.
The End.
Adam Stower’s illustrations are just a little old fashioned, enough to make them seem, you know, a bit classy, but without losing any of their kid appeal. And Pinkwater is, as always, the Fred Astaire of weird, making the fantastic seem effortless. Reading Pinkwater as a boy made me the happy mutant I am today. Reading Pinkwater today keeps me happily mutated in the face of the world’s relentless insistence on normalcy.
Example of an illustration
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