via The National Archives Blog by Dr Richard Dunley
On the late afternoon of 7 February 1910, four men in long robes, accompanied by two in western dress, were greeted at Weymouth station by Captain Herbert Richmond and an honour guard. They were taken by Admiral’s Barge to HMS Dreadnought, the flagship of the Home Fleet, and the symbol of British naval might. Here they were shown around the ship by the Commander in Chief of the Home Fleet, Admiral Sir William May.
Virginia Woolf (far left) and the other ‘Abyssinian Princes’ (ADM 1/8192)
Continue reading
==============================
via Boing Boing by Carla Sinclair
Scrolling through to check and, where necessary, edit I have taken out the image of this fascinating stick insect.
Once a species is considered extinct, it usually stays that way. But not so for an Australian stick insect that had been considered extinct since the early 1920s, and officially extinct by 1986. Alas, they have come back from the dead.
Continue reading
==============================
via Arts & Letters Daily: Emily Midorikawa and Emma Sweeney in Literary Hub
Literary friendships are the stuff of legend. The image of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth tramping the Lakeland Fells has long been entwined with their joint collection of groundbreaking poems. The tangled sexual escapades of the later Romantics Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley fueled gossip in their own time, and remain a source of endless fascination. By the mid-19th century, Charles Dickens was taking Wilkie Collins under his wing: publishing the younger writer’s stories, acting in his household theatricals, initiating excursions to bawdy music halls. And the memoirs of Ernest Hemingway offer readers a ringside view of his riotous drinking sprees with F. Scott Fitzgerald, thereby securing the pair’s Jazz Age friendship its place in literary lore.
Continue reading
==============================
via The Guardian by Jonathan Freedland
Simon Schama is erudite to the point of self-parody. A conversation with him will range across continents and epochs at breakneck speed, the references to kings, painters, writers and scholars coming so fast that just as you’ve placed one, another has taken its place. When we meet, in the Academicians’ Room at the Royal Academy – the closest the New York-based Schama has to a London club – we have barely sat down before he has recommended The Five, a novel by Vladimir Jabotinsky, the intellectual godfather of Likud-style “revisionist” Zionism who died in 1940 (“It’s frighteningly good. It’s strangely sub-Dostoevskian”) and offered a description of the architecture visible in the demilitarised zone that separates North and South Korea (“pseudo-Mussolini, neoclassical, colossalist columns”).
Continue reading
==============================
via Interesting Literature by Ana Sampson
Some of the items are fairly weird but not Edward Lear taking extraordinary measures to make moving house easier for his cat.
Continue reading
==============================
via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
These power plant control rooms are so cool looking that they don't even seem real. This site, called Present /&/ Correct, has a nice gallery of them. Above image is from the nuclear ship Savannah.
==============================
via 3 Quarks Daily: Katherine Ellen Foley in Quartz
Hard to deny.
It’s often said that of all the published scientific research on climate change, 97% of the papers conclude that global warming is real, problematic for the planet, and has been exacerbated by human activity.
But what about those 3% of papers that reach contrary conclusions? Some skeptics have suggested that the authors of studies indicating that climate change is not real, not harmful, or not man-made are bravely standing up for the truth, like maverick thinkers of the past. (Galileo is often invoked, though his fellow scientists mostly agreed with his conclusions – it was church leaders who tried to suppress them.)
Continue reading
==============================
via OUP blog by Graeme Murdock
Europe around 1560, The Historical Atlas by William R. Shepherd, 1923. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Maps convey simple historical narratives very clearly – but how useful are simple stories about the past? Many history textbooks and studies of the Reformation include some sort of map that claims to depict Europe’s religious divisions in the sixteenth century. Some of these maps show Catholic as opposed to Protestant states marked out in distinct colours. Other maps distinguish between varieties of Protestantism and show rival colours for Lutheran and Calvinist (and sometimes also Anglican) territories. Other maps attempt to present a more complex image of Europe’s religious demography with blobs of different colours showing the presence of minority groups within states. Some maps also provide a range of different colours to depict where Anabaptist, Antitrinitarian, Orthodox, Greek Catholic, Hussite, Muslim and Jewish Europeans lived. Some maps show states that offered legal rights to more than one religion and regions with a mixed religious demography using multi-coloured stripes or overlapping blotches of different colours. The viewer might well be drawn to worry that such places would be unlikely to enjoy peace and stability until they could match the comforting monochrome of their neighbours.
Continue reading
==============================
via Big Think by Robby Berman
(PAWEESIT)
The Great Pyramid in Egypt is the last of the ancient Seven Wonders of the World. The tomb for Pharaoh Khufu — “Cheops” in Greek — sits on the Giza plateau about 3 kilometers southwest of Egypt’s capitol Cairo, and it’s huge: nearly 147 meters high and 230.4 meters on each side (it’s now slightly smaller due to erosion). Built of roughly 2.3 million limestone and rose granite stones from hundreds of kilometers away, it’s long posed a couple of vexing and fascinating mysteries: How did the ancient Egyptians manage to get all of these stones to Giza, and how did they build such a monumental object? All sorts of exotic ideas have been floated, including assistance from aliens visiting earth. Now, as the result of an amazing find in a cave 606 kilometers away, we have an answer in the form of 4,600-year-old, bound papyrus scrolls, the oldest papyri ever found. They’re the journal of one of the managers who helped build the great pyramid. It’s the only eye-witness account of building the Great Pyramid that’s ever been found.
Continue reading
==============================
via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz
Lego's new Star Wars Millennium Falcon set is the largest model kit the company has ever sold. It contains 7,500 pieces and retails from Lego.com for $800. It's sold out for now though, but you can get one from a scalper on Amazon for $1,800. Or you can watch Benjamin Große's video of him building the kit, 20 hours compressed to less than two minutes.
No comments:
Post a Comment