Ten items starting with an important one for summer holidays for those with children and money

30 Theme Parks That Make Childhood Dreams Come True
via Lifehack by Louise Williams
Theme parks are awesome! They can help us live out amazing adventures in magical lands that are usually inaccessible. These theme parks can help you fulfil all those childhood fantasies you’ve almost forgotten.
Get ready to take a step back into childhood with this amazing list of fantastic theme parks – emphasis on “fantastic”.
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I have checked the first four links and all are in the UK and operating in 2016.

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Ten worst opening lines in novels
via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder

The American Scholar presents a list of the ten worst opening lines in novels. I don't agree with all their choices, but I agree that most are awful enough to make me abandon the book after reading the first sentence.
I wish more authors of boring books would be courteous enough to warn me to stop reading after one sentence. For example, I trudged through 9/10ths of Donna Tartt's The Secret History, caring less and less what happened as the story unfolded until I closed the book for good.
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George Johnson - The Whistling Coon - 1891 (The first recording by an African-American)
via 3 Quarks Daily: by Rare Soul
George Johnson’s song Whistling Coon was one of the most popular of the Coon songs of the 1850-90s. While the records and the imagery that goes along with them are offensive, these are pioneering African-American recordings and songs. The amazing thing about the earliest of Johnson’s recordings is that each one was unique. Each record was recorded and cut ON THE SPOT, so he had to do each take perfectly, and was then paid for the session. He made a decent living, but there weren’t any copyright laws, or even any record industry at this point. It’s said he did this song 56 times in one day.
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Who was Saxo Grammaticus?
via OUP Blog by Peter Fisher
Saxo, who lived in the latter part of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, was probably a canon of Lund Cathedral (then Danish). He was secretary to Archbishop Abslon, who encouraged his gifted protégé to write a history of his own country to emulate those of other nations, such as Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Absalon was able to supply him with a large amount of material for the last few of the 16 books, since, as a warrior archbishop, he had taken a leading part in the Danish campaigns against the Wends of North Germany.
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Yes, it’s official, men are from Mars and women from Venus, and here’s the science to prove it
via 3 Quarks Daily: Lewis Wolpert in The Telegraph
In My Fair Lady Professor Higgins sings a song about the difference between the sexes, “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” It comes from an amusingly, ludicrously biased male point of view, but I have used it as the title for my new book on the subject to remind us that the differences between men and women remain a major issue.
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The weird phenomenon of Terminal Lucidity
via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz

Terminal Lucidity is a phenomenon where someone who is completely out of it mentally (coma, dementia, schizophrenia, etc.) becomes briefly clearheaded just before they die.
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Classical Intoxication: Love through the lens of Sappho
via Arts & Letters Daily: A.E. Stallings in the weekly standard
Much of what we think we know about Sappho is apocryphal, conjecture, invented, or wrong, maybe even her name. (Sappho calls herself Psappho.) Yet somehow we feel we know her, that she is speaking directly to us across chasms of time, language, geography, and alphabets. And this is only from one, perhaps two, complete poems and a smattering of fragments from the nine-scroll corpus known in antiquity.
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In Search of Sir Thomas Browne
via 3 Quarks Daily: Jim Holt in The New York Times

Dorothy and Sir Thomas Browne, circa 1645. CreditNational Portrait Gallery, London
This 17th-century English physician and philosopher, living in provincial isolation from literary London, managed to cultivate the most sonorous organ-voice in the history of English prose. At a time when the prevailing plain style was growing dull and insipid (John Locke is an example), it was Browne who showed the way to new possibilities of Ciceronian splendor. In doing so, he became a prolific contributor of novel words to the English language. Among his 784 credited neologisms are “electricity”, “hallucination”, “medical”, “ferocious”, “deductive”, and “swaggy”.
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What makes Earth 'just right' for life?
OUP Blog by Karel Schrijver and Iris Schrijver
Within a year, we have been able to see our solar system as never before. In November 2014, the Philae Probe of the Rosetta spacecraft landed on the halter-shaped Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. In April 2015, the Dawn spacecraft entered orbit around the largest of the asteroids, Ceres (590 miles in diameter), orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. And in July, the New Horizons mission made the first flyby of the dwarf planet Pluto, making it the most distant solar-system object to be visited. Other spacecraft continue to investigate other planets, for example, Cassini (whose Huygens probe landed on Titan) studies Saturn and its moons, and Orbiters and Rovers are exploring Mars.
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Yes, I know it is a bit out of date but still a fascinating roundup of exploration.

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Antique toy museum, racist warts and all
via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz

Frank Kidd, 83, is the proprietor of Kidd’s Toy Museum, a private collection of 20,000 antique toys, from cars and trucks to figurines to, Kidd’s favorite genre, mechanical banks like the one above. Some of the toys reveal a lot about the era they’re from.
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Let's end today with another ten irrelevant but interesting items

‘In Search of Sir Thomas Browne’ by Hugh Aldersey-Williams
via 3 Quarks Daily: Jim Holt in The New York Times Sunday Book Review

The history of English prose can be seen as a dialectical struggle between two tendencies: plain versus grand. The plain style aims at ease and lucidity. It favors simply structured sentences, short words of Saxon origin and a conversational tone. It runs the risk of being flat. By contrast, the grand style – also called (by Cyril ­Connolly) “mandarin” – aims at rhetorical luxuriance. It is characterized by rolling ­periods decked with balanced subordinate clauses, a polysyllabic Latinate vocabulary, elaborate rhythms, stately epithets, sumptuous metaphors, learned allusions and fanciful turns of phrase. It runs the risk of being ridiculous.
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The stunning pen and ink drawings of Polish artist Wojtek Kowalczyk
via Boing Boing by Xeni Jardin

Artist Wojtek Kowalczyk, as his beautifully hand-drawn bio shows, is an artist from Krakow, Poland. His Facebook page is regularly updated with new works, and I'm most enchanted with the monochrome works shown here.
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Stunning is the right word for these. Personally I don't care for them.

