Tuesday, 10 February 2015

Trivia (should have been 16 November)

Silent Choir: 1910
via Shorpy Historical Photo Archive – Vintage Fine Art Prints by Dave
Silent Choir: 1910
“Chester Cathedral, England. Major construction 11th-15th century”
8x10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company
View original post

==========================================
Douglas Adams on Environmentalism
via Big Think by Big Think editors
Adamswow
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.

==========================================
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

==========================================
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.
Continue reading

==========================================
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.

==========================================
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

==========================================
Is religion to blame for history's bloodiest wars?
via 3 Quarks Daily John Gray at The New Statesman
“The Inquisition in New Spain” by Samuel de Champlain (1574-1635). Image: Brown University Library, Rhode Island/Bridgeman Images
From the Inquisition to Isis, religion is blamed for brutality. But violence is a secular creed too.
Continue reading

==========================================
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.
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.
Continue reading

==========================================
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

==========================================
Sheep outwits cattle grid
via Boing Boing by Rob Beschizza

via Nothing To Do With Arbroath

No comments: