via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz
TedEd tackles the question of "How does caffeine keep you awake?" The answer is fascinating but I care less about how it works and just thank my lucky stars that it does.
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via 3 Quarks Daily: Melanie McDonagh in The Spectator
Mark Zuckerberg (image: Getty)
Mark Zuckerberg says that Facebook could be to its users what churches are to congregations: it could help them feel part of ‘a more connected world’. That got a dusty response. Facebook as church, eh? So the man who helped an entire generation to replace real friends with virtual ones and online communities is sounding off about people feeling unconnected? Cause and effect or what? He wasn’t quite touting Facebook as an alternative church. It is, rather, now using artificial intelligence to suggest groups that its users might join – anything from locksmiths’ societies to addiction groups and Baptist organisations – and Mr Zuckerberg is enthusing about the benefits of moving from online to offline groups: ‘People who go to church are more likely to volunteer and give to charity – not just because they’re religious, but because they’re part of a community.’ So he’s trying to get more people to join things. Only – only! – 100 million of Facebook’s two billion users belong to a group that gives them a sense of community; he wants to raise that to a billion.
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via Interesting Literature
The greatest fairy stories
As G.K. Chesterton remarked, ‘I left fairy stories lying on the floor of the nursery, and I have not found any books so sensible since.’ Angela Carter, who reinvented the fairy tale in her collection The Bloody Chamber, observed that a fairy tale is a story where one king goes to another king to borrow a cup of sugar.
The best fairy tales are timeless and yet forever modern, tapping into deeply held and widely shared emotions and moral attitudes. The following constitutes not an exhaustive list of the definitive fairy tales, but rather our attempt to pick the top ten greatest fairy stories. As ever, we welcome your suggestions in the comments for any notable omissions.
Continue readingHow to build an igloo
via Boing Boing by Rusty Blazenhoff
Shot on the first day of summer, this video shows northern Canadian Inuit Adami Sakiagak and Tiisi Qisiiq building an igloo.
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via 3 Quarks Daily: Algis Valiunas in The Weekly Standard
Vienna in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a hotbed of genius, and the arch-journalist, poet, and playwright Karl Kraus (1874-1936) presided over this efflorescence of art and thought, knowing everything and everybody, making all the right friends and all the right enemies. From 1899 until his death, Kraus edited Die Fackel (the Torch) and for many years was the sole contributor to this landmark journal, which appeared whenever some gross fatuity in public life or telling grotesquerie in the daily press inflamed him – and which, on an especially inauspicious occasion, might run to some 300 pages of closely argued and eviscerating animadversion.
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via Big Think by Philip Perry
It was the eminent French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes who first suggested that the human mind may operate outside of the physical realm. He called it his mind-matter duality theory. The idea was that the human brain was above the physical world and could use its power to influence it. The “father of modern philosophy,” may have been more prescient than he’d ever realize.
Currently, a theoretical physicist is gearing up to test this theory in modern form. Lucien Hardy of the Perimeter Institute in Canada, will use an EEG machine, to see if the mind operates on the quantum level or outside of it. The results could have vast implications for our understanding of consciousness and free will.
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via 3 Quarks Daily: Audrey Truschke in Scroll.in
Aurangzeb in a Shaft of Light, from the St Petersburg Album, attributed to Hunhar, c. 1660. Freer Gallery of Art, Purchase: Charles Lang Freer Endowment, F1996.1
In 1700, the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb was arguably the richest, most powerful man in the world. He ruled for nearly 50 years, from 1658 until 1707, over a vast empire in South Asia that boasted a population exceeding the entirety of contemporary Europe. Today, he has been forgotten in the West.
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I read this piece, fairly regularly thinking that many people have created monsters out of King Richard the Lionheart and Suliman depending on whether they are Christian or Muslim.
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via Boing Boing by Andrea James
AntsCanada (previously) has an overpopulation problem in his yellow crazy ant colony, so he added two kinds of carnivorous pitcher plants. The resulting relationship between ant versus plant turned out to be quite fascinating.
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via MakeUseOf by Ben Stegner
People remember some operating systems more fondly than others. Nobody wants to take Windows Vista out for a spin just for the heck of it, but nostalgia for Windows 95 still exists. But was Windows 95 really that great?
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via Interesting Literature
The best road poems
Roads often feature in poetry, as symbols for our lives (the ‘journey’ we are travelling on, whether on our way to something, or heading away from it), or as markers of mankind’s interaction with nature. Below are ten of the greatest poems about roads in all of English literature, each of which does something rather different with the road or track it presents to us.
Continue reading and discover whether the selection includes your favourite road poem. Mine is there! And I can still recite most of it (The Rolling English Road).
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