via Boing Boing by Caroline Siede
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via 3 Quarks Daily: Joshua Sokol in Quanta
Millions of years ago, a few spiders abandoned the kind of round webs that the word “spiderweb” calls to mind and started to focus on a new strategy. Before, they would wait for prey to become ensnared in their webs and then walk out to retrieve it. Then they began building horizontal nets to use as a fishing platform. Now their modern descendants, the cobweb spiders, dangle sticky threads below, wait until insects walk by and get snagged, and reel their unlucky victims in.
Continue reading but be aware that the Quanta article starts with a rather large image (not of a real arachnid but could still frighten some people)
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via OUP Blog by Roy T Cook
Formula mathematics blackboard. Public Domain via Pixabay.
We are often told that we should be open-minded. In other words, we should be open to the idea that even our most cherished, most certain, most secure, most well-justified beliefs might be wrong. But this is, in one sense, puzzling. After all, aren’t those beliefs that we hold most dearly – those that we feel are best supported – exactly the one’s we should not feel are open to doubt? If we found ourselves able to doubt those beliefs – that is, if we are able to be open-minded about them – then they aren’t all that cherished, certain, secure, or well-justified after all!
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via Boing Boing by Ferdinando Buscema
Now and then I stumble upon a book that completely blows my mind. The latest of such lucky encounters has been with Seven Brief Lessons in Physics by Carlo Rovelli.
Carlo Rovelli is an Italian theoretical physicist with a solid, international academic career, presently teaching at the University of Aix-Marseille in France. In 2013 he was among the sophisticated minds who were asked the famous Edge.com annual question. The question that year was “What *should* we be worried about?” His reply: “I worry that free imagination is overvalued, and I think this carries risks.”
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via the New Statesman by Caroline Crampton
When John Wilson walks out on to the stage at the Royal Albert Hall in London, there is a roar from the audience that would be more fitting in a football stadium. Before he even steps on to the conductor’s podium, people whistle and cheer, thumping and clapping. The members of his orchestra grin as he turns to acknowledge the applause. Many soloists reaching the end of a triumphant concerto performance receive less ecstatic praise. Even if you had never heard of Wilson before, the rock-star reception would tip you off that you were about to hear something special.
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via OUP Blog by Simon Maclean
Genealogy of the Ottonians, Chronica St Pantaleonis. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
In 2008, archaeologists working on the cathedral at Magdeburg, in eastern Germany, opened an ancient tomb and rediscovered the bones of an Anglo-Saxon princess called Edith. She had died in the year 946, aged only about 30. Her remains were brought across the North Sea for scientific tests which verified the identification via tests on her tooth enamel, indicating that the bones belonged to someone who had grown up drinking water from the chalky landscapes of southern Britain. This Edith was none other than the granddaughter of Alfred the Great (871–99), the king of Wessex who had defeated the Vikings and laid the foundations for his successors to create by conquest the first kingdom of the English. The find was therefore celebrated in the British media as a window onto this legendary moment of English state formation.
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via Boing Boing by Caroline Siede
The YouTube channel RealLifeLore uses the unusual thought experiment, “What if every human ever born came back to life today?” as a springboard for examining world populations, historical life expectancy, and much, much more.
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via The National Archives blog by Dr Jessica Nelson
The Battle of Lincoln – one of the most critical battles in medieval history – was fought on Saturday 20 May 1217, 800 years ago. Forces loyal to the English king Henry III fought those supporting his great rival Louis of France, the son of the French king.
You might assume that the English would naturally be on the side of the English king against a French invader, but in fact a great number of the English barons supported Louis. To understand this, we must go back to the reign of Henry III’s father, King John.
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via Boing Boing by Andrea James
In the world of professional sand sculptors, Toshihiko Hosaka is known for his large commissioned works (like this commissioned Colossal Titan from Shingeki no Kyojin) and for creating an environmentally friendly sand glue.
Continue to video and a link to further images
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A Life of Thomas De Quincey
via 3 Quarks Daily: Nicholas Spice at the London Review of Books
De Quincey’s size mattered to him. He was uncommonly small. But he was also uncommonly clever, and his ambitions were large. As a young man, he idolised Wordsworth and Coleridge, and then sought them out and tried to make them his friends. For a while they all got on, but then increasingly they didn’t. Wordsworth was in the habit of condescending to De Quincey, but Wordsworth condescended to most people and anyway condescending to De Quincey was hard to resist: ‘He is a remarkable and very interesting young man,’ Dorothy Wordsworth wrote, ‘very diminutive in person, which, to strangers, makes him appear insignificant; and so modest, and so very shy.’ ‘Little Mr De Quincey is at Grasmere … I wish he were not so little, and I wish he wouldn’t leave his greatcoat always behind him on the road. But he is a very able man, with a head brimful of information,’ Southey wrote. As relations soured, the belittlements grew sardonic: for Wordsworth, De Quincey was ‘a little friend of ours’; for Lamb, ‘the animalcule’; Dorothy and Mary Wordsworth took to calling him Peter Quince. Even his friends tended to diminish him: ‘Poor little fellow!’ Carlyle exclaimed to his wife, Jane, who mused: ‘What would one give to have him in a box, and take him out to talk.’
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via 3 Quarks Daily: Nicholas Spice at the London Review of Books
De Quincey’s size mattered to him. He was uncommonly small. But he was also uncommonly clever, and his ambitions were large. As a young man, he idolised Wordsworth and Coleridge, and then sought them out and tried to make them his friends. For a while they all got on, but then increasingly they didn’t. Wordsworth was in the habit of condescending to De Quincey, but Wordsworth condescended to most people and anyway condescending to De Quincey was hard to resist: ‘He is a remarkable and very interesting young man,’ Dorothy Wordsworth wrote, ‘very diminutive in person, which, to strangers, makes him appear insignificant; and so modest, and so very shy.’ ‘Little Mr De Quincey is at Grasmere … I wish he were not so little, and I wish he wouldn’t leave his greatcoat always behind him on the road. But he is a very able man, with a head brimful of information,’ Southey wrote. As relations soured, the belittlements grew sardonic: for Wordsworth, De Quincey was ‘a little friend of ours’; for Lamb, ‘the animalcule’; Dorothy and Mary Wordsworth took to calling him Peter Quince. Even his friends tended to diminish him: ‘Poor little fellow!’ Carlyle exclaimed to his wife, Jane, who mused: ‘What would one give to have him in a box, and take him out to talk.’
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