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If Scent Has A Hotline To Memory, It Seems Music Has A Hotline To Emotion
via 3 Quarks Daily: From The Sync Project
Music has the power to stimulate strong emotions within us, to the extent that it is probably rare not to be somehow emotionally affected by music. We all know what emotions are and experience them daily. Most of us also listen to music in order to experience emotions. The specific mechanisms through which music evokes emotions is a rich field of research, with a great number of unanswered questions. Why does sound talk to our emotional brain? Why do we perceive emotional information in musical features? Why do we feel the urge to move when hearing music? Through increasing scientific understanding of the universal as well as the individual principles behind music-evoked emotions, we will be able to better understand the effects that music-listening can have and make better use of them in an informed manner.
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Probably the only article you'll ever need to read about the Sphinx
via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder

Before reading this article about the Sphinx, I knew just three things about it: It was large, it was old, and it was in Egypt. Last night I read “Uncovering Secrets of the Sphinx”, by Evan Hadingham on Smithsonian.com, and learned a lot about the Sphinx. I love articles like this that fill one of the many holes in my knowledge about all the great things in the world.
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5 Fascinating Sites for Seeing and Exploring the Universe
via MakeUseOf by Justin Pot
Space. The final frontier.
If you love gazing at the stars, and beautiful pictures of galaxies, the Internet has a lot to offer. We’ve shown you apps for star-gazers before; today we’re going to talk about five more websites that let you learn about the universe.
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Old North Bridge: 1910
via Shorpy Historical Photo Archive – Vintage Fine Art Prints by Dave
Circa 1910
“Bridge to Revolutionary War monument, Concord, Mass”
The Old North Bridge and Daniel Chester French’s 1875 statue “The Minute Man”
5x7 inch glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company
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Who was Jonas Salk?
via OUP Blog by Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs
Most revered for his work on the polio vaccine, Jonas Salk was praised by the mainstream media but still struggled to earn the respect and adoration of the medical community. Accused of abusing the spotlight and giving little credit to fellow researchers, he arguably become more of an outcast than a “knight in a white coat.” Even so, Salk continued to make strides in the medical community, ultimately leaving behind a legacy larger than the criticism that had always threatened to overshadow his career. We sat down with Charlotte DeCroes Jacobs, author of Jonas Salk: A Life, to get to know a little more about the mysterious researcher and virologist, as well as some of his personal and professional highs and lows.
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Buddhism and the Brain: Mindfulness in Modern Times
via Big Think by Derek Beres
Evan Thompson is a professor of philosophy at the University of British Colombia who specialises in cognitive science, Buddhism, and philosophy of mind. His latest book, Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy, investigates the intersection of brain science and Buddhism in an honest, non-judgemental fashion that’s true to neuroscience and psychology without negating the metaphorical value of millennia-old aphorisms. With an emphasis on dreaming and the complex facets of consciousness, Thompson does a wonderful job at connecting old Buddhist and Hindu concepts with contemporary learnings in the realm of the human brain. I recently chatted with him about these topics.
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Gorgeous and colorful vaulted murals of Rotterdam’s Markthal
via Boing Boing by Andrea James

Rotterdam wanted to honor the history of its public market by creating a space that felt open even though it was enclosed. The resulting Markthal has a beautiful vaulted ceiling adorned with bright murals of food.
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Buster Keaton’s Cure
via 3 Quarks Daily: Charlie Fox at Cabinet Magazine
Here he is, a little man in his trademark outfit of porkpie hat and rumpled suit. He ignores all conversational prompts, playing dumb and nodding a little as if out of beat with the situation, mid-daydream. “The American public would like to hear you say something. Would you say something? Go ahead,” Wynn cajoles him, “speak!” And upon these ventriloquist’s orders, Buster commences a routine that looks like a ludic premonition of the anguished choreographies found in Samuel Beckett’s plays. (Shortly before his death, he would appear as the solitary figure in Beckett’s metaphysically queasy 1965 short, Film). Carefully, the voice must be readied – the whole body is involved. He shrugs his shoulders a few times, bends his knees to ensure that he’s suitably limber, then performs some exaggerated respirations that make his chest swell and deflate like a ragged bellows. There’s a mysterious procedure of cheek massage and jaw agitation in which he looks like a gargoyle attempting to reverse the effects of amphetamines. He spritzes something into his mouth, the host looks quizzically on, and what shy laughter there was in the audience has receded like a weak breeze. Then, at last, he says “Hello!” in an eager innocent’s yelp. Wynn is astonished! His owlish eyes go wide, and Buster falls, exhausted, into his arms as the audience chuckles. Television is probably more accommodating to such outbursts of staccato weirdness than any other medium, but Buster’s act is much more than just an odd trick.
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The effects of work experience during higher education on labour market entry: learning by doing or an entry ticket?

an article by Felix Weiss (University of Cologne, Germany and GESIS Leibniz Institute for Social Sciences in Mannheim, Germany), Markus Klein (University of Edinburgh, UK) and Thomas Grauenhorst (University of Mannheim, Germany) published in Work Employment & Society Volume 28 Number 5 (October 2014)

Abstract

Graduates from higher education often enter the labour market with a considerable amount of work experience. Using German data, we address the question of whether early work experience pays off upon labour market entry. We compare the labour market benefits of different types of work experience.

This comparison allows us to more generally test hypotheses about different explanations of why education pays off. Results indicate that tertiary graduates do not profit from work experience that is unrelated to the field of study or was a mandatory part of the study programme.

Even though field-related and voluntary work experience helps graduates to realize a fast integration into the labour market, it is not linked to higher chances for entering a favourable class position or to higher wages in the long run. These results provide evidence for the signalling explanation of educational benefits in the labour market rather than the human capital explanation.

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Ten interesting items to waste a bit of your time!

