via Big Think by Frank Jacobs
Watch the grey waves pound the Yorkshire coast anywhere between Flamborough Head in the north and Spurn Head in the south, and you get a false sense of timelessness. This forty-mile stretch of beach is the fastest-eroding coastline in Europe. The sea out there used to be land, and the land you’re standing on will soon be eaten by the waves.
Continue reading
=============================
Listen to the sounds of an office, a vinyl record from 1964
via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz
In 1948, Moses Asch founded the incredibly influential Folkways Records label to record and share music and sounds from around the world. Along with bringing the music of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Lead Belly, and Elizabeth Cotten to wider audiences, Folkways, acquired in 1987 by Smithsonian, also issued incredible sound recordings from the Ituri rainforest, Navajo Nation, Peru, and many other locations and indigenous peoples across the globe. (In fact, the label provided several tracks for the Voyager Golden Record, now 12+ billion miles from Earth! Researching that project with my partner Tim Daly, a DIY musicologist himself, I've become absolutely enchanted by Folkways. If any of you dear readers have Folkways LPs collecting dust, I'd give them a wonderful home.)
Continue reading
I have a funny feeling that I have used this item somewhere else but probably better twice than not at all.
=============================
10 of the Best John Keats Poems Everyone Should Read
via Interesting Literature
John Keats (1795-1821) died when he was just twenty-five years old, but he left behind a substantial body of work, considering he died so young. Nevertheless, a number of his poems immediately suggest themselves as being among the ‘best’ of his work. In this post, we’ve selected what we think are the top ten best Keats poems.
Continue reading
=============================
Dance of black holes trembles our Universe
via OUP Blog by Sambaran Banerjee
BBH gravitational lensing of gw150914 by American Astronomical Society (AAS Nova)/SXS and LIGO Caltech. CC BY-SA 4.0 viaWikimedia Commons.
The existence of gravitational waves, or ripples in the space-time, is no more just a speculation but a firm truth, after the recent direct detection of such waves from at least two pairs of merging black holes by the LIGO gravitational-wave detector. In such a binary system, two black holes orbit each other at a close separation, nearly at the speed of light, whirling the spacetime in their neighbourhood. Such a disturbance propagates throughout the Universe along its fabric of spacetime, carrying away energy from the binary, which causes the black holes to spiral towards each other and ultimately merge into a single black hole. But how are such tight binary black holes formed? The surest way involves star clusters: the Universe’s gravity reservoirs.
Continue reading
=============================
Excellent breakdown of LoTR’s amazing Helm's Deep battle sequence
via Boing Boing by Andrea James
How can a film's 40-minute battle scene hold its tension? Nerdwriter breaks down the Battle of the Hornburg (aka the Helm’s Deep battle sequence) into 24 beats to show why it works so well.
Continue reading
=============================
Canine Pups Befriend Cheetah Cubs to Save the Species
via Big Think by Cole Seidner
Winspear the cheetah and Amani the black Labrador at their first birthday party. Their birthday treat was a chicken-flavored giant popsicle. [Photo: NBC 5 News]
Kittens and puppies growing up together isn’t that strange, but most people don’t imagine this with baby cheetahs in the mix.
Continue reading
=============================
Explaining physics with wonderful, 1930s-style animation
via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow
Hugh writes, “These amazing animated shorts on physics feature an adorable, 1930s-style version of Maxwell’s Demon. There are 3 so far – can’t wait to see more!”
Continue reading fascinating
=============================
Look on my works, ye mighty … Ozymandias statue found in mud
via the Guardian by Reuters in Cairo
Egyptian workers with the head of the statue. Photograph: Khaled Desouki/AFP/Getty Images
Archaeologists from Egypt and Germany have found an eight-metre (26ft) statue submerged in groundwater in a Cairo slum that they say probably depicts revered Pharaoh Ramses II, who ruled Egypt more than 3,000 years ago.
The discovery – hailed by Egypt’s antiquities ministry on Thursday as one of the most important ever – was made near the ruins of Ramses II’s temple in the ancient city of Heliopolis, located in the eastern part of modern-day Cairo.
Continue reading
=============================
Rabbit hole in England leads to 700-year old Knights Templar cave
via Boing Boing by Rob Beschizza
The BBC reports that an “ordinary rabbit’s hole in a farmer’s field leads to an underground sanctuary once said to be used by the Knights Templar”.
Continue reading
I thought that rabbit holes led to Wonderland. Maybe not.
=============================
Restoration revealed 1920s roulette table was rigged
via Boing Boing by Rob Beschizza
Enjoy this simple and surprising tale from The Games Room Company, who were tasked with restoring a roulette table operated in Chicago throughout the 1930s: “ we found that it had been completely rigged to defraud people and increase the odds of the house during play”.
Continue reading
No comments:
Post a Comment