Ten more non-work-related items that may interest you

Six things you didn’t know about light
via OUP Blog by Ian Walmsley

Light occupies a central place in our understanding of the world both as a means by which we locate ourselves in nature and as a thing that inspires our imagination. Light is what enables us to see things, and thus to navigate our surroundings. It is also a primary means by which we learn about the world – light beams carry information about the constituents of the universe, from distant stars and galaxies to the cells in our bodies to individual atoms and molecules. The impact of light on the modern world is immense, and often unrealized. For this reason, 2015 has been designated by the United Nations as the International Year of Light – a celebration of light and what is made possible by it.
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Clamshell Coupe: 1924
via Shorpy Historical Photo Archive – Vintage Fine Art Prints by Dave

San Francisco circa 1924
“New Reo Six, Pacific Heights”
We’ll bet that house is finished by now
5x7 glass negative by Christopher Helin
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What the stories of Reynard tell us about ourselves
via 3 Quarks Daily: Joan Acocella at The New Yorker

Writers aiming to tell us about human life have often done so under cover of telling us about animals. Animals are fun – they have feathers and fangs, they live in trees and holes – and they seem to us simpler than we are, so that, by using them, we can make our points cleaner and faster. With Madame Bovary, you pretty much have to say who her parents were. With SpongeBob, you don’t, and this keeps the story moving. Most important, the use of animals to stand in for human beings creates a fertile ambiguity. We know that the author is not proposing a one-for-one equivalence between human and nonhuman life, but some kinship is certainly being suggested. Think of Swift’s Houyhnhnms, trotting down the road, their withers shining in the sun, saying sober, passionless things to Gulliver. How beautiful they are, and how creepy. Animal narratives have allowed writers with lessons on their mind to make art rather than just lessons.
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All Roads: a cool self-working card trick
via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder

Futility Closet posted a how-to for this neat mathematical card trick by New York magician Henry Christ. It's called All Roads.
Brilliant mathematics

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Like a Rolling Stone: Was 1965 the Most Revolutionary Year in Music?
via Big Think by Bob Duggan

What do “Yesterday”, “Satisfaction”, “My Generation”, “The Sound of Silence”, “California Girls”, and “Like a Rolling Stone” all have in common?
They were all hits in 1965, the year author Andrew Grant Jackson calls “the most revolutionary year in music”. In 1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music, Jackson weaves a fascinating narrative of how popular music and social change influenced one another to create a year memorable not only for great music, but also for great progress in American culture. In this whirlwind tour of multiple genres of music as well as multiple pressing political issues, Jackson states a compelling case for 1965 as a key turning point in American music and society as well as provides a mirror for how music and society interact today, 50 years later.
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Meeting and mating with Neanderthals: good and bad genes
via OUP Blog by Eugene E. Harris

Analyses of Neanderthal genomes indicate that when anatomically modern humans ventured out of Africa around 50,000 years ago, they met and mated with Neanderthals, probably in regions of the Eastern Mediterranean. We know that Neanderthals inhabited regions of Eurasia during the recent ice ages for a period of over 200,000 years and finally became extinct around 40,000 to 35,000 years ago. Today, when we examine the genomes of Europeans and Asians, we find that about 2% of their genomes consist of Neanderthal fragments. Africans either do not have or have very small percentages of Neanderthal DNA, probably due to limited interbreeding between Eurasian peoples and Africans in more recent times.
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Emotional Intelligence Is Great, Until It’s Misused
via Big Think by Orion Jones

Emotional intelligence, i.e., the balancing of raw intelligence with emotional awareness, is a double-edged sword: It helps us empathise with others and avoid common misunderstandings that result in hurt feelings, but in the wrong hands, it can become a tool of manipulation.
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Depictions of insanity through history
via 3 Quarks Daily: Andrew Scull at The Paris Review

Modern psychiatry seems determined to rob madness of its meanings, insisting that its depredations can be reduced to biology and nothing but biology. One must doubt it. The social and cultural dimensions of mental disorders, so indispensable a part of the story of madness and civilization over the centuries, are unlikely to melt away, or to prove no more than an epiphenomenal feature of so universal a feature of human existence. Madness indeed has its meanings, elusive and evanescent as our attempts to capture them have been.
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The sea is pretty dangerous for baby jellyfish
via Boing Boing by Leigh Alexander
I might have a Thing about games featuring the frequent deaths of cute marine life, but here is another one: Jelly Reef, a game about guiding baby jellyfish by creating swirling currents in the sea with your fingertips. It’s soothing, until you realize all kinds of things will kill your jellies.
Continue reading it looks like fun!