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The Fibonacci sequence says ”I am large, I contain multitudes“
via 3 Quarks Daily by Jonathan Kujawa
This spring [OK, this will make it over two years ago] I attended the annual meeting of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute. While there I heard a fantastic talk by Dr. Holly Krieger about which I’d like to tell you. If you’d like to hear Dr. Krieger tell you herself, I highly recommend the Numberphile video she hosted. You can see it here.
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Deep impact
via Prospero by R.L.G.

Germans joke about their bad English. In Berlin, you can buy fridge magnets with German expressions over-literally translated into English, like “It is me sausage”—a word-for-word rendering of Es ist mir Wurst, or “it’s all the same to me”. “German Quatsch” on Twitter has many more. But educated Germans usually speak English quite well. The reality is that, to a deeper extent than commonly realised, German is changing under constant influence from English.

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Swear words, etymology, and the history of English
via the OUP Blog by Adrastos Omissi
Have you ever noticed that many of our swear words sound very much like German ones and not at all like French ones? From vulgar words for body parts (a German Arsch is easy to identify, but not so much the French cul), to scatological and sexual verbs (doubtless you can spot what scheissen and ficken mean, but might have been more stumped bychier and baiser), right down to our words for hell (compare Hölle and enfer), English and German clearly draw their swear words from a shared stock in a way that English and French do not. Given that nearly two thirds of the words in English come from Romance roots and only a quarter from Germanic roots, this seems odd.
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Video of grass waving in the wind is entrancing. Seriously!
via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz
Gissur Simonarson shot this in Gjerdrum, near Oslo, Norway. WAY more interesting than watching grass grow.
On YouTube here

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Paper Chasing
via Arts & Letters Daily: by Jake Bittle in Examined Life
In Henry James’s novel The Portrait of a Lady, a hapless suitor named Ned Rosier courts the innocent Pansy Osmond. Rosier is best known as a lifelong collector of tiny books and trinkets called bibelots. After Pansy ejects him, Rosier liquidates his collection of bibelots, hoping to become rich enough to impress her father. This move backfires immediately: those close to Pansy tell Rosier that he would have been better off to keep his “pretty things,” and that his collection of knickknacks and books was “the best thing about him.”
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Toddler explains how babies are born in 4 seconds
via Boing Boing by Xeni Jardin
Yep, that pretty much covers it. Adela, who is 3 years old, concisely and accurately explains in this short video how babies are born.
Don’t blink or you’ll miss it

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Decoding the Remarkable Algorithms of Ants
via 3 Quarks Daily: Emily Singer interviews Deborah Gordon in Quanta
The biologist Deborah Gordon has uncovered how ant colonies search efficiently without central organization, an insight that might improve computer networks.
Read all about it here

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Crossed swords and pistols at dawn: the duel in literature
Whether dutiful, chivalrous, flamboyant or just plain quarrelsome John Leigh’s literary duellists make engaging subjects in Touché: the duel in literature.
via Arts & Letters Daily: Richard Davenport-Hines in Spectator
Earlier this century I was a guest at a fine dinner, held in a citadel of aristocratic Catholicism, for youngish members of German student duelling societies. My hosts were splendidly courteous, some of them held deadly straight rapiers or lethal curved blades, there were brightly coloured and golden braided costumes that made King Rudolf of Ruritania’s coronation robes seem dowdy, and we sung a rousing anthem about Prince Eugene of Savoy smiting the fearful Turk at the battle of Zenta in 1697. It was a high-testosterone evening. A few of my young hosts had duelling scars, discreetly placed so as to be imperceptible when they were in office suits, for some of them worked in Canary Wharf or the City as bankers, lawyers and accountants.
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Hacking Isn’t Just a 21st Century Problem
via Big Think by Dustin Petzold
Before the days of e-mail viruses and information leaks (Wiki and otherwise), hacking existed in a more primitive form. The most notorious hackers throughout history have been a mixture of genuinely malicious cyberterrorists and nonthreatening pranksters whose schemes got a little out of hand. The so-called "original teenage hackers" were firmly in the latter categories, but their hijinks set the stage for the US government's legislative approach to cybercrime. The 414s, a documentary short that tells the fascinating and often humorous story of four computer nerds from 1980s Milwaukee, is one of the best selections to come out of the American Film Institute's documentary festival in Washington, DC.
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Marshmallow Madness – dozens of puffalicious recipes
via Boing Boing by Wink

Homemade marshmallows are all the rage, and Shauna Sever’s whimsical cookbook is the ideal starting place for whipping up a batch in the home kitchen. Sometimes, cookbooks just hit the mark, and this one certainly does. From the basic method and standard vanilla marshmallow to alcohol-infused, gourmet adult treats, Marshmallow Madness had me looking like a hero in the kitchen. Real, fresh, gooey homemade marshmallows are an entirely different confection than their store-bought counterparts, and they can do everything a name brand can and more. Try Sever’s recipe for ambrosia cake or s’mores cupcakes, for instance, or infuse a rich vanilla mallow with delicious homemade salted caramel.
Check it out here

So how much has employment really grown since 2010?

via The Work Foundation blog by Ian Brinkley

In an article in the Independent published today (Monday 12 Jan 2015), Professor Danny Blanchflower takes the Conservative Party to task for publishing what Professor Blanchflower believes to be inaccurate claims about job creation under the Coalition government. As with all these things, it depends a bit on where you start and what measure you select.

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Does Trait Emotional Intelligence Predict Unique Variance in Early Career Beyond IQ and Personality Success

an article by José Manuel de Haro García (Agbar water company (GDF SUEZ), Comunidad Valenciana, Spain) and Juan Luis Castejón Costa (Alicante University, Spain) published in Journal of Career Assessment Volume 22 Number 4 (November 2014)

Abstract

In order to determine the contribution of emotional intelligence (EI) to career success, in this study, we analysed the relationship between trait EI (TEI), general mental ability (GMA), the big five personality traits, and career success indicators, in a sample of 130 graduates who were in the early stages of their careers.

