Good Coal and Wood: 1909Good Coal and Wood: 1909
via Shorpy Historical Photo Archive - Vintage Fine Art Prints by Dave
New York circa 1909
“Broadway – Saranac Lake, Adirondack Mountains”
8x10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company
View original post
=============================================
Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Because good theology makes for good humor, The Daily Show has more fun with exegetics than any other show on television... more
=============================================
The physics of crowds can kill
via Boing Boing by Maggie Koerth-Baker
Almost two years ago, 21 people died when they were crushed to death in the crowd at the Love Parade music festival in Germany. Now, scientists have been able to pinpoint exactly what lead to those deaths. Here's a hint: It wasn't a stampede, there's no evidence of intentional pushing, and it doesn't look like mass hysteria had anything to do with the deaths. So how did those 21 people die? Physics.
via Jennifer Ouellette
=============================================
Young Winston Churchill in uniform, 1895
via Retronaut by Chris
See larger image and one other here.
=============================================
Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Musicologists tend to discuss harmony in technical terms. So they write knowingly about Duke Ellington and miss the central mystery of the music.. .more
=============================================
Bacteria, I Want You Back: Five Friendly Microscopic Creatures In Your Body
via Big Think by Stephen Coscia
We think of bacteria as irredeemably evil microscopic creatures; their sole purpose being to make us sick. Thus, we have taken up such practices as incessantly washing our hands and blasting our bodies with antibiotics at the sound of the slightest cough.
Read More
=============================================
24 Writers’ Jobs, Before They Were Writers
via Reading Copy Book Blog by Beth Carswell
MentalFloss put up a great post on 26 June about the early jobs of 24 famous writers. It’s definitely worth clicking through to read the whole post, but here are seven of Beth’s favourites:
2. William S. Burroughs was an exterminator.
4. Nabokov was an entomologist of underappreciated greatness.
7. Ken Kesey was a voluntary participant in CIA psych tests.
10. Zane Grey was a dentist.
13. Haruki Murakami (whose most recent title is 1Q84) worked in a record store during college.
15. Before writing 1984, George Orwell (born Eric Arthur Blair) was an officer of the Indian Imperial Police in Burma.
24. Harper Lee …
=============================================
Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
The menhaden, a small fish, is big business in the Atlantic, where predation involves not just ecology, but also economics and politics.. .more
A frightening story in anyone’s book.
=============================================
The perilous world of banana slug sex
via Boing Boing by Maggie Koerth-Baker
Banana slugs are hermaphrodites. Every slug has both a penis (which pops out of a pore on its head, like you do) and a vagina. Or, rather, every slug should have a penis. The truth is that quite a few of them don’t and the story behind that discrepancy is rather strange and horrifying. Since there’s little I love more than strange and horrifying stories from nature, you get to hear all about it.
At The Last Word On Nothing, Cassandra Willyard tells the story of a nearly 100-year-old effort by scientists to understand why some banana slugs appear to be missing their penises, or have penises that are stunted. We have known since 1916 how those penises came to be missing. Willyard describes the situation, which you can also watch in action in the video above:
Continue reading here and realise that there are times when nature in the raw is just raw!
=============================================
The Molecular Nature of Water
via Britannica Blog by Britannica Editors
As far as chemical formulas go, H2O is probably the most widely recognized in the world. But for as much as we might think we know about this everyday substance, when it comes to the basic molecular nature of water, we hold some of the strangest misconceptions. For example, it is common to think that as water boils, it decomposes into separate hydrogen molecules and oxygen molecules. Likewise, some may think that the shape of the individual H2O molecules differs for each of water’s three states, ice, liquid, and vapour. The diagram shown here helps demonstrate why neither of these statements is true.
Credit: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Continue reading here – and very interesting it is, too.
No comments:
Post a Comment