via 3 Quarks Daily: James Ryerson in the New York Times
Americans seem to be forever undergoing a “crisis” of civility. Year after year, we’re told that the norms dictating decent behaviour are eroding; that we’ve lost sight of the basic regard we owe our fellow participants in public life; that the contentiousness of our culture threatens to undermine our democracy.
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via OUP Blog by David E Curtis
Everyone knows about Benjamin Franklin. His revolutionary electrical experiments made him famous, and the image of the kite-flying inventor spouting aphorisms have kept him so for more than two centuries. His Autobiography could be considered a founding document of the idea of America, the story of a poor but bright young indentured servant who eventually became so famous he appeared before kings and on our money. Printer, journalist, community organizer, natural philosopher, satirist, diplomat – Franklin’s skill with language and his ability to shape it to personal, national, and scientific purposes are unparalleled in American history.
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via Boing Boing by Andrea James
These three different egg-breaking and separating machines have slightly different tasks, but they are all equally hypnotic.
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The seasons change, but the tree remains: Christopher Thomond has been photographing a single, 200-year-old Lancashire oak throughout 2016
When Guardian photographer Chris Thomond volunteered to spend a year photographing a tree, he spent “a mad couple of weeks auditioning trees” – sending photos of them to his picture editors. “Many were an hour away from my home and we realised we needed something nearby. As I was driving along one day, 10 minutes from my house on the edge of Manchester, I saw a farmer repairing a fence and said, ‘You probably think I’m bonkers, but have you got any nice-looking trees?’ He was a bit wary but then he said, ‘I think I’ve got just the one. People are forever photographing it.’ It just went from there.”
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via Boing Boing by Andrea James
Break out your headphones for this one. Maxime Causeret has created a beautiful animation for Max Cooper's instrumental track “Order from Chaos”. Seemingly random elements slowly coalesce into lifelike forms as the track moves from raindrops to increasingly complex sounds.
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via Big Think by Scotty Hendricks
Schrodinger’s cat is one of the most famous thought experiments in all of science. The source of countless jokes, t-shirts, and pseudo-intellectual conversations. The idea is this: if a cat is put into a box with an elaborate quantum booby trap then when we open the box the trap will either be activated and kill the cat or not be activated at all. Quantum Physics says the cat should be in “superposition” while we are not looking at it, just like the rest of the quantum system. Meaning the cat is both alive and dead at the same time until we look at at! Zombie cat!
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I know nothing about quantum physics but I do know a cute kitten picture when I see one.
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via the Guardian by Lyndsey Winship
Ask any ballet dancer about the film Black Swan and you’ll immediately get a groan that falls somewhere between disdain and disgust. They’re tired of the myths about ballet being a world of competition and cruelty, of freakishly talented and freakishly driven dancers – never mind that there’s some truth in that.
Ballet both feeds on its myths – of it being exceptional and otherworldly – and is constantly trying to demolish them. And each new fiction adds another layer in the popular imagination, even an unassuming, entertaining children’s animation such as Ballerina, the French-Canadian film which follows orphan Félicie on her quest to be a dancer.
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via Boing Boing by Andrea James
Paper marbling is alive and well at Oberlin College’s Letterpress Studio. Alex Fox filmed his friend Jones Pitsker demonstrating a couple of techniques.
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I can do marbling but not like this. Mine is much more hit and miss – mostly miss.
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via Arts & Letters Daily: by Firmin deBrabander in AEON
Unburdening ourselves online can feel radical and liberating. But is baring and sharing all as emancipatory as it seems?
There’s a well-known contradiction in the way many of us behave online, which is this: we know we’re being watched all the time, and pay lip service to the evils of surveillance by Google and the government. But the bounds of what’s considered too personal, revealing or banal to be uploaded to an app or shared with a circle of social media ‘followers’ seems to shrink by the day. When faced with an abundance of digital toys that offer magical levels of connectivity and convenience, many of us succumb to a ‘giddy sense that privacy is kind of stupid’, as the writer Gary Shteyngart wrote in The New Yorker in 2013.
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via Boing Boing by Andrea James
Eric Schlosser’s book and film Command and Control look at the terrifying prospects of nuclear friendly fire, where one of America’s nukes detonates on US soil. It also looks at what might happen if a false alarm gets relayed to a trigger-happy general or President. He starts this New Yorker piece with a terrifying story from June 3, 1980:
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