via Shorpy Historical Photo Archive – Vintage Fine Art Prints by Dave
October 1943. Washington, D.C.
“Sally Dessez talking with some friends near her locker at Woodrow Wilson High School”
Popular girls and their minion
Photo by Esther Bubley for the Office of War Information
View original post
==========================================
The Anatomy of Attention
via 3 Quarks Daily Alan Lightman in The New Yorker
Every moment, our brains are bombarded with information, from without and within. The eyes alone convey more than a hundred billion signals to the brain every second. The ears receive another avalanche of sounds. Then there are the fragments of thoughts, conscious and unconscious, that race from one neuron to the next. Much of this data seems random and meaningless. Indeed, for us to function, much of it must be ignored. But clearly not all. How do our brains select the relevant data? How do we decide to pay attention to the turn of a doorknob and ignore the drip of a leaky faucet? How do we become conscious of a certain stimulus, or indeed “conscious” at all?
Continue reading
==========================================
Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
The world of high criticism is endangered. Not by academic mandarins, but rather by Silicon Valley philistines. Sean Wilentz explains… more
==========================================
A day at Cheltenham
via Times Online by Mary Beard
I had a great day at Cheltenham Literary Festival on Sunday. To be honest, Cheltenham is a bit of a schlepp from Cambridge, so my deal is to go there and back in a day – and I do as many gigs as anyone wants me to fit in (provided that it includes our now traditional "How to read a Latin poem" slot, with Peter Stothard and Llew Morgan).
Continue reading
==========================================
Great ideas that changed the world, and the people they rode in on
via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow
To inaugurate the publication of his brilliant new book How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World (also a PBS/BBC TV series), Steven Johnson has written about the difficult balance between reporting on the history of world-changing ideas and the inventors credited with their creation.
Continue reading
==========================================
Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Willa Cather was against teaching colleges students how to write creatively, instead of how to write “clear and correct English”… more
==========================================
Johnson: Alleged carelessness
via Economist (Prospero blog) by R.L.G.
Journalists have a bad habit. Writing about people suspected of crimes is tricky in many ways, and one of them is conveying the level of facts legally proven to be true at the time of writing. Specifically, journalists too frequently use “alleged” as their own kind of get-out-of-jail-free card, attaching it to a noun that very much implies the suspect is guilty, without the journalist committing to it outright.
Continue reading
==========================================
Are we alone in the Universe?
via OUP Blog by David A Rothery
World Space Week has prompted myself and colleagues at the Open University to discuss the question: ‘Is there life beyond Earth?’
The bottom line is that we are now certain that there are many places in our Solar System and around other stars where simple microbial life could exist, of kinds that we know from various settings, both mundane and exotic, on Earth. What we don’t know is whether any life does exist in any of those places. Until we find another example, life on Earth could be just an extremely rare fluke. It could be the only life in the whole Universe. That would be a very sobering thought.
Continue reading
==========================================
Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Wit can be charming or mean, whimsical or incisive. Done well, it mocks pretension, false self-esteem, snobbery. Wit is vital – and in decline… more
==========================================
Futility Closet 26: A Practical Joke on a Grand Scale
via Boing Boing
In 1810 someone told hundreds of London merchants that Mrs. Tottenham at 54 Berners Street had requested their services. She hadn't. For a full day the street was packed with crowds of deliverymen struggling to reach a single door – and the practical joker was never caught.
Continue reading
No comments:
Post a Comment