via An Awfully Big Blog Adventure by Joan Lennon
Domenico Remps (1620-1699)
Like every writer who goes into schools, I have been asked many times, "Where do you get your ideas?" And I trot out the same old answer, how everything I see or hear or do or come across or experience in any old way goes into the soup between my ears, and how then this bit and then that bit and then another bit will float to the surface and bump into each other and a what if will ensue ... And it all sounds pretty revolting, really. And then, not long ago, I rediscovered the delectable Lucinda Lambton and her beguiling TV programmes from the 80s and I realised how much more elegant it would be to compare a head full of this and that to a cabinet of curiosities.
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via 3 Quarks Daily: Radhika Jones in New York Times
The mystery writer Agatha Christie at her home in Wallingford, England, in 1956. Hubert de Segonzac/Paris Match, via Getty Images
I don’t remember ever buying one. They just materialized in the house when I was 12, a row of well-thumbed paperbacks, in the bookcase under the basement stairs. I read them over and over, until the pages were soft as cotton. On a visit to Portland, Ore., in January, browsing the shelves of Powell’s Books, I felt the familiar pull. I walked out with “Ordeal by Innocence,” an Agatha Christie sleeper hit (no one I ask ever seems to know it), in which a young man, Jack Argyle, one of an adopted brood in postwar England, is found to be innocent of the murder of his mother, for which he’d been convicted.
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via Boing Boing by Andrea James
Who needs anesthesia when you have a sharp rock and some naturally-occurring asphalt to fill a cavity? Archaeologists found evidence of Paleolithic dentistry. After the team used computer reconstructions to examine the cavities, they analysed the bitumen in the fillings.
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via Big Think by Robby Berman
Kangaroo's Paw, UV-style (CRAIG BURROWS)
Photographer Craig Burrows has just published some beautiful photos that reveal a secret side to flowers, capturing, as he puts it, “something we always see, but never can observe”. He’s an ultraviolet-induced visible fluorescence (UVIVF) photographer.
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via The National Archives Blog by Benjamin Trowbridge
Martin Scorsese’s recent cinematic epic Silence captures in vivid tones the intensity of persecution of Portuguese Jesuits and Japanese converts to Christianity in 17th century Japan. Although such a cinematic experience is intended to shock and provoke debate over faith, it also lifts the lid on a forgotten aspect of early modern history: when European trade and culture first made contact with the ancient kingdom of Japan.
For this reason I was intrigued as to whether The National Archives held any records shedding light on the dawn of Anglo-Japanese relations during the early 17th century.
Continue reading if only to see the fascinating map from 1596.
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via OUP Blog
The following is an extract from Animal Behaviour: A Very Short Introduction by Tristram D. Wyatt and explains in detail how mumurations occur.
Shortly before sunset, especially in winter from October to February, flocks of tens of thousands of European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) fly in aerobatic displays called murmurations. The flocks swirl and morph, transforming from, for example, a teardrop shape into a vortex, and then into a long rope. The spontaneous synchronised flock turns as if of one mind. An early 20th century British bird watcher and author Edmund Selous was mystified how such big flocks could be so beautifully coordinated.
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via Big Think by Elise Bohan
Facial Traits and Perceived Intelligence
What’s in a face? Turns out, more than you think.
In 2014, Czech scientist Karel Kleisner conducted a study in which participants viewed photographs of 40 male and 40 female subjects and rated their intelligence. Kleisner sought to discover if there was a relationship between perceived and measured intelligence. He also investigated whether there is an intelligent ‘look.’ In other words, are specific facial traits associated with attributed and actual intelligence?
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via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
The beauty of pills and capsules releasing their payload.
Watch the stunning video here
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via Seth Godin’s Blog
Predict the weather
Read an X-ray
Play Go
Correct spelling
Figure out the P&L of a large company
Pick a face out of a crowd
Count calories
Fly a jet across the country
Maintain the temperature of your house
Book a flight
Give directions
Create an index for a book
Play Jeopardy
Weld a metal seam
Trade stocks
Place online ads
Figure out what book to read next
Water a plant
Monitor a premature newborn
Detect a fire
Play poker
Read documents in a lawsuit
Sort packages
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I would definitely remove “create an index for a book” from this list, and I know my neo-natal nurse friend would remove the “monitor a premature newborn”.
The point that Godin is making is that we should be learning to do something that a computer cannot do or we will be out of work.
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10 of the Best Short Stories about Cats
via Interesting Literature
Previously, we’ve offered our pick of classic cat poems, and that post proved so popular that in this post we’ve set ourselves the task of compiling a top ten list of the best cat stories. The classic cat stories below range from the comical to the horrific, the tragic to the heart-warming – but they all have one thing in common, that they are purr-fect stories about cats (sorry, we’ll stop short of making a tail/tale pun here).
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via Interesting Literature
Previously, we’ve offered our pick of classic cat poems, and that post proved so popular that in this post we’ve set ourselves the task of compiling a top ten list of the best cat stories. The classic cat stories below range from the comical to the horrific, the tragic to the heart-warming – but they all have one thing in common, that they are purr-fect stories about cats (sorry, we’ll stop short of making a tail/tale pun here).
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