via 3 Quarks Daily by Emrys Westacott
As an expatriate Brit who has lived in North America for many years, I have sometimes been asked what I miss most about the old country. There's plenty to miss, of course: draught bitter; Prime Minister's Question Time; red phone boxes; racist tabloid newspapers; Henderson's Yorkshire Relish; grey rainy afternoons, especially at the seaside in July. But my answer is always the same: I miss the footpaths.
Continue reading and see a couple of lovely pictures of the Peak District that I cannot get HTTPS to save properly!
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What’s the difference between a $20 ukulele and a $1000 ukulele
via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
The answer is, not much, but if you are serious about playing, an extra $980 is probably worth it. In this video George Elmes compares his super cheap yellow starter uke with his most recent uke purchase, a $1000 beauty. Listen to him play the same song on each uke.
The expensive uke has a brighter sound, but the $20 uke sounds pretty good. Elmes says the expensive uke holds a tune better, has better action and intonation, and feels better to play, “however, you can still play a tune on this $20 yellow ukulele”.
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Mary Ellen Marks (1940 - 2015)
via 3 Quarks Daily: Stefany Anne Golberg at The Smart Set
In a photograph titled “Ward 81″, a woman sits on a bed. She is young, a teenager. She sits cross-legged and wears her clothes and hair like a teenager would. The wall behind this teenage girl is covered in pictures. The pictures, magazine cutouts, are taped to the wall and some of the edges have been carefully rounded with scissors. There are pictures of animals and a picture of a tree. Below a picture of the Mona Lisa the name BRENDA is written in marker. In this room that could belong to any teenager, the walls are strangely close. The bed is pushed up to the radiator and the metal headboard is too white and plain. The young woman’s eyes are blank—one eye tilts toward her nose. Her left arm is outstretched bearing the evidence of self-inflicted wounds and on the wall above the radiator, also written in marker, are the words, “I wish to die.”
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Please be aware that the photograph of Brenda clearly shows her self-harm scars. You may wish to leave the story here.
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Discovering a new star archaeological museum
via Times Online by Mary Beard
For reasons I shall share in due course, I hitched a ride with the husband who was off to see an icon in Lebanon. I had never been there before, but had always wanted to see Baalbek. One should of course check ahead. It was only by the time that all had been booked that I discovered that Baalbek was very definitely now off limits, But it turned out that there was plenty more good stuff.
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10 Ancient Books That Can Inspire You Even Today
via Lifehack by Peter Burns
In this day and age, many people feel lost. They don’t know in what direction their life should be headed, how to overcome the different challenges that life throws at them, or just how to be relaxed and happy. Oftentimes they try to find outside sources to help them in this. The self-help industry is worth billions of dollars and keeps on growing.
Many people spend huge sums of money to try to get answers to their questions. They often don’t know which advice to choose and how to proceed with changing things that need changing.
If you really want to get to the core of self-improvement, happiness and success, it is time to get back to the basics. A wise man once said, that whatever question people have today, a wise man from thousands of years ago had already provided the answer.
The people of yesteryear lived hard, and challenging lives, but that did not stop them from working on improving themselves, achieving their goals and enjoying the little things.
Whatever question you might have, whatever challenge you are trying to overcome, the answer can most likely be found in the one of the books below. Best of all, all of them can be found totally free on the internet.
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Tulipmania – When Tulips Caused A Financial Crash
via Arena Flowers by Daisy Chain
In 1593 a handful of tulips were planted by a man named Carolus Clusius at the University of Leiden in Holland. This is considered by many as the birth of Holland’s well known flower business that we know today, and the catalyst for one of the first recorded financial bubbles known as “Tulipmania”, where a tulip buying frenzy saw their prices reach extortionate levels.
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What the Hell
via 3 Quarks Daily: Joan Acocella in The New Yorker
People can’t seem to let go of the Divine Comedy. You’d think that a fourteenth-century allegorical poem on sin and redemption, written in a medieval Italian vernacular and in accord with the Scholastic theology of that period, would have been turned over, long ago, to the scholars in the back carrels.
But no.
By my count there have been something like a hundred English-language translations, and not just by scholars but by blue-chip poets: in the past half century, John Ciardi, Allen Mandelbaum, Robert Pinsky, W. S. Merwin. Liszt and Tchaikovsky have composed music about the poem; Chaucer, Balzac, and Borges have written about it. In other words, the Divine Comedy is more than a text that professors feel has to be brushed up periodically for students. It’s one of the reasons there are professors and students. In some periods devoted to order and decorum in literature – notably the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries – many sophisticated readers scorned the Divine Comedy as a grotesque, impenetrable thing. But not in our time. T. S. Eliot, the lawgiver of early-twentieth-century poetics, placed Dante on the highest possible rung of European poetry. “Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them,” he wrote. “There is no third.”
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Smuggling for Christ the King
via OUP Blog by Julia G. Young
Guns, ammunition, bootlegged liquor, illegal drugs, counterfeit cash—these are the most common objects that generations of smugglers have carried across the US-Mexico border. Historians of the borderlands, as well as residents of the area, know that government agents on both sides of the line have never been able to gain complete control over this type of trafficking, despite their best efforts. And so, from the late nineteenth century to the present day, the borderlands have been portrayed in popular culture as a site of sin and dissolution, contraband and illicit trade.
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Why magenta doesn’t appear in the rainbow
via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
Steve Mould’s colored flashlights (sometimes called “coloured torches” in distant lands) are useful props in this excellent 5-minute lecture on color mixing. I learned that magenta is not a color. Rather, it is the absence of green.
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How are the smallest beasts of the stellar zoo born?
via OUP Blog by Vicente Hernández Hernández and Aina Palau
In the same way as a jungle harbours several species of birds and mammals, the stellar (or almost stellar) zoo also offers a variety of objects with different sizes, masses, temperatures, ages, and other physical properties.
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