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

Even after I re-started the trivia posts I couldn't seem to keep up with three a week so here's just an odd one to keep going with. I seem to have amassed a lot of material that I've done nothing with and it is clogging up my drafts so I need to have a clear-out.

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Untethered: 1942

via Shorpy Historical Photo Archive – Vintage Fine Art Prints by Dave

May 1942

“Parris Island, South Carolina. Tactical formations of barrage balloons prevent dive bombing and the strafing of important ground installations. The Leathernecks are developing an excellent technique in this method of protecting important locations from enemy aircraft”

Photos by Alfred Palmer and Pat Terry for the Office of War Information.

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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Sex and economics. John Maynard Keynes – all moustache and bedroom eyes – had many lovers. Is there any connection between the people he slept with and the ideas he espoused?… more

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The techie novels of Nevil Shute
via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
Last month I had a conversation with Dale Grover (co-founder of Maker Works in Ann Arbor, Michigan – read his profile at Make) about the late author Nevil Shute. Shute is best known for the novel On the Beach (about a dying Earth after a global nuclear war) but we discussed a lesser-known novel of Shute’s called Trustee from the Toolroom, which I read five or six years ago and absolutely loved.
Continue reading
As an aside I own a copy of every book that Nevil Shute wrote, several of them are in poor condition and may need to be replaced at some point!

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Watch Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita in Two Minutes via Flavorwire by Emily Temple
  
Whether you’ve read Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita or not, this gorgeous little animation will make you want to pick it up post-haste. [via Open Culture]

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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Postmodern before postmodernism, existentialist before Sartre, ironic before irony was debased: Kierkegaard, rejected in his time, is a man for our time… more

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How to: Figure out what color dinosaurs really were
via Boing Boing by Maggie Koerth-Baker
Colour is just a happy side effect of physics. So Canadian scientists are turning to The Canadian Light Source synchrotron, a particle accelerator in Saskatchewan, to help them figure out what colour extinct duck-billed dinosaurs actually were. By putting a 70-million-year-old skull into the accelerator, they’ll be able to figure out what molecules — from pigments to melanin-producing cells — are still present in the fossil.
Francie Diep explains how it works at Popular Science.


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Universal Grit: A Sideways Look at Dust
via Encyclopaedia Britannica Blog by Gregory McNamee

Dust storm, Baca county, Colorado, c.1936. 
Credit: Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
Draw your finger across the top of a door, or a back corner of your refrigerator. Unless you’re an exceptionally thorough homemaker, the chances are good that you’ll find on your fingertip a chalky, sandy, grayish film – dust, that is.
There’s no shame in that discovery, although generations of cleaning-products manufacturers and their advertising agencies have lived and died by the hope that you’ll feel at least a little bit bad about that inescapable fact of life. And inescapable it is, no matter how much we may try to make it otherwise, for the world is a dusty place.
Continue reading

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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Benoit Mandelbrot saw simplicity where others saw complexity. How? By relying on visual insight. “When I seek, I look, look, look”… more

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The Red Rose of Saturn
via BoingBoing by Xeni Jardin

Continue reading [the high resolution images are stunning!]

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Not your great-great-grandfather's consumption
via BoingBoing by Maggie Koerth-Baker
Tuberculosis — aka, the reason everybody in 19th century literature is always coughing up blood, escaping to the countryside for “better air”, or dying tragically young — is back. And this time, it’s evolved a resistance to antibiotics. In fact, in a handful of cases, tuberculosis has been resistant to every single antibiotic available to treat it.
Tom Levenson explains what’s happening and why it matters at The New Yorker.