via FlavorWire by Alison Nastasi
Pippa Dyrlaga’s incredible cut-paper artworks are created from a single sheet of paper. She creates precise patterns made from hundreds of cuts that form details, like the fur of a cat or the scales of a snake. They are delicate, intricate, and amazing to behold.
Continue reading
==============================
via Big Think by Paul Ratner
Chariot racing
Soccer maestro Cristiano Ronaldo's 2017 pay of $93 million makes him the world's highest-paid athlete, according to Forbes magazine. The money that comes in from salary and endorsements make NBA great LeBron James second on that list with $86.2 million, while the $80 million earned by Lionel Messi, another soccer legend, rounds out the top three. But none of these amazing athletes can compare to the earning ability of the highest-paid athlete of all times – a Roman charioteer by the name of Gaius Appuleius Diocles, who got paid $15 billion in his lifetime.
Historian Peter T. Struck says that Diocles, a Lusitanian Spaniard who lived from 104 to 146 AD, earned 35,863,120 Roman sesterces in his lifetime – a figure that would amount to the $15 billion in today's money. The number is inscribed on a monument in Rome, erected for Diocles by his fans at the end of a 24-year career.
Continue reading
==============================
via the OUP blog by Charlotte Zaidi
An alchemist reading a book; his assistants stirring the cucible on the other side of the room. Engraving by P.F. Basan after D. Teniers the younger, 1640/1650. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
On the 20th of August 1947, 16 German physicians were found guilty of heinous crimes against humanity. They had been willing participants in one of the largest examples of ethnic cleansing in modern history. During the Second World War, these Nazi doctors had conducted pseudoscientific medical experiments upon concentration camp prisoners and the stories that unfolded during their trial – The Doctors’ Trial – were filled with descriptions of torture, deliberate mutilation, and murder.
Continue reading
==============================
via Boing Boing by Andrea James
Teun van der Zalm developed an algorithm for creating nebulae in games, VR, and film. This showcase of the results, set to a lovely free track by Lee Rosevere, hints at the beauty that emerges from math.
Continue reading (and watching)
==============================
via the New Statesman by Islam Issa
GETTY
This year [2017] marks 350 years since John Milton’s Paradise Lost was published (1667). Its author was a controversial blind man who publicly advocated the execution of King Charles I before serving in the republican government. He was an anarchist who spoke out against the Catholic Church, didn’t believe in the Trinity and wrote pamphlets about the merits of divorce. But Paradise Lost would become his most important contribution.
And this week [of 19 October 2017] , Philip Pullman’s The Book of Dust is ready to hit the stores. This new work is a prequel to the famous trilogy, His Dark Materials, which drew heavily on Paradise Lost for its themes, characters and settings. In fact, the very title, His Dark Materials, is taken straight out of Paradise Lost. As Satan sets off on his mission to tempt humankind, he comes across “the wild abyss” of Chaos in which the component qualities of the classical elements are “mixed confusedly” forever. That is, unless God decides “to create more worlds”, in which case these elements will form “his dark materials”.
Continue reading
==============================
via the Guardian by Paul Mason
Lenin … ‘We know today how wrong it went.’ Photograph: Heritage Images/Getty Images
Things were going badly for Lenin this time 100 years ago [in 2017]. We are eight days away from the centenary of the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power, but, as he prepared to strike, Lenin fell victim to one of the great scoops of the 20th century.After a scratchy committee meeting had set the date of the revolution for 2 November (western calendar), two leading Bolsheviks, Zinoviev and Kamenev, who thought the whole idea crazy, leaked the plan to a pro-government newspaper.
Lenin, outraged, expelled them from the party and ordered the insurrection to be postponed for five days. The provisional government, already largely powerless, spent that time ordering extra troops into Petrograd, while the Bolshevik commissars set about countermanding these orders.
Continue reading
==============================
via the Big Think blog by Robby Berman
(BENSON KUA)
Dog and cat owners and animal lovers believe that animals carry some sort of human-like thought. Some may say it’s just anthropomorphizing, but we’re pretty convinced that our pets are "happy" or "sad" or whatever we want to project on them. Obviously we can’t just ask them — at least for now — but as scientists learn more and more about animal intelligence, it’s safe to say that fewer people see our companions as acting purely from instinct. Nonetheless, even some animal lovers have trouble believing that fish are self-aware and have feelings — after all, they’re as expressionless as… (most) cats. To some scientists, though, it’s become clear that fish not only have emotions, but that they’re subject to depression.
Continue reading
==============================
via OUP blog by George Currie
“beach-clouds-landscape-ocean” by Josh Sorenson. CC0 via Pexels
The relationship, through history, between humans and the sea has been one of conflict and conquest. The dangers of traveling on such a fickle, treacherous, and alien environment could easily mean death for early seafarers and explorers (and indeed it still can today). What is even more impressive, and perhaps mind-boggling, is that those venturing to sea in pre-history did not know what they would find, if anything at all. So why did humans first take to the sea? What drove them to surf and sail into the unknown? One reason may be our inquisitive nature.Continue reading
==============================
via Interesting Literature
In this week’s Dispatches from the Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle considers Drummond Allison, a poet who died in the Second World War
‘Lost Generation’. That was the name Gertrude Stein gave to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and their contemporaries, men who’d lived through the Great War. Of course, many writers were lost in the war themselves, killed in action while still in their twenties (or younger): Isaac Rosenberg, Charles Hamilton Sorley, Wilfred Owen. But the Second World War also produced its own lost generation: born just after the First World War and destined to perish in the Second. Of that generation, it would be those poets who survived the Second World War, or who were excused active service for health reasons, who would go on to achieve wider notice: Charles Causley, Richard Wilbur, and, most of all, Philip Larkin. Yet although Sidney Keyes and Alun Lewis died before, perhaps, their full potential could be realised, Keith Douglas, as I’ve previously observed, was a great poet even by the time he died aged 24 during the D-Day campaign. Drummond Allison was also a very accomplished poet by the time he died, aged just 22, while fighting on the Garigliano. Yet next to Allison’s, Douglas’s small measure of fame looks positively stratospheric.
Continue reading
==============================
via Boing Boing by Gareth Branwyn
I'm not a guitar player (though I did take lessons in my youth), but I am a huge Nick Drake fan and have always been haunted by the very unique, dark, and moody guitar tones that he achieved. In this fascinating video by YouTube guitar teacher, Josh Turner, he presents and demonstrates his theory for how Nick got his signature sound.
Continue reading and, of course, start watching and listening
No comments:
Post a Comment