via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz
Here is delightful factory footage from 1965 of Matchbox car manufacturing in the London Borough of Hackney.
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via Big Think by Philip Perry
Egyptologists, writers, scholars, and others, have argued the race of the ancient Egyptians since at least the 1970’s. Some today believe they were Sub-Saharan Africans. We can see this interpretation portrayed in Michael Jackson’s 1991 music video for “Remember the Time,” from his Dangerous album. The video, a 10 minute mini-film, includes performances by Eddie Murphy and Magic Johnson.
Reactionaries meanwhile, say that there’s never been any significant black civilizations, an utter falsehood. There were several in fact, highly advanced African empires and kingdoms throughout history. Curiously, some extreme Right groups have even used blood group data to proclaim a Nordic origin to King Tut and his brethren.
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via Boing Boing by Andrea James
Graphic designer José Bernabé explores a lot of wonderful concepts as part of his work, including this standalone project titled Organic Geometry.
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via OUP Blog by Yves Bergeron, Alain Leduc and Frederic Raulier
Old forest by Henry Ziegler. Used with permission. (Ooops! I think I may be breaking copyright but it is such a beautiful image)
Sustainable forestry aims to maintain wood supply whilst preserving biodiversity and the integrity of the ecosystem. Research shows that boreal forests, like those across much of Northern Europe and Canada, have higher levels of variability in their structure and dynamics when unmanaged, improving their biodiversity and the stability of their ecosystems. These unmanaged forests also have a higher proportion of older trees than those used in industrial forest rotation – around 70-100 years in Canadian boreal forests.
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via Interesting Literature
In this week’s Dispatches from the Secret Library column, Dr Oliver Tearle considers E. W. Hornung’s forgotten ‘crime doctor’, John Dollar.
Dr John Dollar is a fictional detective with a difference. He is, as one of the characters in The Crime Doctor puts it, ‘a medical expert in criminology’. He is the forerunner to the fictional criminal psychologists we see in modern police procedural television dramas, probably most famously Cracker, the ITV drama created by Jimmy McGovern and starring Robbie Coltrane as Dr Edward ‘Fitz’ Fitzgerald, a criminal psychologist who helps the Manchester police to investigate crimes.
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via ResearchBuzz Firehose: Vint Cerf in Google Blog
For millennia, people have created art – in media ranging from paint on cave walls to metal or stone sculpture to computer-generated images, sound and motion. In recent years, many have made an effort to digitize physical art in an effort to preserve it for future generations and make it accessible to a wider audience. And many contemporary artists have produced creative works using digital media, to be experienced completely online. Yet while the cave paintings in Lascaux are an incredible 20,000 years old, it isn’t clear whether digitized images of that art – or any digital art created today – will last 20 years, let alone 20,000.
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via Interesting Literature
A reading of a classic Donne poem
‘Oh my black soul’ is one of John Donne’s finest sacred poems. It is also, perhaps, one of the finest and most powerful deathbed poems in all of English literature. But why does it carry such power? A few words of analysis concerning this classic sonnet are included below.
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via 3 Quarks Daily
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via OUP Blog by Rhiannon Graybill
Image by tertia van renseberg. CC0 1.0 via Unsplash.
What does the Hebrew Bible have in common with horror movies? This question is not as strange as it might seem. It only takes a few minutes with the biblical texts to begin to realize that the Bible is filled with all kinds of horror. There are strange figures dripping blood (Isa. 63) and mysterious objects that kill upon touch (2 Sam. 6:7). Women are threatened, pursued, and even dismembered (Judges 19). The “scream queens” of horror are well matched by the screaming women of the Bible, especially in the prophetic literature, where women weep, cry, and howl in pain. (Even when it is men who are crying, their sound is compared to the sound of screaming women, as in Isa. 26:17-18). Even the repetitions of horror – the endless sequels, the killers returned from the (near) grave to haunt another day, the perky college students who just can’t stop going into the basement to find out what’s making that noise – have their parallels in the repetitions of the Hebrew Bible – the people who can’t stop sinning, the God who can’t stop finding new and appalling ways to punish them (in the book of Numbers: miserable food, disease, poisonous snakes, and strange fire, to name but a few). A better question might be not ‘What does the Bible have in common with horror movies?’ but ‘Why is the Bible so much like a horror movie?’.
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An awesome Beatles-scored tap dance routine
via Boing Boing by Caroline Siede
Dancer/choreographer Nick Young uses The Beatles’ “Come Together” as inspiration for this gorgeously shot tap dance number.
via Boing Boing by Caroline Siede
Dancer/choreographer Nick Young uses The Beatles’ “Come Together” as inspiration for this gorgeously shot tap dance number.
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