via Boing Boing by Caroline Siede
In this nifty YouTube video, Dave Hax talks through the properties of gallium, the metal that liquefies at just 86ºF and is safe to play with. (Just don’t eat it!)
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A Short Analysis of John Donne’s ‘A Hymn to God the Father’
via Interesting Literature
A summary of a classic Donne poem
‘A Hymn to God the Father’ is one of John Donne’s most famous religious poems. As the Donne scholar P. M. Oliver observed, what makes Donne’s poem unusual and innovative is that, in ‘A Hymn to God the Father’, Donne has written a hymn that does not set out to praise God so much as engage him in a debate. The poem is one of Donne’s most masterly holy poems.
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Sphaera – a difficult dexterity puzzle
via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
This puzzle designer, Fleb, has a YouTube channel that has in-depth videos of new and old puzzles. I love it. In this video, he tries out a puzzle called Sphaera, from Art of Play.
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Urchins and alleyways: a rare glimpse of 19th-century Glasgow – in pictures
via the Guardian
Photographer Thomas Annan captured Glasgow in the 1860s and 70s, at a time when the city had transformed and grown rapidly after the industrial revolution.
See the rest of the images here
I wonder how many of my photos will still be viewable after 150 years.
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The Galileo Trial: Faux News from the 17th Century
via 3 Quarks Daily by Leanne Ogasawara
A man cloaked in myth, what if I told you that many of the stories we tell ourselves about Galileo are simply untrue? That not only did the great scientist not drop any balls off the top of the Tower of Pisa but he didn't invent the telescope either. And not only was he never excommunicated from the Catholic church but he wasn't imprisoned in a dungeon either. Would you be surprised if I brought up the fact that he had been given permission by the Pope to write on the very topic that people think got him into trouble?
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Czeslaw Milosz’s Battle for Truth
via Arts & Letters Daily: Adam Kirsch in The New Yorker
Having experienced both Nazi and Communist rule, Poland’s great exile poet arrived at a unique blend of skepticism and sincerity.
Illustration by Andrea Ventura
In July, 1950, Czeslaw Milosz, the cultural attaché at the Polish Embassy in Washington, D.C., received a letter from Jerzy Putrament, the general secretary of the Polish Writers’ Union. The two men had known each other for many years – they had been contributors to the same student magazine in college, in the early nineteen-thirties – but their paths had diverged widely. Now the arch-commissar of Polish literature told the poet, “I heard that you are to be moved to Paris. … I am happy that you will be coming here, because I have been worried about you a little: whether the splendor of material goods in America has overshadowed poverty in other aspects of life.”
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Yvette Chauviré (1917 - 2016)
via 3 Quarks Daily
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Learn 3 cool magic tricks with a Sharpie
via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
Oscar Owen has a nice tutorial for doing three different tricks with a standard Sharpie pen.
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The Night Of
via 3 Quarks Daily by Gerald Dworkin
From time to time my friends, knowing that I watch many television series, ask me what current show I recommend. I always start by asking if they have watched The Wire. If they say they have not, I suggest they watch all five seasons and then I will make suggestions about what to watch now.
The Wire, which ran from 2002 to 2008, was created, and largely written, by David Simon, a former police reporter on the Baltimore Sun. It is a systematic examination of the oppression of poor and black Baltimore citizens by five major institutions as they interact with the criminal justice system. These are drug trafficking, the seaport and its unions, city hall (politicians and bureaucracy), the school system, and the press.
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Translate between Charles Babbage’s computing jargon and modern terminology
via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow
If you’re intending to build an analytical engine with a six-sided prism to run Charles Babbage’s weird cardboard vaporware program, you will need some help with Babbage’s notes, as old Charles was inventing a whole technical vocab from scratch.
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