via Marcus Zillman
The Map Room is a weblog about maps, curated and composed by map connoisseur Jonathan Crowe. Readers will find frequently updated posts on everything from the use of maps in fantasy novels to election maps to multilingual maps of India.
Entries are short - usually less than 100 words – and packed with links to fascinating and informative sites from around the web. After readers have scrolled down the page and taken in all the latest from Mr. Crowe, they may like to explore the categories of Archives, Fantasy Maps, Publications, and Reviews.
Archives date back to 2003 and include hundreds of entries. They can be scouted by month or by subject (Antique Maps, Environment, GPS, Transit, and about two dozen other). There is also an excellent tag function, where readers can find everything from NASA to 3D Printing to refugees.
This will be added to Reference Resources Subject Tracer™.
From The Scout Report, Copyright Internet Scout 1994-2016. https://www.scout.wisc.edu
Oh the side trails that one can go down on the Internet!
The Library of Congress’s map blog, Worlds Revealed, has begun a series of posts about imaginary maps. “We’ll be exploring all of these types of maps and imaginary worlds this summer. Come revisit the Hundred Acre Wood and the other worlds of your favorite children’s stories, spend some time in medieval Europe, and run from White Walkers in Game of Thrones.” So far we have an introduction and a look at maps from the European Middle Ages and Renaissance, with Tolkien’s map of Middle-earth next on the schedule. [WMS]
I give up or I will never get anything done!! But I tell you that the Hundred Acre Wood map is superb.
===================================
Insects are conscious, according to study
via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
“Brain scans of insects appear to indicate that they have the capacity to be conscious and show egocentrico, apparently indicating that they have such a thing as subjective experience.” That's the finding of study written by Andrew B Barron and Colin Klein, and published in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences.
Continue reading
===================================
Ghetto: The Shared History of a Word
via 3 Quarks Daily: Adam Kirsch in Tablet
Today most Americans would be surprised to learn that the original ghettos were inhabited by Jews. That is the experience Mitchell Duneier relates in his new book Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea, when it comes to teaching his own students at Princeton about the history of the ghetto. For the last 70 years, Duneier shows, the word “ghetto” has for Americans become exclusively associated with poor black neighborhoods, especially in big cities like New York and Chicago. Few people know that, for centuries before America even existed, Jews in many European cities were legally confined to walled neighborhoods known as ghettos. (“Ghetto” is the Italian word for “foundry”; the first Jewish enclave in Venice was located on the same island as a foundry, and the word came to refer to the neighborhood by extension.)
Continue reading
===================================
BT Archives: making a collaborative resource
via The National Archives Blog by James Fleming
It’s difficult to overstate the impact of the First World War on people across the globe; from the significant political consequences, to the military and medical legacies, the effect of the First World War on the development of society can still be seen today. Among the various technological developments to medical and military equipment is the impression the war had on British telecommunications and the technological strides that were made as a result.
Continue reading
===================================
War and Peace on screen
via OUP Blog by Amy Mandelker
I’m 15 years old and I have just thrown up in the lavatory at the movie theater. Shaking too hard to reach the paper towels, I need to hide out there for the entire intermission of the third instalment of Sergei Bondarchuk’s epic 1967 film adaptation of War and Peace. In its uncut version, the film is almost 9 hours long, requiring four separate screenings of almost 3 hours each, shown on two consecutive weekends of two nights each.
Continue reading
===================================
What Killed off the Neanderthals? You Might Not Like the Answer
via Big Think by Philip Berry
Beginning about 400,000 years ago, Neanderthals began moving across Europe and Western Asia. They roamed widely for hundreds of thousands of years. Then something happened about 45,000 years ago. That’s when a new, invasive species turned up on the scene, homo sapiens—our direct ancestors. This group began migrating across Africa and into Europe. Waves of them came and spread out. The next bit has been a mystery to modern science. 5,000 years later, the Neanderthals disappeared. No one knows why. But a new discovery has us one step closer to a definitive answer.
Continue reading
===================================
Mourning, memory, and performance
via OUP Blog by Laurie Maguire
There is a wonderful Christopher Rush novel, Will (2007), in which Shakespeare says that what he does best is death: “I do deaths you see. And I can do the deaths of children. Their lips were four red roses on a stalk… – that sort of thing.” From the death of young Rutland in 2 Henry VI to the unexpected death of Mamillius in The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare’s plays are full of loss.
Continue reading
===================================
The Mad Dogs of London: A Tale of Rabies
via The Chirurgeon’s Apprentice
There was panic on the streets of London in 1760, and the city’s newspapers weren’t helping the situation. Hundreds of column inches, for week upon week, were full of terrifying reports about an outbreak of attacks by rabid dogs. Armchair experts even wrote letters to newspaper editors offering advice and hypotheses on the causes and prevention of rabies (or “hydrophobia” as contemporaries called it).
Continue reading
===================================
Bosch Mania
via 3 Quarks Daily: Morgan Meis in The Easel
This year [2016] is shaping up to be downright Boschian. We are speaking here of Hieronymus Bosch, the painter. 2016 happens to mark the five-hundred-year anniversary of Bosch’s death. So, Bosch’s home and eponymous town, Den Bosch (or, more correctly but much harder to say, ‘s-Hertogenbosch), has assembled the largest retrospective of Bosch’s work ever to be exhibited. The exhibit (Jheronimus Bosch – Visions of a Genius) is at the Noordbrabants Museum through May 8th. Such is public demand to see the show that this normally sedate regional museum has extended its opening hours until past midnight. And Bosch mania will not end there. The Prado in Madrid, for example, is hosting its own blockbuster Bosch exhibit beginning at the end of May and running into September. The crowds at the Noordbrabants Museum and the activity in the global press suggests that Bosch is more relevant, more interesting to the public mind than ever. Bosch mania is set to peak at the same time as the heat of the Northern summer, with festival events scheduled throughout the summer.
Continue reading and discover what, like me, you missed.
===================================
The Cognitive Origins of Religion
via Big Think by Derek Beres
To understand the human brain we often turn to neuroscientists and psychologists. Two decades ago, Professor of Archaeology Steven Mithen decided to explore the origins of our nervous system (and much more) through his field of study. Besides popularizing the term ‘cognitive fluidity’, in his landmark book, The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion, and Science, Mithen speculated on exactly how primates evolved to the current iteration of the brain.
Continue reading
Marc Bolan of T. Rex hosted a glam rock TV music show in the 1970s, and it was awesome
via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
I didn't know glam rock icon Marc Bolan hosted a music TV show in the 1970s. It was called simply MARC, and judging from this sixth (and final) episode, it was terrific.
Continue reading
No comments:
Post a Comment