via Boing Boing by Andrea James
Remember the helicone toy that changed from a helix to a pine cone? A mathematician just upped the ante with the colorful lollipopter.
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via Arts & Letters Daily: Stephen Akey in The Smart Set
Towards the end of Gabriel García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold, a newly graduated magistrate is sent to a small Colombian town to investigate the circumstances surrounding the murder of the novel’s ill-fated protagonist, Santiago Nasar. 25 years after the murder, the narrator, conducting his own investigation, travels to the Palace of Justice in Riohacha to examine the magistrate’s report. Although the narrator can’t find the magistrate’s name on any of the surviving papers, “it was obvious that he was a man burning with the fever of literature. He had doubtless read the Spanish classics and a few Latin ones, and he was quite familiar with Nietzsche, who was the fashionable author among magistrates of his time . . . He was so perplexed by the enigma that fate had touched him with, that he kept falling into lyrical distractions that ran contrary to the rigor of his profession.”
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via Boing Boing by Rob Beschizza
A secret passageway led to an trove of smuggled Nazi artifacts, say investigators in Argentina, and their collector is in trouble with the law.Continue reading
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via the New Statesman by Michael Prodger
Spiky and unlikeable, the painter was blighted for years by his flirtations with fascism.
In the early years of the 1930s the painter, novelist and social theorist Percy Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957) passed beyond the pale and has remained on the wrong side ever since. His crime was to write a series of books sympathetic to totalitarianism – as he saw it, man’s last, best hope against both the mass killings of communism and another world war. In 1931 he described Hitler as “a man of peace” but when he went to Germany in 1937 and witnessed Nazism at first hand he realised just how wrong he had been. His recantations came too late, however, and he has subsequently always been tagged as an apologist for fascism.
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via OUP Blog by Keith Robbins
Photograph of women working at a Bell System international telephone switchboard. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Once upon a time, it could be believed that each advance in communications technology brought with it the probability, if not the certainty, of increased global harmony. The more that messages could be sent and received, the more the peoples of the world would understand each other. Innovators have not been slow to advance comprehensive claims for their achievements. Marconi, for example, selected 1912 as a year in which to suggest that radio, in apparently making war ridiculous, made it impossible. Other pioneers have also been ambitious: the telephone, it was said, would facilitate global brotherhood (and no doubt sisterhood as well). ‘Nation shall speak peace unto Nations’ seemed the appropriate founding motto for the BBC in 1927. Decade after decade, subsequently, the claim has been repeated as each new technological advance appears.
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via 3 Quarks Daily: Davide Castelvecchi in Nature
NIK SPENCER/Nature
Materials patterned like this gyroid could help engineers to manipulate light into topological states in future fibre-optic devices.
Charles Kane never thought he would be cavorting with topologists. “I don't think like a mathematician,” admits Kane, a theoretical physicist who has tended to focus on tangible problems about solid materials. He is not alone. Physicists have typically paid little attention to topology – the mathematical study of shapes and their arrangement in space. But now Kane and other physicists are flocking to the field. In the past decade, they have found that topology provides unique insight into the physics of materials, such as how some insulators can sneakily conduct electricity along a single-atom layer on their surfaces. Some of these topological effects were uncovered in the 1980s, but only in the past few years have researchers begun to realize that they could be much more prevalent and bizarre than anyone expected.Continue reading
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via the New Statesman by David Hepworth
Roots, Radicals and Rockers is full of great characters and vignettes of bracingly different times.
Skiffle is an American expression which, between the wars, meant “rent party”. It means little to most Americans today. To Britons, particularly those who were young in the 1950s, it came to denote that fidgety form of music, which served as a bridge between the weighty folk-blues of singers such as Leadbelly and the lurid new rock’n’roll as practised by Elvis Presley. Skiffle was popular because it required little technique and could be played on cheap acoustic guitars and even items of old household equipment.
The golden generation of British rockers all started out in skiffle groups. It was their gateway to what came after rock’n’roll. Paul first clapped eyes on John when he was leading his skiffle group the Quarrymen at a church fête in the summer of 1957.
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I know exactly what he means about the generation that was there when it happened now being no longer around. I have lost touch with all those who formed the St Paul’ church skiffle group in Cliftonville in 1959 (I was the tea-chest bass player). I wonder if any are still alive?
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via the Guardian by John Grace
After the publication of The Silmarillion, which I found gathering dust in my father’s attic long after his death, I went rootling through his house in search of other discarded manuscripts. Eventually, I managed to assemble a manuscript of 17,835 pages that, for some reason, Allen and Unwin – like my father – believed to be unpublishable. Undeterred, I pressed on with editing these invaluable jottings to produce as many posthumous works as my father had managed to complete while he was alive along with a 12-volume history of Middle-earth without which any reading of The Lord of the Rings is pointless.
I should also add that though everything that is included in this book has been published elsewhere – I point readers in particular towards The Silmarillion, the Lost Tales, the Lay of Leithian and the Quenta Noldorinwa – this is the first time, and almost certainly the last, that anyone has tried to extract the story of Beren and Lúthien into a single coherent whole and explain how the narrative developed.
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via Boing Boing by Rusty Blazenhoff
Think you know how to make something cool? Mid-century industrial designer Raymond Leowry sure did. He's behind some of the most iconic pieces of American culture, including the Coke bottle and the Shell logo.
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via Interesting Literature
The best Restoration comedies and tragedies
Restoration comedies and tragedies often get overlooked in our rush to celebrate the Elizabethan and Jacobean drama of Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson. Yet any survey of English literature would be substantially poorer if it didn’t mention Aphra Behn, William Wycherley, or William Congreve. Below we introduce ten of the greatest works of Restoration theatre – comedies and tragedies, though mostly the former.
Continue reading although I will add, as I have before, that the only way to truly appreciate a play is to watch it being performed.
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