via the Guardian by Vanessa Thorpe
Hedy Lamarr, a 1940s film idol, was joint winner of a scientific award for her work on radio waves. Photograph: Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Image
It is an extraordinary story, ripe for the telling: a glamorous Hollywood leading lady is at the summit of the film industry, yet treated as a sexual trophy and repeatedly undervalued intellectually. But her scientific knowhow leads to a breakthrough in military technology and opens up the way for contemporary communications methods, such as Bluetooth and wifi.
The remarkable life of the Austrian-born Hedy Lamarr – considered the most beautiful woman in the world by her Hollywood peers in the 1940s and 50s – is now the subject of a documentary, co-produced by the actress Susan Sarandon, which receives its British premiere in London on Wednesday [15 November 2017] as part of the Jewish Film Festival.
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via the Big Think blog by Philip Perry
There are many points of view on what exactly happiness is. Is it being successful, having close friends and a loving family, long stretches of contentment, or reaching your own life goals? If you define it as contentment with life, you may be surprised at what age(s) most people find it. There’s often more than one peak. According to a series of seven surveys recently digested and charted, most people are happiest around age 20.
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via Interesting Literature
A close reading of a classic Dickinson poem
‘The brain is wider than the sky’: the mind and all that it can take in – and imagine – is far greater than even the vast sky above us. This is the starting point of one of Emily Dickinson’s great meditations on the power of human imagination and comprehension. Before we attempt an analysis, though, here’s a reminder of the poem.
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via 3 Quarks Daily: Richard K in The Bloody Crossroads
I happened to be emerging from a bout of depression when I first realised we were approaching the centenary of Robert Lowell’s birth in 1917. Now that date – 1st March – has passed, but I’ve been rereading the poetry anyway, in the spirit of the young student in Richard Attenborough’s 1993 film Shadowlands: ‘We read to know we’re not alone.’ Lowell once told his fellow poet Stanley Kunitz: ‘It may be that some people have turned to my poems because of the very things that are wrong with me, I mean the difficulty I have with ordinary living …’ I think that’s right: The idea of the ‘mad artist’ is a mystification, a secular version of the divinely inspired genius; but there is no doubt that in the middle of the twentieth century mental illness began to emerge as a topic in US poetry in particular, and Lowell was one of its most sensitive registers, the equal of John Berryman and Sylvia Plath. Whatever his personal failings (and they were many) his best poems offer an exquisite exploration of this inescapable modern theme.
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via Boing Boing by Jason Weisberger
Via Digg.
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via the OUP blog by Ditte Høyer Engholm
Painting by WerbeFabrik. CC0 public domain via Pixabay
According to the WHO, Streptococcus pneumoniae (also known as pneumococcus) is the fourth most frequent microbial cause of fatal infection. These bacteria commonly colonize the upper respiratory tract and are the most common cause of bacterial pneumonia and meningitis. Although much is known about pneumococcal biology and the diseases it causes, there are still many questions about the molecular biology and cellular processes of the bacterium.Continue reading
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via The National Archives Blog by Euan Roger
![A later badge of the Order of the Garter in Windsor Castle [author's photograph]](https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Windsor.jpg)
A later badge of the Order of the Garter in Windsor Castle [author’s photograph]
One of our most interesting collections for the study of military and family history is made up of the various series of army pension records, especially those of returning soldiers wounded in service (you can read more about the re-cataloguing of some of these in our recent blog). The awarding of such pensions might seem a very modern idea, but in fact it goes all the way back to the 14th century, to the violent and bloody Hundred Years War between England and France.
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via the Guardian by Maev Kennedy
Scotney Castle in Kent, opened to the public in 2007 after the death of Betty Hussey, the last resident of the family who owned the estate. Photograph: John Melhuish/Rex Features
In proper storybook style, in a disintegrating cardboard box shoved to the very back of a drawer, in a castle where every nook and cranny is still stuffed with the possessions of generations of hoarding owners, a cache of valuable antique coins, some extremely rare, has been discovered.
Scotney Castle in Kent was left to the National Trust in 1970, and the gardens, with the ruin of a medieval moated manor house, Scotney Old Castle, have been enjoyed by visitors since then. But the Victorian mansion house, sometimes known as New Scotney Castle, only opened to the public in 2007 after the death of Betty Hussey, the last resident of the family that owned the estate since the 18th century. Since then volunteers have been scouring through attics and cellars, and opening hundreds of cupboards and drawers, carefully recording myriad family possessions from medieval documents to 20th-century account books.
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via Interesting Literature
A commentary on a short WWII poem
The poem ‘War Poet’ was written by Sidney Keyes (1922-43), one of the most famous English poets of the Second World War, in March 1942 and published the following year, the year of his untimely death. Curiously, the day Keyes was born, 27 May 1922, was the exact same day that the actor Christopher Lee entered the world. Lee outlived Keyes by over 70 years, and it’s odd to think of the two men as exact contemporaries. Keyes was commissioned into the Queen’s Own West Kent Regiment and sent to Tunisia in March 1943, where he was killed, one month before his 21st birthday.
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Jim Henson teaches kids how to make puppets (1969)
via Boing Boing by Rusty Blazenhoff
Using common objects like socks, tennis balls, wooden spoons, and even potatoes, Jim Henson and his assistant Don Sahlin show children how to make basic puppets and bring them to "life" in the 1969 Iowa Public Television show, "Volume See."
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