Where childhood memories go
via Boing Boing by Rob Beschizza
Chances are you don't remember much from before you were about three years old, and the way we narrate our worlds to ourselves is a big part of why.
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Go Ask Alice: What really went on in Wonderland
via 3 Quarks Daily: Anthony Lane in The New Yorker
Who reads “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”? The answer used to be: Anyone who can read.
From the tangled tale of mass literacy one can pluck a few specific objects – books that were to be found in every household where there was somebody who could read and people who wanted to listen. Aside from the Bible, a typical list would run like this: “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” “Robinson Crusoe,” and “Gulliver’s Travels,” to which were later added “The Pickwick Papers” and “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.” Notice that Alice is not the sole adventurer. Every one of those titles contains the leading character, whose fate is to go on a journey, and whose mettle is tested in the process. Each explores a different landscape, or body of water, but all five traverse what you might call the valley of the shadow of life, profuse with incident. Three of the writers were men of God, and the two others began as journalists. Had you asked any of them to take a creative-writing course, the door would have closed in your face.
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A Sleep Researcher’s Attempt to Build a Bank for Dreams
via Research Buzz: Andy Wright in Atlas Obscura
For many people, listening to just one person describe their dreams is a nightmare. But for G. William Domhoff, it’s a calling; as a dream researcher, he listens to them professionally.
But even a dream doctor has his limits.
“As soon as people find out what I do, they want me to interpret their dream,” says Domhoff, a research professor in psychology and sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz and author of several books on dreams.
But dreams are a numbers game and Domhoff prefers to work with big data sets, not a single offering. Over the years he has collected and analyzed a vast library of dreams and is one of the founders of The DreamBank, an online archive of over 22,000 dreams. The database, which is available for the public to sift through, is an attempt to quantify one of the most ephemeral of human experiences.
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Take a Walk in the Woods to Feel Better
via Big Think by Natalie Shoemaker
Researchers suggest the best remedy to break the cycle of depressing rumination is to go for a walk in the woods.
The researchers noted the importance of this study in their paper, writing that “[urbanization] is associated with increased levels of mental illness, but it’s not yet clear why.” They say with more than 50 percent of people living in urban areas and a predicted 70 percent moving to cities in 2050, they believe it's important to understand how scientists can mitigate these effects. One of the ways they believe is to get a little nature.
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A Primate’s Education
via Education State by Editors
Baby School
Newly arrived infants and very young orangutans spend the day in a forested nursery where they are cared for 24/7 by their babysitters. Their health is carefully monitored as many of them have come to the center severely malnourished and they are extremely susceptible to illness due to having compromised immune systems. Many of them had been raised as pets after their mothers were slaughtered and precious few have been lucky enough to survive the ordeal of life without the one person they depend on most: their mothers.
Continue reading and find out about Forest School followed by University.
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Base Station: 1906
via Shorpy Historical Photo Archive – Vintage Fine Art Prints by Dave
New Hampshire circa 1906
“Base station, Mount Washington Railway, White Mountains”
8x10 inch dry plate glass negative
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‘Why Grow Up?’ by Susan Neiman
via Arts and Letters Daily: a review by A. O. Scott in The New York Times
A great deal of modern popular culture – including just about everything pertaining to what French savants like to call le nouvel âge d’or de la comédie américaine – runs on the disavowal of maturity. The ideal consumer is a mirror image of a familiar comic archetype: a man-child sitting in his parents’ basement with his video games and his “Star Wars” figurines; a postgraduate girl and her pals treating the world as their playground. Baby boomers pursue perpetual youth into retirement. Gen-Xers hold fast to their skateboards, their Pixies T-shirts and their Beastie Boys CDs. Nobody wants to be an adult anymore, and every so often someone writes an article blaming Hollywood, attachment parenting, global capitalism or the welfare state for this catastrophe.
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Fountain Pen Factory: 1935
via Shorpy Historical Photo Archive – Vintage Fine Art Prints by Dave
Circa 1935
“Sheaffer fountain pen factory, Fort Madison, Iowa. Final act of the pen manufacture.”
8x10 acetate negative by Theodor Horydczak
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Dreams and Anna Karenina
via Arts & Letter Daily: Janet Malcolm in The New York Review of Books
Tatyana Drubich in Sergei Solovyov’s adaptation of Anna Karenina, 2009
We do not think of Tolstoy as a comic writer, but his genius permits him to write farce when it suits him. There is a wickedly funny scene in Anna Karenina that directly precedes the painful scenes leading to Anna’s suicide. It takes place in the drawing room of the Countess Lydia Ivanovna, who, almost alone among the novel’s characters, has no good, or even pretty good, qualities. She embodies the kind of hysterical and coldhearted religious piety that Tolstoy was especially allergic to.
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How Pyrex Transformed Every Kitchen Into a Home-Ec Lab
via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
Ben Marks of Collectors Weekly says, “Pyrex turns 100 this year, so Hunter Oatman-Stanford reached out to Glen Cook, chief scientist at the Corning Museum of Glass, and Regan Brumagen, one of the curators of a Pyrex exhibition at the museum that continues through March of 2016. Hunter learned that Pyrex actually began as an industrial product used in everything from telescope lenses to railroad-signal lanterns, and that it was the wife of a Corning physicist who championed its application in the kitchen.”
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OK, so we may not be able to get to see the exhibition but we can read about it.
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