Sunday 19 August 2012

10 stories and links I found educative or interesting (nothing weird in this lot!)

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The Squeaky Wheel: 1904
via Shorpy Historical Photo Archive - Vintage Fine Art Prints by Dave
The Squeaky Wheel: 1904
Circa 1904 “Michigan Central Railroad engineer oiling up before the start”
8x10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company
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I’m not a railway fanatic but this photo really got to me for some reason.

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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Mullahs and masturbation. When clerics turn sexologists, the results tend to be strange. Look no further than Iran, where all sex is political...more

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Neuroscience + Supercomputing + Nanotechnology = Human Brain
via Big Think by Orion Jones
Scientists at IBM are combining our current knowledge in the fields of neuroscience, supercomputing and nanotechnology to build a completely new computing architecture which mimics the functionality, low-power and small size of the human brain.
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It’s Hard to Be Happy
via Big Think by Andrew Cohen
One unforgettable day in New York City, over ten years ago, I was crossing Park Avenue on my way to give a lecture when a Yellow Cab that had decided not to stop at a red light careened out of control at about forty miles an hour.
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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Jean-François Champollion, father of Egyptology, was a radical revolutionary with a taste for trashy novels. Overwork killed him at the age of 41... more

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Why Cheap Fashion Is Costing Us so Much
via Big Think by Orion Jones
If you’ve ever bought outfits from retailers like H&M or Zara, you know that the supposed luxury of cheap fashion gets substantially less glamorous when the stitching starts to fall apart.
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My cheap clothing comes mainly from charity shops – if an item has survived long enough to be pre-worn then it’s unlikely to fall apart at the first wearing!
I now have a wardrobe of better quality clothes from the likes of Laura Ashley, Marks & Spencer and Monsoon some of which I have had for well over ten years.

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Jantzen Swimwear, 1950s
via Retronaut by Amanda
I think we simply have to have the pipe-smoking guy messing around near a buoy saying “danger” which holds, or doesn’t, two pretty girls.

See the rest of Amanda’s selection here.
Source: X-Ray Delta One

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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
More and more, physics is encroaching on philosophy. No surprise that philosophers feel threatened. They should, says Lawrence Krauss. Science progresses, and philosophy doesn't... more

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A Nun’s Story – Lessons from History
via 3quarksdaily by Zujaja Tauqeer
Via Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt at Wonders & Marvels:
It is not often that my research is topical. Most people feign polite interest when I tell them I study sixteenth-century Spanish convents. But with the recent controversy over the Catholic Church’s scrutiny of the behaviour and activities of American nuns, the subject of female monasticism has enjoyed an unprecedented timeliness.
My goal in this essay is not to enter the twenty-first century polemic; I’m much more comfortable in the sixteenth century. I would offer, however, the following observation: that certain assumptions and even stereotypes undergird the remarks of some of the participants in the current debate. And here is where history can be so useful. Arguably, we root some of our modern interpretations of nuns in what we think convents were like in the premodern period.
Continue reading
However, to call this item “an essay” stretches my imagination more than somewhat!

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A Quantum Theory of Black Holes Could Solve Physics’ Mysteries
via Big Think by Orion Jones
In an attempt to reconcile Einstein’s theory of gravity with quantum mechanics, two European physicists are attempting to explain black holes using the language of quantum physics. Because particles are the building blocks of quantum theory, Georgi Dvali of CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, and Cesar Gomez of the Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain, chose gravitons, the hypothetical particles that are thought to carry the force of gravity.
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