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Science and serendipity: famous accidental discoveries
via 3 Quarks Daily: Samira Shackle in New Hummanist
Penicillin

Perhaps the most famous accidental discovery of all is penicillin, a group of antibiotics used to combat bacterial infections. In 1928, Scottish biologist Alexander Fleming took a break from his lab work investigating staphylococci and went on holiday. When he returned, he found that one Petri dish had been left open, and a blue-green mould had formed. This fungus had killed off all surrounding bacteria in the culture. The mould contained a powerful antibiotic, penicillin, that could kill harmful bacteria without having a toxic effect on the human body. At the time, Fleming’s findings didn’t garner much scientific attention. In fact, it took another decade before this drug was available for use in humans. Retrospectively, Fleming’s chance discovery has been credited as the moment when modern medicine was born.
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Ten trivial items you may enjoy as I did

The True Story of Rupert Brooke
via 3 Quarks Daily: Joanna Scutts at The New Yorker

For a long time, the history of the First World War has been understood via the symbolic transition from Brooke to Wilfred Owen, from posh idiot nationalist to heroic witness. That simple narrative obscures the extent to which Owen worshipped Brooke in the early days and just how long Brooke remained the war’s most famous poet.
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Octopus grabs diver’s video camera, swims off with it while it’s recording
via Boing Boing by Xeni Jardin
Their grip is no joke, as anyone who has encountered them while under water can attest. From “Victor’s Videos”, the YouTube uploader:

while trying to get video of a wild octopus, it suddenly dashes towards me and rips my shiny new camera from out of my hands, then swims off, all while the camera is recording! he swam away very quickly like a naughty shoplifter. after a 5 minute chase, I placed my speargun underneath him and he quickly and curiously grabbed hold of the gun as well, giving me enough time to reach in and grab the camera from out of his mouth. I didn’t feel threatened at all during the whole ordeal. he seemed to be fixated on the shiny metallic blue digital camera. the only confusing behavior was how he dashed off with it like a thief haha. cheeky octopus.

And remember, touching, poking, petting, or otherwise bugging marine life while in the sea is not cool.
Have a look at the video

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Is Economic Justice In Our Nature?
via Big Think by Jag Bhalla

It’s plausible that something like social contracts run deep in our nature. Along with the “economic justice” they need.
Continue reading (if you follow all the links you will be quite a long time on this but I found it very interesting).

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The Paston Letters Go Live
via Research Buzz: British Library Medieval Manuscripts Blog

 A 19th-century view of the ruins of Caistor Castle in Norfolk.
This 15th-century 'castle' was built for a prominent aristocratic family, the Fastolfs.
It passed to the Paston family who occupied it for the next century (British Library KTop XXXI.47)
The collection known as the Paston Letters is one of the largest archives of 15th-century English private correspondence, comprising about 1000 letters and documents including petitions, leases, wills and even shopping lists. They offer a unique glimpse into the personal lives of three generations of the Paston family from Norfolk over a period of 70 years – the family name comes from a Norfolk village about 20 miles north of Norwich. The Pastons rose from peasantry to aristocracy in just a few generations: the first member of the family about whom anything is known was Clement Paston (d. 1419), a peasant, who gave an excellent education to his son William (d. 1444), enabling him to study law. William’s sons and grandsons, two of whom were knighted, continued his relentless quest for wealth, status and land, and their story was acted out against the backdrop of the Wars of the Roses.
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Finding Trollope
via OUP Blog by Dominic Edwardes

Finding Trollope is one of the great pleasures of life. Unlike other Victorian authors Trollope is little studied in schools, so every reader comes to him by a different path. It might be a recommendation by a friend, listening to a radio adaptation or watching a TV production that leads to the discovery of Trollope and his world.
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What is the Self? Watch Philosophy Animations Narrated by Stephen Fry on Sartre, Descartes & More
via 3 Quarks Daily: Colin Marshall in Open Culture
If you’ve followed our recent philosophy posts, you’ve heard Gillian Anderson (The X-Files) speak on what makes us human, the origins of the universe, and whether technology has changed us, and Harry Shearer speak on ethics – or rather, you’ve heard them narrate short educational animations from the BBC scripted by Philosophy Bites’ Nigel Warburton. Now another equally distinctive voice has joined the series to explain an equally important philosophical topic. Behold Stephen Fry on the Self.
Watch and learn here

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The Hobbit read as the BBC Radio 4 Shipping Forecast
via AbeBooks by Richard Davies
The BBC Radio 4 Shipping Forecast has always fascinated me. I love the rhythm and cadence of the forecasts for each respective shipping area along with all those memorable names – Dogger, Rockall, German Bight anyone? I even don’t mind when the test match cricket commentary is interrupted by a five-minute break for the Shipping Forecast just as England are about to lose/win the game.
Continue reading and above all listen

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The Mr. Mom Switch
via 3 Quarks Daily: Erin O'Donnell in Harvard Magazine

