Trivia (should have been 20 September)

A Walk on the Water: 1907
via Shorpy Historical Photo Archive – Vintage Fine Art Prints by Dave

New York circa 1907
“Manhattan from the Brooklyn Bridge”
8x10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company
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Supercomputing center in a beautiful, deconsecrated church
via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center is not only gorgeous with its soaring ceilings, it also was an instrumental site for developing modern microchip technology.
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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate

Myth of self-made men
The rags-to-riches narrative permeates the American psyche. From Franklin to Carnegie to his own father, John Swansburg ponders why… more

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Things You Don’t Know About Beer
via Lifehack

From the steins of Germany to Japan’s world-class Sapporo, humanity loves its beer. We’ve been making it for millennia – so long ago that we’re not exactly sure which culture came up with it first (or if there was a “first”). The Chinese were brewing the stuff 9,000 years ago out of rice, honey, and fruit, while the barley variety cropped up in the Middle East at least 5,000 years ago. Then we got to the Middle Ages, and that whole “hops” thing really took off.
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Spongebob Theme Song slowed down is a terrifying subaquatic nightmare
via Boing Boing by Rob Beschizza

He can’t hear you, kids. He. Can’t. Hear. You.

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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate

Does the history of philosophy matter?
Histories of philosophy are difficult to write. Bertrand Russell excelled. Then there’s Peter Adamson’s new, pun-laden work… more

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The Umbrella Galaxy
via Big Think by Big Think editors

Near the constellation Coma Berenices, some 63 million light-years away, is NGC 4651, a spiral galaxy about the size of our Milky Way. Extending 100 thousand light-years past its galactic disk is an umbrella-shaped structure.
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Tracking the killer of hundreds of ancient Romans
via Boing Boing by Maggie Koerth-Baker
What killed the hundreds of people buried in a single catacomb known as "the X Tombs"?
Scientists are finding answers with the help of DNA analysis

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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate

The mystery of GO
Go, the ancient board game, has long been a favourite of computer scientists. Yet no computer has yet defeated a top human player. Does it matter?… more

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What history textbooks don’t tell you about the Jacobites…
via The National Archives by Clare Horrie
I had a sketchy knowledge of the period relating to the Jacobites and had never studied them as part of my history degree. This all changed when I found out about The National Archives’ cataloguing project headed by Dr. Katy Mair. When I saw some of the material that was being uncovered from the State Papers of George I (SP 35) and George II (SP 36) by a dedicated team of volunteer cataloguers, it drew me in immediately, helped by the fact that the documents for the most part were so readable in their original state!
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