via Big Think by Orion Jones
Having greater intelligence can actually make you a more foolish person because intelligence breeds hubris, according to sociologists who study how intelligent people make life decisions.
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Mixing Up Settings: Town, Country and the Books of Lorna Hill
via An Awfully Big Blog Adventure by Emma Barnes
Last week I was in Northumberland. It's only a couple of hours from Leeds, where I live, but it feels like a different world.
Leeds is a big, bustling, ethnically diverse Northern city. The Northumberland coast, with its empty beaches, fishing villages and old-fashioned pubs, feels like a journey away in time as much as space. Even the tourist hot spots – like Lindisfarne – are tranquil, the cars abandoned once the causeway has been crossed, the many visitors wandering the windswept island by foot.
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Why Did Humans Advance Among Primates? Look to Ants For the Answer
via Big Think by Big Think Editors
In many of Edward O. Wilson's books, most notably his recent titles The Meaning of Human Existence and The Social Conquest of Earth, the famed biologist adopts a scientific lens to examine the quandaries of the human condition and other opaque areas of human knowledge. These are topics most typically explored by philosophers and sociologists, but Wilson approaches them with the scientific mind. For example, in the Big Think interview below, Wilson asks how Homo sapiens managed to separate from other primates and dominate the large animals of the world. Is this something science on its own can explain?
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10 Reasons Why Coffee Drinkers Are More Likely To Be Successful
via Lifehack by Casey Imafidon
I love coffee. I hope you do too. There is a ritual that comes with making it and the smell is wonderful. While others are yawning and trying to get their days going, coffee is like a punch in the face to wake you up into the real world. Perhaps you drink coffee all the time or merely sometimes, yet do not quite fully understand how pivotal it is to your success. If so, here is some news for you!
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Pain Relievers May Be Numbing Your Emotions
via Big Think by Natalie Shoemaker
Popping a Tylenol may do more than just alleviate that headache you've been suffering through; it may also be a potent solution for numbing emotions. Researchers, led by social psychology doctoral candidate Geoffrey Durso, have published a study in the journal Psychological Science, which reveals that “rather than being labeled as merely a pain reliever, acetaminophen might be better described as an all-purpose emotion reliever."
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Royal Mint to welcome visitors for first time with £7.7m museum
via The Guardian by Maev Kennedy
The Royal Mint is to open its doors to the public for the first time in its 1,100-year history. There will be tours, but no gold and silver samples.
A £7.7m museum and visitor centre showcasing the long history of coinage in the UK, designed by Mather & Co, will be built at the site in Llantrisant in South Wales, where the Mint moved in the 1960s to meet the challenge of creating a new coinage when the UK went decimal.
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10 Actors Who Played Against Type — and Failed
via Flavorwire by Jason Bailey
This Friday [would have been months ago!], Arnold Schwarzenegger does something you’d have never quite predicted: he plays the leading role in an indie drama. Even more surprisingly, he’s very good in it. His quiet turn as a Midwestern farmer in the family drama/zombie flick Maggie is both a strong performance and a smart move for the aging actor, whose action vehicles haven’t exactly burned up the box office lately; when what you do isn’t working anymore, it’s a good idea to try something new. But for every Robin Williams, Matthew McConaughey, or Albert Brooks who transformed their screen persona successfully, there’s another who didn’t quite pull it off.
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“Under the influence of rock’n’roll”
via OUP Blog by David George Surdam
Rock’n’roll music has defied its critics. When it debuted in the 1950s, many adults ridiculed the phenomenon. Elvis, Chuck Berry, and their peers would soon be forgotten, another passing fancy in the cavalcade of youth-induced fads. The brash conceit, “rock’n’roll is here to stay”, however, proved astute.
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Infested, About Bedbugs
via 3 Quarks Daily: Marlene Zuk at The New York Times
A book about bedbugs is, by necessity, a book about nearly everything: about travel and adventure, about our relationship to nature, about how scientists solve problems, about trust and whether we view strangers as friends or foes. It is a book about what people will do under extreme circumstances, and about environmental politics, and art and mental illness. It is even a book about kinky sex.
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The UK’s most eccentric library
via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz
In this week’s New Yorker, Adam Gopnik visits one of the more intriguing and strange European libraries, the Warburg Institute in London, a 115-year-old institution with a sadly uncertain future.
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