In the mouse world, virgin male mice are not known as nurturers. They’re aggressive and infanticidal, regularly injuring or killing newborn mice fathered by other males. But research led by Catherine Dulac, Higgins professor of molecular and cellular biology, reveals that these murderous mice can be turned into doting dads simply by stimulating a set of neurons, shared by both males and females, that appears to drive parental behaviour.
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3 Emotions Caused by the Internet That There Are No Words For
via MakeUseOf by Justin Pot

Sometimes there’s just no word for a particular idea. Shakespeare knew, in those circumstances, to just make one up – which is why we have words like “assassination”, “cold blooded” and “swagger” today.
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Broken on the wheel
via 3 Quarks Daily: Ken Armstrong in The Paris Review (via The Browser)
On the night of October 13, 1761, cries rang from the shop of Jean Calas, a cloth merchant who lived and worked in the commercial heart of Toulouse, in the South of France. The eldest of Calas’s six children, Marc-Antoine, a moody, handsome man who was fond of billiards and gambling, had just been found dead. The family said he had been murdered – perhaps stuck with a sword by someone who slipped into the darkened boutique from the cobblestone street.
Continue reading but be aware that the story starts with a gruesome image of a person being broken on a wheel.

Ten more trivial items from the past for your delectation

Helen Keller, feminist, radical socialist, anti-racist activist and civil libertarian
via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow

Helen Keller’s activism on behalf of people with disabilities was rooted in her radical socialism, which held that the problems of the most vulnerable in society were the fault of capitalism, not genetics or industrial accidents.
Keller railed at her public reputation, which whitewashed her politics out of her activism. She’d be even more furious today, when she – like most historical socialists, like Albert Einstein and Jesus Christ – has had her politics completely expunged from her memory. However you feel about socialism, it is pure revisionism to remember Keller without politics. Keller did what she did because of her socialism, feminism and anti-racist activism.
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Play it now: The Penanggalan
via Boing Boing by Leigh Alexander

Games made in Puzzlescript have a uniquely-nostalgic feel, beyond the usual endeavour toward ‘pixel art’. The Penanggalan resembles a little old Atari game, starring a “floating head and entrails time-traveling vampire”.
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NailO – brilliant fingernail trackpad
via Red Ferret by Nigel

Sometimes you have to take your hat off to the boffins for coming up with something genuinely innovative, and this new concept product is one of those. The NailO is a nail sticker which fits over a thumb and converts your digit to a full blown trackpad. It’s the brainchild of the geeks at MIT – we’re rather surprised it’s not a crazy Kickstarter project yet – and it looks to have real potential.
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’90s computer teacher shows you how to use new thing that looks like TV called a computer
via Boing Boing by Xeni Jardin {via Laughing Squid via Reddit}
“It looks like a television. But it’s a computer!”
“You’re learning the most recent version of DOS, DOS 6.0.”
“What happens when you press the wrong button? Does it blow up?”
Go and watch the videos, great fun!

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Was Yoda a medieval monk? It takes a museum curator to tell you
via The Guardian by Peter Moore

Until the arrival of social media, being a curator at the British Library remained a solitary, out of the way job. In many ways it still is for Julian Harrison, curator of pre-1600 historical manuscripts. Behind the scenes he cares for the priceless collections that include copies of Beowulf, some of the world’s oldest Bibles, the Lindisfarne Gospels and the state papers of Henry VIII. He curates exhibitions such as the current Magna Carta: law, liberty, legacy. The difference for Harrison these days is that he does all this with a virtual audience of thousands.
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Crime Dog: 1923
via Shorpy Historical Photo Archive – Vintage Fine Art Prints by Dave

Washington, D.C., 1923
“Police dog -- Gus Buchholz”
About to take a bite out of something.
Harris & Ewing Collection glass negative
View original post

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The great conductors in rehearsal: 15 vintage practice room pictures
via Classicfm
Those intense rehearsal moments captured - with history’s finest conductors and composers at the podium.
View for yourself

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The Oxford Etymologist gets down to brass tacks and tries to hit the nail on the head
via OUP Blog by Anatoly Liberman

I have always been interested in linguistic heavy metal. In the literature on English phrases, two “metal idioms” have attracted special attention: dead as a doornail and to get (come) down to brass tacks. The latter phrase has fared especially well; in recent years, several unexpected early examples of it have been unearthed. I say “unexpected”, because the examples turned up in obscure local newspapers, a repository of many language nuggets buried with little hope of resurrection (I’ll return to the burial metaphor at the end of the post) and because those working on the first volume of the OED (1884) did not have a single citation of the phrase. In the First Supplement, the earliest one goes back to 1903, but now we have examples dated to 1863. The feeling has always been that to get down to brass tacks is an American coinage, and indeed it first surfaced in print in Texas. As we will see, some other evidence also points in the direction of the United States.
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Researchers are on the trail of a mysterious connection between number theory, algebra and string theory
via 3 Quarks Daily: Erica Klarreich in Quanta

