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
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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)
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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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