via 3 Quarks Daily: Thomas Small in the Times Literary Supplement
Shahab Ahmed begins What is Islam? with an intriguing anecdote. At a Princeton banquet, a Cambridge logician turns to a distinguished Muslim academic seated at the same table and asks him whether he considers himself a Muslim. “Yes”, the Muslim replies. This is puzzling, so the don, operating under the customary misunderstanding that Islam is, in essence, a fiercely puritanical religion as hell-bent against wine-bibbers as it is against music-makers, homosexuals and the veneration of icons, motions to the Muslim’s glass and asks further, “Then why are you drinking wine?” The answer he receives provides the book with its starting point: “My family have been Muslims for a thousand years,” the Muslim says, “during which time we have always been drinking wine. You see,” he goes on, smiling at the don’s bewildered look, “we are Muslim wine-drinkers.”
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via Big Think by Robby Berman
Until this, what we’d thought was that humans first appeared in East Africa about 200,000 years ago. But now, researchers have reported in the June 7 issue of Nature that they’ve discovered homo sapiens fossils that are much older – over 100,000 years older – and in a surprising place: Jebel Irhoud, Morocco. Taken together, it may be time to rewrite the earliest chapters of human history. Homo sapiens may have not have emerged fully formed from a single area of East Africa. Jebel Irhoud is clear across the continent from Omo Kibish, Ethiopia, the site previously assumed to be the “cradle of humankind”.
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via The National Archives Blog by Louise Bell
Due to the rate of venereal disease (VD) in the armed forces during the First World War, there some dismay regarding the demobilisation, or discharge, of men. How could it be ensured that they were not suffering from VD in a communicable form?
A medical examination could give some degree of an answer, but the most stringent means of detection was the Wassermann test (an antibody test for syphilis). However, with the large numbers of men to deal with, this was not deemed practicable. Everything depends on numbers: too many men, requiring the help of even more bacteriologists; if they wanted to keep the men until they were cured, then a large amount of hospital accommodation would be needed.
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via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz
Four video game audio designers explore the psychoacoustics of vintage video games, from the accelerating heartbeat of Space Invaders to the dramatic woosh of Myst’s linking books.
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via Science Blogs by Ethan
“It is the function of science to discover the existence of a general reign of order in nature and to find the causes governing this order. And this refers in equal measure to the relations of man – social and political – and to the entire universe as a whole.” -Dmitri MendeleevWhen the Big Bang first occurred, the Universe was filled with all the various particles and antiparticles making up the Standard Model, and perhaps still others yet to be discovered. But missing from the list were protons, neutrons, or any of the atomic nuclei key to the life-giving elements in our Universe today. Yet the Universe expanded, cooled, antimatter annihilated away, and the first elements began to take shape.
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via Interesting Literature
Sylvia Plath (1932-63) was a prolific poet for the few years that she was active before her untimely death, by her own hand, aged just 30. But what are her greatest poems? A few titles spring to mind, but it’s not easy to reach a consensus on, say, Sylvia Plath’s top ten best poems. But we like a challenge here, so we’ve suggested ten of Plath’s finest and most famous poems, along with a little bit about each of them.
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via The National Archives Blog by Joseph McGrath
Pirates have often been dramatised in popular culture: romantic figures, taking to the high seas in search of freedom and treasure.
However, the real-life pirates of the Caribbean often had short careers, meeting with violent ends. We look at what happened to six of them.
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via 3 Quarks Daily: Elizabeth Pennisi in Science
Weighing in at 200,000 kilograms and stretching the length of a basketball court, the blue whale is the biggest animal that’s ever lived. Now, scientists have figured out why they and other baleen whales got so huge.
“It’s a cool study,” says Jakob Vinther, an evolutionary paleobologist at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom. “I’m going to send it to my students.” Biologists have long debated why some whales became the world’s biggest animals. Some have proposed that because water bears the animal’s weight, whales can move around more easily and gulp in enough food to sustain big appetites.
Others have suggested that whales got big to fend off giant sharks and other megapredators. Researchers have also argued about when these animals got so huge. In 2010, Graham Slater, an evolutionary biologist currently at the University of Chicago in Illinois, argued that cetaceans – a term that includes whales and dolphins – split into different-sized groups very early in their history, perhaps 30 million years ago. Dolphins remained the shrimps of the cetacean world, filter-feeding baleen whales became the giants, and predatory beaked whales stayed in the middle size-wise, with the descendants in those three groups sticking within those early established size ranges.
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via Boing Boing by Andrea James
YouTuber Murmiland, aka Ortwin Grüttner, created this one-of-a-kind rafting-themed marble run that takes nearly 3 minutes from start to finish. Follow one yellow marble in a sea of green glass marbles as they cascade down the carved wooden path. Lots of nifty little features.
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The Simple Logical Puzzle That Shows How Illogical We Are
via 3 Quarks Daily: Brian Gallagher in Nautilus
In the 1960s, the English psychologist Peter Wason devised an experiment that would revolutionize his field. This clever puzzle, known as the “Wason selection task,” is often claimed to be “the single most investigated experimental paradigm in the psychology of reasoning,” in the words of one textbook author.
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via 3 Quarks Daily: Brian Gallagher in Nautilus
In the 1960s, the English psychologist Peter Wason devised an experiment that would revolutionize his field. This clever puzzle, known as the “Wason selection task,” is often claimed to be “the single most investigated experimental paradigm in the psychology of reasoning,” in the words of one textbook author.
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