22nd February 6 +3 +1

The Pointer Sisters: 1910
via Shorpy Historical Photo Archive – Vintage Fine Art Prints by Dave

Circa 1910
“Ford, J., Mrs., group”
An outlier among Harris & Ewing’s generally sedate-and-sober studio portraits
8x10 glass negative
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How to Build Your Personal Brand Without Acting Insufferable
via Big Think by Robert Montenegro
Dorie Clark of Harvard Business Review recently published an interesting piece about how to self-promote without being a jerk. According to Clark, there are several key things to remember in order to ensure that your brand-building isn't completely self-serving. Sure, you want to frame yourself in the best way possible. But you're also submitting facts about yourself to augment others' understanding of your skills and capabilities. By composing an accurate and thorough resume or CV, you're offering employers and teammates a tool by which they can analyze your skills and needs.
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via Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Why we confess
The theological disclosures of Augustine and the earnestness of De Quincey have given way to a petty, low-stakes literature. Confession has been commodified… more

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Hello! Exploring the Superweird world of Hello Kitty
via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder

An exhibit at the Japanese American National Museum showcases the beloved 40-year-old British girl known as Hello Kitty
Continue reading about Mark’s visit to the exhibition and see all his lovely pictures.

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A brand new electrical phenomenon has been discovered – a huge electric field in a thin film of laughing gas
via 3 Quarks Daily: from Science Alert

Scientists in Denmark have made a curious and awesome discovery – cooled down, solid laughing gas can contain an enormous electric field.
The discovery occurred when physicists at Aarhus University were observing how electrons travel through nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, frozen to minus 233 degrees Celsius. When brought down to this temperature, the gas formed a thin, solid film, about one tenth of a micron thick, hovering over a strip of gold.
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via Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Satre
Hopped up on coffee and amphetamines, Sartre filled notebook upon notebook with prose both windy and impenetrable… more

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Audrey Hepburn's Final Salute to the Movies
via Big Think by Big Think editors

Audrey Hepburn (1929-1993) was a British actress, humanitarian, and cultural icon of Hollywood's golden age. The star of such films as Sabrina, Roman Holiday and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Hepburn is also notable for her work with UNICEF as a cultural ambassador who visited Ethiopia, Somalia, Vietnam, and Central America in the final years of her life.
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Toys are more gendered now than they were 50 years ago
via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow

Before Reagan’s FCC deregulated kids’ TV and allowed toy-makers to produce 22-minute commercials disguised as cartoons, there had been major strides in de-gendering toys, grouping them by interest, rather than by constraining who was “supposed” to play with them.

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via Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Frame of reference
Do you know what “sprezzatura” means? How about “starboard out, starboard home”? Secret frames of reference govern writing… more

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The contents of the bowels of an Italian medieval warlord have revealed his nefarious cause of death nearly 700 years later
via 3 Quarks Daily: Michelle Starr in CNet

It’s commonly accepted that life expectancy in the Middle Ages was pretty low, hovering around the early 30s – mainly because of the hazards of childhood. If a person made it to adulthood, the average was in the 60s – but, although that’s comparable with today’s global life expectancy, the world was still a much more dangerous – and openly vicious – place. It wasn’t, for example, unusual for popes and kings to be assassinated.
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