Results from hierarchical regression analyses indicated that TEI, and especially its dimension “repair,” has incremental validity in predicting one of the career success indicators (salary) after controlling for GMA and personality.

These findings provide support for the use of TEI measures as predictors of career success in the early stage.

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Migrant deprivation, conditionality of legal status and the welfare state

an article by Owen Corrigan Trinity College Dublin, Ireland published in Journal of European Social Policy Volume 24 Number 3 (July 2014)

Abstract

This article adds to our theoretical understanding of the determination of third-country national (TCN) migrant deprivation and poverty in western Europe. The stratifying effects of different types of legal status on migrant outcomes have been established in previous research. The conditionality that states attach to securing different types of legal status has heretofore been overlooked as an important explanatory factor, however.

A measure of the conditionality attached to attaining the key social rights–granting status of long-term residency (LTR) is operationalized using cross-national policy data. Building on existing theory, we hypothesize that the negative impact of welfare generosity on TCN material deprivation is moderated by a state’s level of LTR conditionality, such that deprivation will be greatest where conditionality is high and generosity is low.

This hypothesis is tested using large-scale European microdata in the context of multilevel modelling.

The empirical results are consistent with the central hypothesis.

These findings have implications for policymakers and for extant accounts of migrant welfare, the welfare state and the factors implicated in the determination of poverty and deprivation in Europe.

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On the transnational social question: How social inequalities are reproduced in Europe

an article by Thomas Faist (Bielefeld University, Germany) published in Journal of European Social Policy Volume 24 Number 3 (July 2014)

Abstract

What are the consequences of cross-border employment and social protection practices for social inequalities in Europe?

The transnational social question is a multifaceted one: it is linked not only to inequalities generated by heterogeneities such as class, gender, ethnicity, legal status and religion, but also to the perception that cross-border interdependence has grown and that transnational interactions themselves have become a criterion for differentiation.

International migration is of strategic significance for an understanding of the transnational social question, because it reveals the cross-connections of the fragmented world of social protection. In particular, it provides a window into the social mechanisms that support social protection across borders and how these mitigate old and generate new social inequalities.

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Trivia (should have been 29 November)

At Ease: 1863
via Shorpy Historical Photo Archive – Vintage Fine Art Prints by Dave


“June 1863 Gettysburg Campaign. Fairfax Court House, Virginia. Capt. J.B. Howard, Office of Assistant Quartermaster, and group at headquarters, Army of the Potomac.”
Wet plate glass negative by Timothy H. O’Sullivan
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The Magical Illustration of Arthur Rackham
via Abe Books UK by Beth Carswell

Arthur Rackham was an illustrator in the late 19th and early 20th century. He was born in London in 1867. He began studying at the Lambeth School of Art at the age of 18, and soon found his passion and calling. The first of Rackham’s illustrations to be published in a book were in 1893, in The Dolly Dialogues. Rackham never looked back. From that first publication, illustration was his career until the day he died at age 72, of cancer.
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WARNING: Please keep a tight hold on your credit / debit card. Some of the books available do not come at a low price.
But they are so lovely that I want a whole shelf of them!

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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Cézanne and the old masters
Anxiety of influence. While most Impressionists disavowed the old masters, Cézanne studied their works with painful precision… more

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Plato and contemporary bioethics
via OUP Blog by Susan B Levin

Since its advent in the early 1970s, bioethics has exploded, with practitioners’ thinking expressed not only in still-expanding scholarly venues but also in the gamut of popular media. Not surprisingly, bioethicists’ disputes are often linked with technological advances of relatively recent vintage, including organ transplantation and artificial-reproductive measures like preimplantation genetic diagnosis and prenatal genetic testing. It’s therefore tempting to figure that the only pertinent reflective sources are recent as well, extending back – glancingly at most – to Immanuel Kant’s groundbreaking 18th-century reflections on autonomy.
Surely Plato, who perforce could not have tackled such issues, has nothing at all to contribute to current debates.
Continue reading to find out that you could be wrong

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What We Mean When We Say “I Did Something I Didn't Want to Do”
via Big Think by David Berreby

One way to understand a nudge – a government policy that inclines you to make a particular choice, often without your awareness – is that it makes it easier for you to do what you really would have wanted despite your fallible human nature. But how do you know what you really want?
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I found this really interesting.

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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Friendship with Gore Vidal
“He looked like a down-and-out panhandler who had sneaked in off Duval Street to swipe a drink and a fistful of peanuts.” Gore Vidal at 83… more

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“Vampire grave” from the 13th century unearthed
via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz

An archaeologist found a “vampire grave” in Bulgaria where a Medieval skeleton lies with an iron spike through its chest.
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Shakespeare’s Invisible Hand in Economics
via Big Think by Jag Bhalla

Metaphors can be our shortest stories: their compact explanations often shape our view of the truth. But like stories taken out of context, badly mixed metaphors from biology and physics mislead many economists. And Shakespeare’s “invisible hand” is partly to blame.
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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Cyril Connolly’s masterpiece
“Approaching forty, sense of total failure.” And so Cyril Connolly quit journalism to write a masterpiece. The key, he believed, was to have an interest in but contempt for humanity… more

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The real-life Sherlock Holmes
via Boing Boing: Futility Closet

Sherlock Holmes was based on a real man, a physician who trained Arthur Conan Doyle at the University of Edinburgh. During his medical lectures, Joseph Bell regularly astonished his students with insights into his patients’ lives and characters.
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Trivia (should have been 23 November)

River City: 1901
via Shorpy Historical Photo Archive – Vintage Fine Art Prints by Dave

Detroit circa 1901
“Excursion steamers Tashmoo and Idlewild at wharf”
No loafing allowed!
8x10 glass negative, Detroit Publishing Co
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The history of Christian art and architecture
via OUP blog
Although basilisks, griffins, and phoenixes summon ideas of myth and lore, they are three of several fantastic beings displayed in a Christian context. From the anti-Christian Roman emperor Diocletian to the legendary Knights of the Templar, a variety of unexpected subjects, movements, themes, and artists emerge in the history of Christian art and architecture.
To get an idea of its scope, we mined The Oxford Dictionary of Christian Art and Architecture for information to test your knowledge.
Go to OUP to try for yourself
The one thing I love about OUP quizzes is that you get a score but also the correct answers and a brief paragraph about the question.

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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Uses of art
Like a Victorian social reformer, Alain de Botton wants to lead the masses away from shallow consumerism. And he wants to make buck… more

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25 Insanely Unique and Mind-Blowing Buildings Around the World
via Lifehack by Alicia Prince

Throughout history, architecture has remained a crucial expression of cultural and societal growth. Today, innovative building techniques plus new materials and ways of thinking give us almost unlimited potential when it comes to this art form. Mixing old and new, natural and modern, the following 25 mind-blowing buildings from around the world might make your head spin and your jaw drop.
See for yourself

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Five Tribes – a twist on the worker placement game
via Boing Boing by Matt M Casey

Cathala’s Five Tribes inverts the popular worker placement game genre. In worker placement games, players use tokens (commonly called “workers”) to claim the exclusive right to perform a specific action.
Continue reading and watch the video

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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Culture and internet
People who want to make a living in arts and letters are screwed. It’s a sad fact worthy of attention. It’s also not at all unsurprising… more

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50 Cultural Icons on Their Favorite Books
via Flavorwire by Emily Temple
Everybody loves a good book. Yes, everybody – even the rich, famous and culturally relevant. And since there’s nothing better than a book recommendation from someone you already idolise, why not check out which ones they count as their favourites? Maybe you’ll wind up finding out that you have even more in common with Lady Gaga than you thought.
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How Sound Waves Help Deliver Medicine to the Brain
via Big Think by Robert Montenegro

The fact that your brain is protected by both the skull and a thick barrier of discerning cells is, for the most part, a good thing. One can only imagine how lousy it would be if every little toxin or substance could infiltrate your body's central processing centre.
But sometimes the brain’s blessing can also be a doctor’s curse, especially when trying to treat disorders such as Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. This is because just as your head’s defenses keep pathogen out from the sensitive areas of the brain, they also set up a roadblock for vital medicines needed to fight disease.
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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate

Architecture of (commercial) desire
Packaged pleasures. The “tubularization” of society – cigarettes, tin cans, soda bottles, lipstick – marked a radical shift in human experience… more

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Qwerkywriter: a mechanical typewriter keyboard
via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow

Shipping in summer 2015, Qwerkywriter is a $300 computer keyboard that uses mechanisms that mimic the keys of an old-fashioned manual, mechanical keyboard.
The Qwerkywriter was funded through a very successful Kickstarter campaign, and can be pre-ordered with US/UK/Spanish/French/German layouts. It connects to your devices through Bluetooth or USB.
Qwerkywriter (via Core 77)

Trivia (should have been 22 November)

Brakeman Capsey: 1943
via Shorpy Historical Photo Archive – Vintage Fine Art Prints by Dave

March 1943
“Acomita, New Mexico. Brakeman R.E. Capsey repacking a journal box of a special car as the train on the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad between Belen and Gallup, New Mexico, waits on a siding.”
Medium-format negative by Jack Delano for the Office of War Information
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Rembrandt’s lessons for the selfie era: why we must learn to look again
via Guardian by Jenny Judge
The selfie threatens to distract us from what Rembrandt did: looking at ourselves closely, honestly, but compassionately

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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate

Writers and gardens
Voltaire’s garden was an ethical statement; Emily Dickinson’s was a place for private retreat. What – if anything – can we learn from an author’s garden?… more

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New Video: The Internet of Things - Explained
via CommonCraft by Lee LeFever
About This video:
The internet is evolving. It used to be made of computers, but today, the internet includes all sorts of “things” that can work together. This video explains the Internet of Things and what it can mean for both individuals and communities.
What it teaches:
— Why the internet in changing to include more “smart” devices
— What has enabled these “things” to become connected
— How increased connections could impact households
— How the internet of things could lead to greater efficiency and safety
Watch the video now

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Urban “Fingerprints” Finally Reveal the Similarities (and Differences) Between American and European Cities
via MIT Technology Review
Travelers have long noticed that some American cities “feel” more European than others. Now physicists have discovered a way to measure the “fingerprint” of a city that captures this sense.
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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate

Mr and Mrs Disraeli
He was a dandified outsider with outsize ambitions. She was 10 years older and married – well, but not happily. Notes on a strange romance… more

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16 cartoonists who changed the world
via Boing Boing by Monte Beauchamp
Who were the original comic artists that left an indelible mark upon the world, paving the way for those who followed? Monte Beauchamp identifies the genre’s early masters.

