via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz
Over at The Last Word on Nothing, esteemed science writer Rebecca Boyle wrote a lovely appreciation of trees. "Apart from humans, maybe, trees are the best form of life on this planet," she writes.
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via the Guardian by Stephen Moss
1. The first castaway – marooned on 29 January 1942 – was Vic Oliver, a music-hall star in the 1930s. He was the perfect first interviewee for presenter Roy Plomley, the Wodehousian wannabe actor who devised the show. The first guest was supposed to be the philosopher CEM Joad, but he was indisposed. Who knows how broadcasting history would have turned out if Joad had made it to the recording.
2. The second castaway, on 5 February 1942, was the critic James Agate. Incestuously, one of his musical choices was Eric Coates’s By the Sleepy Lagoon, the programme’s theme music (which was inspired not by a tropical island, but by Bognor Regis). Agate was gay, but Plomley would never have dreamed of discussing such subjects – either in 1942 or 40 years later, when he was still presenting the show.
At 19. we have:
Marlene Dietrich. Photograph: Schafer/Paramo/REX/Shutterstock
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As there are 75 remembrances please allow yourself a lot of time.
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via Big Think by Paul Ratner
In a new paper, scientists have envisioned a new power source straight out of Star Trek. While nuclear fusion reactors, which produce energy in the same way as the sun, are still not a viable reality, researchers from Tel Aviv University and the University of Chicago are proposing quark fusion.
Quarks are super-tiny elementary particles that combine to form protons and neutrons. There are six kinds of quarks, including up and down quarks, which are found in protons and neutrons, and heavier charm quarks.
The way we can produce quarks is through particle accelerators like the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, which can smash protons and neutrons to break them up into quarks.
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via Arts & Letters Daily: Michael Flanagan in The Irish Times
Usually employed to dramatise states of harmony or disharmony, teatime is used to great effect in such works as Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
If food is fundamental to life and a substance upon which civilisations and cultures have built themselves, then food is also fundamental to the imagination. Perhaps the deepest emotional exposure we have of imagination is that which we experience in childhood. Just as food studies is becoming important in the field of general literature, so too is it becoming important in the field of children’s literature.
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What a grumpy Alice that is!
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via the New Statesman by Yo Zushi
The surprising thing about Dylan’s evangelical Christian period? It isn’t all bad.
PHOTO: LYNN GOLDSMITH/CORBIS
They found Elvis face down on the floor of his bathroom, his body slumped on the vomit-stained red shag carpet in front of the toilet. The King was dead. On the evening of 16 August 1977, the 42-year-old singer had taken Seconal, Placidyl, Valmid, Demerol and an assortment of other drugs before putting on his gold pyjamas, the bottom half of which was now crumpled around his ankles. Beside him lay a book about sex and psychic energy – or, depending on whose account you believe, a copy of A Scientific Search for the Face of Jesus by Frank O Adams.
Sex, drugs and rock’n’roll are a well-established trinity, but to that list we could very reasonably add God. As Elvis explained, “Rock’n’roll is basically just gospel music, or gospel music mixed with rhythm and blues.” Scientists at the University of Utah demonstrated last year that, among a test group of 19 devout Mormons, “A recognisable feeling central to their devotional practice was reproducibly associated with activation in nucleus accumbens, ventromedial prefrontal cortex and frontal attentional regions” – which, in plain English, means that religious experiences can have the same sort of effect on the brain as sex, drugs and love. Faith, then, should be natural material for rockers, and so it has proved in the music of Elvis, U2 and even Black Sabbath.
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via OUP blog by Nathan Platte
Hollywood Sign Iconic Mountains Los Angeles” by 12019. CC0 via Pixabay.
If asked to recall a melody from Gone with the Wind, what might come to mind? For many, it’s the same four notes: a valiant leap followed by a gracious descent. This is the beginning of the Tara theme, named by composer Max Steiner for the plantation home of Scarlett O’Hara, whose impassioned misunderstandings of people and place propel the story.
Less known is that Max Steiner fashioned his Tara theme from another melody that he had unveiled in They Made Me a Criminal, a modest Warner Bros. film released eleven months before David O. Selznick’s production of Gone with the Wind. This melodic forerunner had its own predecessor, with Steiner spinning it from a simpler prototype used in Crime School (1938).
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via the Guardian by Patrick Barkham
Rosamund Young with one of the 113 grass-fed cows she farms at Kites Nest on the flanks of the Cotswolds. Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian
I’ll see who is in the mood for talking,” says Rosamund Young, strolling across a steep field on the Cotswold escarpment. “Hello, are you busy? You’re very nice, yes you are. Don’t walk off.” Young pauses, empathising with Celandine’s shyness. “She doesn’t like being any more than I do.”
“She won’t know she’s being photographed,” harrumphs Graeme Robertson, the photographer. Or will she?
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via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow
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via the Big Think blog by Robby Berman
(BASE)
Why are we here, anyway? No, not in the what’s-the-meaning-of-it-all sense, but why haven’t matter and antimatter completely obliterated each other, the universe and us? In nature, two identical things that are 180° out of phase with each other — as matter and antimatter seem to be — cancel each other out. So, um, why are we here?
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via Interesting Literature
An introduction to a classic fairy tale
A classic example of the fairy tale featuring ‘the animal as helper’, ‘Puss in Boots’ entered the canon of classic fairy tales when Charles Perrault included it (as ‘Le Chat Botté’) in his 1697 collection of fairy stories, although like many of the greatest fairy tales, an earlier version can be found in the 1634 Pentamerone, a collection of oral folk tales compiled by Giambattista Basile. How we should analyse ‘Puss in Boots’ has troubled authors, commentators, and illustrators over the years. George Cruikshank objected to ‘a system of imposture being rewarded by the greatest worldly advantages’.
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