via BBC Technology by Chris Baraniuk
Some of the cycle ways retain a faint hint of their original red colour
A vast network of forgotten cycle ways across the UK has been rediscovered with the help of Google Street View.
Historian and cycling enthusiast Carlton Reid found the routes, which were created between 1934 and 1940, after scanning for evidence of them online.
They were originally put in place by the Ministry of Transport, but many fell out of use after World War Two. Mr Reid is now part of a campaign to reinstate some of the routes.
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via Interesting Literature
The best poems of Philip Sidney
Sir Philip Sidney (1554-86) was one of the finest poets of the English Renaissance and a pioneer of the sonnet form and English love poetry. Many of Sidney’s finest poems are to be found in his long sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella – the first substantial sonnet sequence in English literature – but he wrote a number of other poems which are much-loved and widely anthologised. Below we’ve chosen what we think are ten of Sir Philip Sidney’s best poems.
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via Boing Boing by Andrea James
The Paper Aviary just completed a successful free exhibition of beautifully-crafted paper birds. Let's hope it travels following its inaugural success!
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In 1858, he seems to advocate a good night’s sleep, outdoor exercise, careful grooming - and clean cotton socks in summer
via Arts & Letters Daily: Ben Markovits in The Spectator
Walt Whitman, aged 35, as he appeared in the first edition of Leaves of Grass
A few years after Walt Whitman brought out the first edition of Leaves of Grass (it didn’t do well), he wrote a column on ‘Manly Health and Training’ for the New York Atlas. His pieces were published under a pseudonym, Mose Velsor, and have only recently been connected to Whitman by a graduate student at the University of Houston, who discovered them on microfilm. (Unless this whole thing is a joke – it’s a little hard to tell.) Boxtree has cherrypicked from over 47,000 words of manly advice to produce a cod-retro book along the lines of the Ladybird Book of the Hangover or the Ladybird Book of the Midlife Crisis or the Ladybird Book of the Hipster. In fact, the Manly Health guide is a bit like all of them.
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via Boing Boing by Rob Beschizza
I lived in Britain for 20 years and am still amazed by Drunk-Scientist's map of London's commuter drainage basins.
See for yourself
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via The Scholarly Kitchen by David Crotty
Founded in the year 859, University of Al Qarawiyyin in Fez, Morocco is thought to be the world’s oldest library. In recent years, great efforts have been made to restore and reopen the library to the public. The video below explores the connection between the library’s founder, Fatima Al-Fihri, who used her inheritance to create a center of knowledge in Fez, and Aziza Chaouni, the architect responsible for the restoration.
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via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz
Pelicans haven’t evolved much in 30 million years. That’s because they’ve pretty much nailed how to be a pelican.
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via The New Statesman by Lucy Rigby
In the 18th and 19th centuries, various Enclosures Acts packaged up common land and moved it into privately-owned estates. Altogether, millions of acres of common land, which had been used by Britain’s rural population to graze cattle and grow crops, were privatised. This in turn robbed many of their livelihoods and way of life.
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via Big Think by Philip Perry
Evolutionary anthropology has for some time tried to understand what natural relationship pattern humans follow, if there is one. In his book Sex at Dawn psychologist Christopher Ryan posits that our prehistoric ancestors practiced multiple kinds of sexual and romantic relationships.
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Research principles from the legendary Xerox PARC
via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz
Founded in 1970 as Xerox's R&D division, PARC was a dream factory that brought the world laser printing, Ethernet, the graphical user interface that led to Windows and the Macintosh, ubiquitous computing, and many other technologies that we now take for granted. Why made the place so damn special?
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