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How cancer cells assure immortality by lengthening the ends of chromosomes
via 3 Quarks Daily from KurzweilAI

“Telomeres as fish”
On Sept. 23, KurzweilAI noted that scientists at the Salk Institute had discovered an on-and-off “switch” in cells that might allow for increasing telomerase, which rebuilds telomeres at the ends of chromosomes to keep cells dividing and generating.
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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate

The dark and light
Goya’s etchings of war exemplify one aspect of his talent, but it showed up in many guises. The irreducible breadth of an artist’s vision… more

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Man From Mars Radio Hat
via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow
It’s been three years since we last mentioned the astounding Man From Mars Radio Hat, so here is your triennial reminder that we are a fallen people, our glory years long behind us.
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And yet another ten "things" that really are not trivial

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The destruction of an Assyrian palace
via OUP Blog by David Kertai

In March 2015, ISIS released a video depicting the demolition of one of the most important surviving monuments from the Assyrian empire, the palace of Ashurnasirpal in the ancient city of Nimrud.
As archaeologists, we are all too familiar with destruction. In fact, it is one of the key features of our work. One can only unearth ancient remains, buried long ago under their own debris and those of later times, once. It brings with it an obligation to properly record and make public what is being excavated. The documentation from Ashurnasirpal’s palace is generally disappointing. This is due to the palace mostly having been excavated in the early days of archaeology. Still, the resulting information is invaluable and will continue to allow us to answer new questions about the past.
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Quantum Life Spreads Entanglement Across Generations
via MIT Technology Review
Computer scientists have long known that evolution is an algorithmic process that has little to do with the nature of the beasts it creates. Instead, evolution is set of simple steps that, when repeated many times, can solve problems of immense complexity; the problem of creating the human brain, for example, or of building an eye.
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Home-brewed heroin? Scientists create yeast that can make sugar into opiates
via The Guardian by Hannah Devlin
Researchers have managed to reproduce the way poppies create morphine in the wild, but warn that the technology needs urgent regulation

Home-brewed heroin could become a reality, scientists have warned, following the creation of yeast strains designed to convert sugar into opiates.
The advance marks the first time that scientists have artificially reproduced the entire chemical pathway that takes place in poppy plants to produce morphine in the wild.
Scientists warned that the findings could pave the way for opium poppy farms being replaced by local morphine “breweries” and called for urgent regulation of the technology. In theory, opium brewing would be no more difficult to master than DIY beer kits, raising the possibility of people setting up Breaking Bad-style drug laboratories in their own homes.
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‘Cyber-archaeology’ salvages lost Iraqi art
via BBC News: Science & Environment by Jonathan Webb
Priceless historical artefacts have been lost recently, to violence in Iraq and earthquakes in Nepal. But ‘cyber-archaeologists’ are working with volunteers to put you just a few clicks away from seeing these treasures – in colourful, three-dimensional detail.
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Adult bookstore’s tasteful mural still gets complaints
via Boing Boing by Jason Weisberger

"The vibrant, cartoonish work depicts a female feeding a purple beaver an apple. But some fear the colorful creation may attract children." Some are just assholes. (via WTVR.com)

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The surprising links between faith and evolution and climate denial – charted
via 3 Quarks Daily: Chris Mooney in the Washington Post

For a long time, we’ve been having a pretty confused discussion about the relationship between religious beliefs and the rejection of science – and especially its two most prominent U.S. incarnations, evolution denial and climate change denial.
Continue reading (and access a much larger version of the chart)

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Young Mozart reviewed in 1769
via Boing Boing by Rob Beschizza

“While in London, an 8 year old Mozart proved a huge sensation. But with his child prodigy status came questions from a skeptical few. Was he really so young? Was he really that talented? One person eager to test the truth of these doubts was Daines Barrington, a lawyer, antiquary, naturalist and Friend of the Royal Society.”
Continue reading at The Public Domain Review

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‘Romantic Outlaws’, About the Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley
via Arts & Letters Daily: Christina Nehring at The New York Times

A literary legacy: Mary Shelley, left, and her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft.CreditLeft: Richard Rothwell/National Portrait Gallery, London; right: John Opie/National Portrait Gallery, London
They had it all.
When they eloped, 16-year-old Mary Godwin and 21-year-old Percy Shelley had everything artists could desire: genius, beauty, literary pedigree, aristocratic inheritance, Mediterranean villas, famous friends, fearless admirers, freedom and – above all – faith in free love.
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Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits and Spies in the Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean World
via 3 Quarks Daily: Felipe Fernández-Armesto at Literary Review

On the &lsquo'Golfing for Cats’ principle, Noel Malcolm’s publishers thought, presumably, that knights, corsairs, Jesuits and spies were saleable, whereas the real subject of Malcolm’s new book, which might be expressed as ’A Reconstruction of the Political Activities of Members of Two Related Albanian Families in the Late Sixteenth-Century Eastern Mediterranean and Balkans’, would be poor window-dressing. But good stories, well told, made bestsellers of The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs and A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian. We can be honest about Agents of Empire without fear of impeding sales.
Continue reading from The Guardian’s review of the book. The original link is no longer viable but I am fascinated to discover a period and place in history about which I know nothing. I am about the check the public library and see if I can find the book.

Trivia (should have been 16 November)

Silent Choir: 1910
via Shorpy Historical Photo Archive – Vintage Fine Art Prints by Dave

“Chester Cathedral, England. Major construction 11th-15th century”
8x10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company
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Douglas Adams on Environmentalism
via Big Think by Big Think editors

Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001) was an English writer and humorist most famous for authoring The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Outside of literature, Adams was a major advocate for environmentalism as well as a proponent of technological innovation. He died of a heart attack at the young age of 49.

We don't have to save the world. The world is big enough to look after itself. What we have to be concerned about is whether or not the world we live in will be capable of sustaining us in it.

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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate

How will the world speak
Greece without Greek? Japan with no Japanese? Of the world’s 6,000 languages, by 2115 only 600 will survive. John McWhorter explains… more

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Apocalypse soon: the scientists preparing for the end times
via 3 Quarks Daily: Sophie McBain in New Statesman

A growing community of scientists, philosophers and tech billionaires believe we need to start thinking seriously about the threat of human extinction.
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An old bridge in Palermo and pointed arches
via Newton Excel Bach, not (just) an Excel Blog
The Ponte dell’ Ammiraglio (Admiral’s Bridge) in Palermo, Sicily, built from 1125-1135 (or 1113, according to the Italian Wikipedia), is one of the oldest surviving post-Roman era arch bridges in Europe. The bridge has been restored and surrounded by a new park, but also being surrounded by busy Sicilian roads, cut off from its original purpose, and outside the main tourist area, it is little visited.
Continue reading and perhaps spend some time wandering around in this fascinating blog where you will find, besides the Excel tips and techniques, art, music, architecture and ... you name it then it is probably there somewhere.