In 1978, the mathematician John McKay noticed what seemed like an odd coincidence. He had been studying the different ways of representing the structure of a mysterious entity called the monster group, a gargantuan algebraic object that, mathematicians believed, captured a new kind of symmetry. Mathematicians weren’t sure that the monster group actually existed, but they knew that if it did exist, it acted in special ways in particular dimensions, the first two of which were 1 and 196,883.
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Delightful time-lapses of flowers blooming
via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz
You simply have to look at this video

Ten trivial items (mostly from a long time ago)

Dolly Parton talks flush toilets and growing up with 11 siblings
via Boing Boing by Caroline Siede
“Blank On Blank” animates rarely-heard interviews with famous figures. Their latest video features Dolly Parton, discussing growing up in poverty with 11 siblings in Tennessee—she didn’t use a flush toilet until she was around eight years old).
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Water Park: 1907
via Shorpy Historical Photo Archive – Vintage Fine Art Prints by Dave

Toledo, Ohio, circa 1907
“Walbridge Park Annex – Casino, boardwalk and roller coaster on Maumee River“
Panorama of two 8x10 glass negatives
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Iconic trumpet players who defined jazz history
via OUP Blog by Miki Onwudinjo

Since emerging at the beginning of the 20th century, jazz music has been a staple in American culture. Historians are not clear on when exactly jazz was born or who first started playing it, but it can be agreed upon that New Orleans, Louisiana is the First City of Jazz. Amidst the inventive be-bop beats filling up NOLA bars are the iconic trumpet players who still continue to inspire musicians and new music every day.
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Biggest instrumental hits of the last 50 years
via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz
Cuepoint plays through disco, funk, jazz, classical, TV themes, movie soundtracks, and, er, Kenny G to list “every instrumental, as classified by Billboard, that has made it to the Top 10 over the past 50 years”.
Check out the link above. There’s some surprising omissions.

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Wilfred Owen Insensibility
A reluctant soldier responds to mass tragedy.
via 3 Quarks Daily: Austin Allen at Poetry Foundation
From an early age, Wilfred Owen seems to have demanded a lot out of the people around him. His younger brother Harold, as Philip Larkin recounted in a review of Jon Stallworthy’s Owen biography (1975), claimed that: “[Wilfred] as an adolescent veered from ‘too high spirits’ to depression and attacks of bad temper in which he was inclined to lecture the whole family furiously for their failure to attain proper standards.” Harold also recalled that Wilfred seemed to enjoy pointing out Harold’s errors in his schoolwork and reveling in “the pleasures of his destructive criticism.” If these recollections are accurate, Wilfred would hardly be the first poet to turn the flaws of his character into the strengths of his art.
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Perhaps the greatest of the poems to come out of WW1

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How to Outsmart a Lie Detector Test
via Big Think by Robert Montenegro

A polygraph machine is not a magical device. It can’t read your mind; it has no concept of truth. The polygraph test is ostensibly designed to identify liars from truth-tellers, but its weaknesses make it like any other test in that it can be beaten, given the right kind of studying. To outsmart a lie detector you must first understand its psychological facets and then turn them in your favour.
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How We Age
via 3 Quarks Daily: from The Scientist

Growing old is a fact of life. And there’s no mistaking it, given the increased fatigue, weakened bones, and ill health that generally accompany aging. Indeed, age is the number one risk factor for myriad diseases, including Alzheimer’s, cancer, cataracts, and macular degeneration. And while researchers are making progress in understanding and treating each of these ailments, huge gaps remain in our understanding of the aging process itself.
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Watch How A Rubber Band Can Help You With A Stripped Screw
via Lifehack by Matt Duczeminski

A stripped screw can be a source of frustration, and at worst can lead to a voided warranty or lost security deposit if you don’t know how to handle it. You might be tempted to try your own fix, or even shell out extra cash to have a professional fix it so you don’t mess anything else up. But before you break out the socket wrench or ball peen hammer, reach in your junk drawer for a plain old rubber band.
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The Fight: 1913
via Shorpy Historical Photo Archive – Vintage Fine Art Prints by Dave

New York, 1913
“Quality Shop and Hudson Theatre”
Where the audience for Bayard Veiller’s drama The Fight included a grand jury probing charges that the play was “indecent and a public nuisance“
8x10 glass negative
View original post

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How Digital Light Processing works
via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
Ben Krasnow is the modern Way Things Work. In this video, he shows how Digital Light Processing projectors work. He even built a macro-size chip so you can see the mirrors in action.
Watch it yourself here
Fascinating.