via Prospero by P.C.
Some of the most memorable scenes in films have revolved around money. Think of Michael Douglas declaring “Greed is good” in “Wall Street”, Leonardo DiCaprio’s share scams in “The Wolf of Wall Street” and, most memorably, Jimmy Stewart’s desperate attempts to save his local bank in “It’s A Wonderful Life” (pictured).
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Mars, Pluto… and beyond
via OUP Blog by Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams
The story of our solar system is developing into one of the most absorbing – and puzzling – epics of contemporary science. At the heart of it lies one of the greatest questions of all – just how special is our own planet, which teems with life and (this is the difficult bit) which has teemed with life continuously through most of its 4.5 billion year lifetime? Not all of the answers are to be found here on Earth. Our world must be understood in context, by comparison with other planets, near and far. New information has recently come in from one of our nearest neighbours, Mars, and from our most distant one, that heavenly body Pluto, that used to be known as a planet. The information is puzzling and astonishing in equal measure.
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First Demonstration of Photonic Intelligence
Next time you need to choose, why not let a photon make the decision instead?
A View from Emerging Technology from the arXiv
Imagine walking into a casino to play the one-armed bandits. You’ve heard that one of them pays out more than the others, so your goal is to find out which. But how much of your resources should you pour into exploring the machines before you decide to exploit one of them?
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Dental Picks
via Cool Tools by Kitty Hill
Dental picks come in all kinds of shapes and sizes. First recommended to me by my art teacher in 1982 as a great tool for picking out small bits in tight areas of woodcuts. I found them to be excellent for just about anything you could imagine: lifting out gobs of hair stuck in a drain, cleaning the grooves and fine lines in my antique stove, reaching into small areas to retrieve slipped objects, clearing scraps of jammed paper in a copy machine. I got my first one from my dentist who looked at me rather oddly and I assured him I would not be doing my own dental work! I believe they throw them out anyway.
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Most Italians did not speak Italian
via 3 Quarks Daily: David Gilmour in delanceyplace
In 1861, when the Italian peninsula was finally united into a single political entity, only 2.5 percent of “Italians” spoke the Italian language. In fact, the citizens of every major Italian city – Rome, Venice, Florence, Milan, and others – each spoke a different language. The situation was similar in the other countries of Europe: “The posthumous role of Dante Alighieri in the development of Italian has long been treated with reverence and solemnity. The great Florentine poet was, according to one scholar, not only ‘the father of the Italian language’ but also ‘the father of the nation and the symbol of national greatness through the centuries’. It is doubtful that Dante would have thought the second part of the description applicable to him, especially as he believed Italy should be part of the Holy Roman Empire and not a nation by itself. Yet he did write The Divine Comedy (or, as he himself called it, simply La Commedia) in Italian and extolled the virtues of the vernacular, the ‘new sun’ that would put Latin in the shade, in De vulgari eloquentia, a book he wrote in Latin.
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Fannia falanghina
via Times Online by Mary Beard
Another of my favourite Roman inscriptions, which I have mentioned before and talked about at Bard, is what may be the tombstone of a couple, known for business purposes (one presumes) as Calidius Eroticus and Fannia Voluptas. All those names are individually well attested at Rome, but together they roughly equal Mr Hot Sex and Mrs Gorgeous (though Fannia in Latin does not mean what you might imagine). So it seems highly unlikely that they were the names the couple were born with, but the one’s they took to brand their bar or cheap lodging house.
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A pauper's life in their own words
via The National Archives by Katie Fox
It is generally accepted that primary sources detailing paupers’ experience of the 19th century are largely written about the poor rather than by them.
This is true. However, at The National Archives we estimate there to be thousands of documents written by paupers within our record series MH 12. These ego documents (meaning autobiographical writing) take the form of letters, petitions and signed depositions that came into the Local Government Board and its predecessors, the Poor Law Commission and the Poor Law Board. So within one (admittedly huge) record series we can find documents setting out the pauper experience written by paupers themselves.
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A wonderful museum and some very odd notices
via Times Online by Mary Beard
I have just been stunned by the new museum at Ephesus, which I think only opened a few months ago, funded largely by the Austrians. I hadn’t been to Ephesus for about thirty years, and it was a flying visit back then, which certainly didn’t include the museum. I got the impression that most people going to the site now don’t take in the museum too: a big mistake. Go there if you get the chance.
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It’s OK to Be a Luddite
Mocking people who fear technology’s dehumanizing creep is easy. Here’s why they have a point.
via Arts & Letter Daily: by David Auerbach in Slate
Technology will save us!
Technology sucks!
Where today’s techno-utopians cheer, our modern-day Luddites, from survivalists to iPhone skeptics to that couple that dresses in Victorian clothing and winds its own clock, grumble.
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This underwater nightmare scorpion was Earth's first “big predator”
via Boing Boing by Rob Beschizza
Meet Pentecopterus decorahensis, the creature that would have eaten you were you a tasty fishy 460m years ago: “It was obviously a very aggressive animal. It was a big angry bug.”
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