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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate

Pale Fire
Love triangles, tales of incest – Nabokov’s works call out for cinematic adaptation. There is, of course, an exception: Pale Fire… more

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Is religion to blame for history's bloodiest wars?
via 3 Quarks Daily John Gray at The New Statesman

From the Inquisition to Isis, religion is blamed for brutality. But violence is a secular creed too.
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Fire in the night
vua OUP Blog by Belden C Lane

Late moon rising in Theodore Roosevelt National Park.
Photo by Justin Kern. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via justinwkern Flickr
Wilderness backpacking is full of surprises. Out in the wilds, the margin between relentless desire and abject terror is sometimes very thin. One night last fall, I lay in a hammock listening to water tumbling over rocks in the Castor River in southern Missouri. I’d camped at a point where the creek plunges through a boulder field of pink rhyolite. These granite rocks are the hardened magma of volcanic explosions a billion and a half years old. I’d tried to cross the water with my pack earlier, but the torrent was running too fast and deep. I had to camp on this side, facing the darker part of the wilderness instead of entering it.
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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate

“Crisis of Man”
Intellectuals have spoken in the language of difference since the 1960s. Mark Greif recalls a time when commonality was in the air… more

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Sheep outwits cattle grid
via Boing Boing by Rob Beschizza

via Nothing To Do With Arbroath

And here is another ten old but interesting items

How Artists Are Blending Biotechnology And Art
via MakeUseOf by Rick Delgado

Artists are all about exploring the world around them, delving into deep questions and asking audiences to think and be inspired. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that science often crosses paths with the art world.
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Winnipesaukee Cannonball: 1906
via Shorpy Historical Photo Archive – Vintage Fine Art Prints by Dave

Circa 1906
“Railway station at Weirs – Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire”
5x7 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company
View original post

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The evolution of the word ‘evolution’
via OUP Blog by Jeremy Marshall

It is curious that, although the modern theory of evolution has its source in Charles Darwin’s great book On the Origin of Species (1859), the word evolution does not appear in the original text at all. In fact, Darwin seems deliberately to have avoided using the word evolution, preferring to refer to the process of biological change as ‘transmutation’. Some of the reasons for this, and for continuing confusion about the word evolution in the succeeding century and a half, can be unpacked from the word’s entry in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).
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How the Doctor Who theme was recorded
via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz
A clip from the "Masters of Sound" special feature on the Doctor Who: The Beginning DVD set, about how pioneering electronic musician Delia Derbyshire and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop recorded Ron Grainer's Doctor Who theme. (via Chris Carter)
Check it out for yourself

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Brain Self-Organizes into Different Chambers, Preventing Damage to the Whole
via Big Think by Natalie Shoemaker

Writing is a recent innovation in the history of human evolution. So, how then is it that our brains have incorporated a skill of this type? Is it based on speaking?
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Elephants
via An Awfully Big Blog Adventure by Megan Rix

As soon as I heard about Lizzie the Sheffield elephant I knew I wanted to write a story about an elephant in World War One. I decided to have my elephant helping on the Home Front and on a farm after reading in the newspaper archives about an elephant that went to live and work on a farm in 1901. The man bought the elephant at a circus auction and initially thought he would start his own circus with her. But when he found out how good she was at working on the farm he changed his mind. He never did start a circus but he did keep the elephant, who he described as gentle and docile.
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The Great & Beautiful Lost Kingdoms
via 3 Quarks Daily: William Dalrymple in the NYRB (photo from Bridgeman Images)

Recently, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York held two remarkable but quite separate shows that, along with their catalogs, reflected this conceptual division. The northward thrust of Indian influence was examined in a small but fascinating show entitled “Buddhism Along the Silk Road: 5th–8th Century,” which was mounted in the Indian department of the museum between June 2012 and February 2013. The visual legacy of the diffusion of Indian art to Southeast Asia was the subject of a far more ambitious exhibition held at the Met a year later, in the summer of 2014, entitled “Lost Kingdoms”.
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Who Is Online: The Best Doctor Who Episodes of All Time
via MakeUseOf by Christian Cawley

“All of time and space; everywhere and anywhere; every star that ever was. Where do you want to start?”
This year, Doctor Who celebrates its 52nd anniversary, originally airing on November 23rd 1963 (and repeated the following week just in case people were more interested in the Kennedy assassination, news of which broke in the UK as the show was going out).
Over those 52 years, to date, Doctor Who has had 252 televised stories, two 1960s Dalek-centric cinematic spinoffs, two charity spoofs, and a deluge of print (novels and comics) and audio spinoffs. And we haven’t even touched on independent, fan-produced media!
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Was the world’s oldest deck of cards any fun?
via Boing Boing by Leigh Alexander

The oldest complete deck of cards in the world is from the distinctly-unhappy 15th century, and lives at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Cloisters location. The oblong cards are nifty-looking — but what would people play with them?
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The Crooked Tower
via 3 Quarks Daily: Greg Siegel at Cabinet Magazine

Galileo taught mathematics at the University of Pisa from 1589 to 1592, and sometime during this period he mounted a dramatic public demonstration of one of his more unorthodox notions. Clutching two lead spheres of different sizes and masses, he climbed the stairs of the campanile, the bell tower in the Piazza del Duomo, behind the cathedral. The young professor then proceeded—before an assembly of expectant onlookers, many of them faculty and students from the university—to drop the test objects simultaneously from the upper balcony. The plummeting orbs reached the ground together; with no temporal interval between their terrestrial impacts, a single resounding thump announced their coincident landing. Aristotelian physics, for ages the dominant paradigm, held that the velocities of free-falling bodies moving through the same medium vary in direct proportion to their weights. Galileo’s so-called Leaning Tower of Pisa Experiment conclusively disproved Aristotle’s doctrine of natural downward motion: heavier objects do not fall to earth faster than lighter objects, after all. In a veritable instant, the old certainties, all those dusty apriorisms of ancient and medieval inheritance, were upended. Science and knowledge had at last entered the modern era.
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Ten more items some people may find trivial

