via the National Archives blog by Pad Kumlertsakul
A map of Southeastern Asia from 1883 (catalogue reference CO 700/EASTERN13)
This year [2017] marks the 70th anniversary of a military coup that occurred during the first year of the reign of Bhumibol Adulyadej, the late king of Thailand. The coup took place during the chaotic transitional period that followed the suspicious death of Bhumibol’s brother, King Ananda, and was an important event for Southeast Asia, and for Thailand in particular. In November 1947 the military seized power from the civil government and reinstated the military dictator Field Marshal Phibunsongkhram. This coincided with the onset of the Cold War and the establishment of a communist regime in Southeast Asia.
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via Boing Boing by Rob Beschizza
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You do not have to tell me. I joined the industry in 1961 but when I tried to get back in after having children there were no openings. It was twenty years before I got anywhere near a computer again.
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via the New Statesman by John Burnside
Gabriel Cornelius von Max was, by all accounts, an extraordinary individual. The son of a prominent sculptor, he studied Eastern philosophy, parapsychology and anthropology in Prague during the 1850s but, in an attempt to give expression to a very particular spiritual vision, he turned to painting around 1860, winning early favour with the critics for powerful religious and domestic scenes.
Few artists capture so well the curiosity of the human subject faced with sickness, grief and death: one extraordinary painting in Munich’s Neue Pinakothek shows an elderly man in formal clothes, seated in a room that could be the study of any philosopher, the desk piled with papers around a particularly vivid memento mori of two skulls, one human, the other that of a large primate. The man is thoughtful, quiet, possibly melancholic – and on a low table next to his chair is the body of a woman, the sheet that had recently covered her pulled back to reveal the beautiful, perfectly white skin, the reddish-gold hair, the eyes that seem ready, at any moment, to open again in wonder.
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via Interesting Literature
What are the greatest classic animal poems?
From cats to mice, dogs to horses, fish to pigs, poets have written touchingly, powerfully, and enchantingly about animals. In this post we’ve chosen ten of our favourite poems about animals of all kinds. What would feature on your list of the best animal poems?
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via Big Think by Paul Ratner
Excitonium, a strange form of matter that was first theorized almost 50 years ago, has now been discovered by researchers.
What is excitonium? It is a rather exotic condensate that exhibits macroscopic quantum phenomena like a superconductor or a superfluid. It consists of excitons, particles formed from an unlikely pairing of an escaped electron and the hole it leaves behind. The hole actually behaves like a positively-charged particle itself. It attracts an electron and together they form the composite particle known as the exciton.
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via the OUP blog by Phillippe Gaubert, Agostinho Antunes, Warren E Jonhson [sic], Shu-Jin Luo
Pangolin by Adam Tusk. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.
Pangolins, or scale-bodied anteaters, are a unique lineage of mammals exclusively feeding on ants and termites. Eight species are distributed across Africa and Asia. They all show extraordinary adaptation to myrmecophagy (specialized diet of ants and termites), including a scaled armor covering the body and tail that protects them from bites (both from bugs and large predators!), powerful arms and claws to rip anthills and termite mounds open, toothless jaws, and a long, sticky tongue that can reach 70 cm in the largest species (the giant pangolin).
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WARNING: Contains images which some people, including me, may find upsetting. H.
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via the Guardian by Mark Forsyth
‘Too wicked to move …’ Ian Carmichael plays Dixon in the 1957 film adaptation of Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim. Photograph: Ronald Grant
There have been drunken poets and poetic drunkards ever since the dawn of time, or, to put it more properly, since the sun first rose over the yardarm of history. The Vikings believed that all poetry came from some magical mead that Odin had stolen from a giant, downed, and then regurgitated in Asgard. They even believed this of bad poetry because, according to them, Odin had regurgitated most of it, but, in the heat of the moment, some of it had leaked out of his arse.
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via Boing Boing by Rob Beschizza
I have no idea what the fellow is saying about this tribe of capybaras invading a warehouse in Brazil, I'm just glad that they did so and that he was there to record it for posterity.
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via Interesting Literature
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle gives us a taste of the interesting trivia to be found in his new book…
I spent a lot of time looking into treacle earlier this year. Not literally. But, as it were, literarily. You see, there’s more to treacle than meets the eye. (If treacle ever does meet your eye, I recommend washing it out immediately.) Take Treacle Mines. They don’t exist. At least, not really. But in fiction, they do. It all began at St Frideswide’s Well in Binsey, Oxfordshire, a small village immortalised by Gerard Manley Hopkins in his poem ‘Binsey Poplars’. One notable visitor to this well was Charles Dodgson, who worked nearby at Oxford University. One of his companions was probably a girl named Alice Liddell, of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. You see, Charles Dodgson was also Lewis Carroll. (Alice’s nurse, the wonderfully named Miss Prickett, came from Binsey.)
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via the New Statesman by Bhanuj Kappal
On New Year’s Day in 1818, Peshwa Baji Rao II, the ruler of the Peshwa faction of the Maratha Confederacy, which covered much of central India, led a 28,000-strong force towards Pune, a city on the west coast (and a metropolis today). His aim was to recapture it from the British East India Company. At the village of Bhima Koregaon, however, he was halted by a small Company force numbering 800.
Rao II sent 2,000 of his finest infantrymen to capture the village, but the outnumbered Company soldiers held them off till eventually the Peshwa forces withdrew, fearing the arrival of a larger British force.
This would be one of the last battles of the Third Anglo-Maratha war, which established the firm hold of the British Empire on India. Consequently, the British erected a 60 foot commemorative obelisk at the site, inscribed with the names of the 49 company soldiers who died in the battle. Of those soldiers, 22 belonged to the Mahar community, viewed as “untouchables” by traditional Hindu caste hierarchy. Intended as a symbol of British political and military power, over the last century the memorial has become a symbol of Dalit resistance and the site of an annual pilgrimage for thousands of Dalits from Maharashtra (and elsewhere).
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