Trivia (should have been 24th August)

Full Stop: 1917
via Shorpy Historical Photo Archive – Vintage Fine Art Prints by Dave

Washington, D.C., or vicinity
“Auto wreck”
Tree 1, Car 0. Another of National Photo’s “auto wreck” plates from 1917
8x10 glass negative
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Kenneth Clark at Tate Britain: A civilising force
via Prospero by L.L.B.
“Kenneth Clark: Looking for Civilisation” is was at Tate Britain, London, until August 10th 2014 but it is still worth reading the review.

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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Is evil innate or groomed? Is immoral behavior more a consequence of where you are than who you are? Let’s ask a war criminal… more

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A Fire Rainbow Over Ohio
via Big Think by Big Think editors

Have you spotted a fire rainbow before? They make the clouds appear to shine in different colours due to the ice crystals of distant cirrus clouds catching the sun’s light. NASA released this picture and explains Continue reading and find lots of interesting links

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The finest literary locations
via pages and proofs (Abe Books) by Richard Davies
Put away your passport and forget about the luggage. The literary world is full of fictional locations that can all be visited with the simple turn of a page. From the outdoor life of farms and villages that are not what they seem to lonely islands and lakes full of mysteries, these books will take you on a trip you won’t soon forget.
The criteria for our bumper list of fictional locations is that the place is also the title of the novel or the location has been used in the title (so Hogwarts and Tara are not included). We have also not left our planet (so we’re not dining at The Restaurant at the End of the Universe) or veered into fantasy (so no Wonderland or Discworld).
Authors seem drawn to farms, hotels, lakes, islands, villages and stately homes. Animal Farm and The Mayor of Casterbridge represent the two ends of fictional locations. The home of Napoloeon cannot be placed on a map, while Hardy’s Casterbridge is based on the actual town of Dorchester. Many fictional places in literature can be clearly located to a distinct area – Lake Woebegon is in Minnesota. Salem’s Lot (full name Jerusalem’s Lot) is in Maine, Watership Down is in Hampshire and Stepford is in Connecticut. Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead (somewhere in the South of England) is particularly interesting as the stately home has clearly seen better days, like the family it hosts.
See the list
Warning: Abe Books is my favourite, and most scary, website. Prices for good quality second hand books start at 62p with shipping at around the £3 mark.

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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Holocaust memory is a singular accomplishment of the postwar age, a harbinger of human-rights consciousness. How did it emerge?… more

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10 Problems With How We Think
via Big Think by Ross Pomeroy

By nature, human beings are illogical and irrational. For most of our existence, survival meant thinking quickly, not methodically. Making a life-saving decision was more important than making a 100% accurate one, so the human brain developed an array of mental shortcuts.
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Steven Pinker: “We don’t throw virgins into volcanoes any more”
via 3quarksdaily by S. Abbas Raza
Oliver Burkeman at CNN:

At first glance Pinker’s implacable optimism, though in keeping with his sunny demeanour and stereotypically Canadian friendliness, presents a puzzle. His stellar career – which includes two Pulitzer Prize nominations for his books How the Mind Works (1997) and The Blank Slate: The modern denial of human nature (2002) – has been defined, above all, by support for the fraught notion of human nature: the contention that genetic predispositions account in hugely significant ways for how we think, feel and act, why we behave towards others as we do, and why we excel in certain areas rather than others.
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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Eighty percent of pre-1930 American films, on fragile film stock, are lost. Now think about this: Who is preserving software for posterity?… more

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15 Photos That Capture Famous Romances
via Flavorwire by Alison Nastasi

A picture tells a thousand words – and photos of famous couples throughout pop culture history can tell us more about their relationship than all the tabloids, biographies, and interviews put together. Photography may be a two-dimensional medium, but passion and intimacy cannot be contained by paper alone.
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