The Epic of a Genocide
via 3 Quarks Daily: James Reidel in the NYRB

The Forty Days of Musa Dagh made Franz Werfel (1890-1945) one of the world’s most celebrated and controversial authors after it first appeared in German in 1933. He had worked a miracle for Armenians around the world, taking what might have been a footnote in the history of World War I – the deportation and mass murder of the Ottoman Empire’s Armenian minority – and writing an epic that anticipated the ominous events unfolding in Germany as Adolf Hitler and the Nazis came to power. The erosion of civil rights, the singling out of a minority for the nation’s problems, and the state-sanctioned violence perpetrated against it were becoming a reality for German Jews and this made Musa Dagh seem the work of a prophet.
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Found this gem hidden amid the creased romance novels in a thrift store
via AbeBooks by Richard Davies

I found this 1972 Penguin paperback edition of A Clockwork Orange in a thrift store at the weekend. I could see row after row of creased romance novels and then spotted some orange spines, so I reached in to see what the books were.
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The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Changing Stories Across Mediums
via MakeUseOf by Justin Pot

If previous seasons are any indication, a subset of Game of Thrones fans are going to be yelling this a lot at their TVs for the next few Sundays. They’ll probably tweet, and leave angry comments, about changes they don’t like.
They shouldn’t.
Mediums have different strengths and weaknesses, and adapting a text from one medium to another sometimes calls for substantial changes. Perhaps no one understood this better than legendary science fiction author Douglas Adams.
And then we have the story, or stories, about Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy which you can read here

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Minding your stems and crowns
via OUP Blog by Frederick B. Essig

Since evolution became the primary framework for biological thought, we have been fascinated – sometimes obsessed – with the origins of things. Darwin himself was puzzled by the seemingly sudden appearance of angiosperms (flowering plants) in the fossil record. In that mid-Cretaceous debut, they seemed to be diversified into modern families already, with no evidence of what came before them. This was Darwin’s famous “abominable mystery”.
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Even if I hadn't been fascinated by the subject matter I think I would have chosen this item on the basis of the picture. I love flowers.

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Aphrodisias and Rome: now and then
via A Don’s Life by Mary Beard

I have just had a really flying visit to the site of Aphrodisias in Turkey, the Greco Roman city that has probably produced more important Roman discoveries over the last fifty years or so than anywhere else: Roman inscriptions by the ton have been found and published, but amongst other things uncovered pride of place must go to the "Sebasteion", the sanctuary of the imperial cult and to the extraordinary array of sculptured panels with which it was originally decorated (showing emperors in various poses and scenes from Greek myths). 80 of these survive from an original 200.
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Destination India
via OUP Blog by Lloyd I. Rudolph and Susanne Hoeber Rudolph

What would it be like driving overland from London – East of Suez and over the Khyber Pass – to India ? Day by day and mile by mile, we found out, recording our impressions and experiences of people, landscape, and encounters as we drove a 107″ wheel base Land Rover from London to Jaipur. The year was 1956; the months July and August. Our 5,000 mile journey took us across the ecological and cultural limes distinguishing Europe from Asia and into the Indian subcontinent. As freshly minted PhDs, 26- and 28-years-old, we were open to adventure and to knowledge of the other. Funded by a Ford Foundation Foreign Area Training fellowship, we found ourselves positioned at the cusp of the area studies era generated by the end of colonial rule.
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Einstein’s Dice and Schrödinger’s Cat
via 3 Quarks Daily: Jennifer Ouelette at The New York Times

On a cold January day in 1947, Erwin Schrödinger took the podium at the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin and triumphantly announced that he had succeeded where Albert Einstein had failed for the past 30 years. Schrödinger said he’d devised a unified theory of everything that reconciled the general theory of relativity with quantum mechanics. His announcement caused a sensation in the international press, which shamelessly played up the David and Goliath angle, much to Schrödinger’s discomfort and Einstein’s irritation. It nearly destroyed their longstanding friendship. Matters became so acrimonious at one point, with rumors of potential lawsuits, that another colleague, Wolfgang Pauli, stepped in to mediate. A full three years would pass before the estranged friends gingerly began exchanging letters again.
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London mapped to show the emotions in Victorian literature
via Boing Boing by Clive Thompson

Behold the “emotional geography” of Victorian literary: A map that shows the “feeling and sensations” connected with various city locations in 19th-century novels. There are some surprising findings.
Continue reading and find those very surprising things.

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Guns, herbs, and sores: inside the dragon's etymological lair
via OUP Blog by John Kelly

While St. George is widely venerated throughout Christian communities, England especially honors him, its patron saint, for St. George’s Day on 23 April. Indeed his cross, red on a white field, flies as England’s flag.
St. George, of course, is legendary for the dragon he slew, yet St. George bested the beast in legend alone. From Beowulf to The Game of Thrones, this creature continues to breathe life (and fire) into our stories, art, and language; even the very word dragon hoards its own gold. Let’s brave our way into its etymological lair to see what treasures we might find.
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Fruits and Vegetables Are Trying to Kill You
via 3 Quarks Daily: Moises Velasquez-Manoff in Nautilus

You probably try to exercise regularly and eat right. Perhaps you steer toward “superfoods,” fruits, nuts, and vegetables advertised as “antioxidant,” which combat the nasty effects of oxidation in our bodies. Maybe you take vitamins to protect against “free radicals,” destructive molecules that arise normally as our cells burn fuel for energy, but which may damage DNA and contribute to cancer, dementia, and the gradual meltdown we call aging.
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