via Boing Boing by Andrea James
Nahre Sol's Practice Notes channel is a whirlwind tour of music history, with variations of well-known melodies in the styles of different composers, mashups of genres, and other delights.
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via Killer Directory by Administrator
If you like films to do with the internet and computers then you should definitely check out this infographic from the people at VizionOnline in the UK. View information about movies including Nerve, Tron, Her, AntiTrust and more.
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via 3 Quarks Daily by Carl Pierer
A few months ago, this column discussed Rae Langton’s argument that pornography subordinates women. This argument forms the first part of a longer paper re-published in her book Sexual Solipsism. The second part of this paper argues that pornography silences women. In light of recent events and discussions, this idea seems to have acquired a new relevance.
The second part of Langton’s article builds on the speech act theory of the first. Silencing means, for Langton, the failure to perform a speech act. Her argument in this part of the paper is to first argue that speech acts can be silenced, secondly that there are silencing speech acts, and to conclude, thirdly, that pornography is a silencing speech act that silences the speech act(s) of women.
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via the News Statesman by Bret Johnson
JAMES JOYCE AND HIS PUBLISHER SYLVIA BEACH. PHOTOS: AFP/GETTY
On or about July 2010 the literary world experienced a small but far-reaching tremor. That was the month Gabriel Josipovici’s What Ever Happened to Modernism? was published. Much like the first Velvet Underground record, while it wasn’t a bestseller, it galvanised many of those who encountered it – in this case, to begin their own exploration of modernism’s legacy.
Some critics claimed Josipovici’s quest was as quixotic as the art he lauded. His book is more personal than academic – it’s a love letter to the trauma and tribulations that, for him, were at the core of modernist art. Now, seven years later, modernism has slipped back into our lives, back onto the shelves of bookstores, and back into the vernacular of authors who are looking back in order to look forward.
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via Arts & Letters Daily: Guy D Middleton in aeon
There’s a common story of how the Maya civilisation was wiped out: they fell foul of unstoppable climate change. Several periods of extreme drought withered their crops and killed off thousands in their overpopulated cities. ‘There was nothing they could do or could have done. In the end, the food and water ran out – and they died,’ wrote Richardson Gill in 2007. The jungle reclaimed the cities with their palaces and pyramids until they were rediscovered in the 19th century by intrepid explorers.
Likewise, we all know that the Easter Islanders chopped down all the palm trees on their small, isolated island to clear farmland for their ever-growing population and to move their characteristic moai statues, not realising that they were eroding their landscape, reducing their food production, and ultimately cutting themselves off from the bounty of the sea – and the possibility of escape. The Europeans who found the island in the 18th century wondered how such primitive people could ever have had a civilisation developed enough to carve the majestic stone heads.
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via the Guardian by Jude Rogers
Robert Plant Photograph: Mads Perch
Listen – You’d Better Run
“I’m 17, full of myself, in a youth club with Noddy Holder …” It’s a warm-boned autumn afternoon in London’s Primrose Hill, and Robert Plant, 69, is luminous as a cartoon lion, a Soul Jazz records T-shirt tight over his belly, his golden mane winking in a dimly lit local French restaurant. Carry Fire, his 11th solo album (24th if you count collaborations and Led Zeppelin LPs) is just out, and with a little judicious nudging – Plant generally dislikes nostalgia – he’s looking back. We are somewhere in the West Midlands in 1966. “We’d borrow Noddy’s dad’s window-cleaning van for our gear, buckets clanking through the Black Country streets, so to have a record that was going to be pressed, have a dust sleeve – it was showing-off time.” He rears up. “‘Well, we’ve got this deal with CBS, Noddy.’ And Noddy goes: ‘That’s all right, we’ve got one with Columbia.’ And then I found out it was the same bloody song!”
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via the Big Think blog by Philip Goff
Artist's representation of a black hole. Public Domain.
Common sense tells us that only living things have an inner life. Rabbits and tigers and mice have feelings, sensations and experiences; tables and rocks and molecules do not. Panpsychists deny this datum of common sense. According to panpsychism, the smallest bits of matter – things such as electrons and quarks – have very basic kinds of experience; an electron has an inner life.
The main objection made to panpsychism is that it is ‘crazy’ and ‘just obviously wrong’. It is thought to be highly counterintuitive to suppose that an electron has some kind of inner life, no matter how basic, and this is taken to be a very strong reason to doubt the truth of panpsychism. But many widely accepted scientific theories are also crazily counter to common sense. Albert Einstein tells us that time slows down at high speeds. According to standard interpretations of quantum mechanics, particles have determinate positions only when measured. And according to Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, our ancestors were apes. All of these views are wildly at odds with our common-sense view of the world, or at least they were when they were first proposed, but nobody thinks this is a good reason not to take them seriously. Why should we take common sense to be a good guide to how things really are?
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via Boing Boing by Andrea James
In 1997, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recorded "the bloop," a one-minute sound emanating 1,500 miles west of Chile's southern coast. The unexplained sound was never recorded again.
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via Interesting Literature
A short summary of Woolf’s 1924 essay
Virginia Woolf reacted against the style and attitude of much Victorian fiction, much as many of her fellow modernists did, and her 1924 essay ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ almost acts like a manifesto for her view of this new way of writing. But she is not railing against the fiction that had been written by Charles Dickens and George Eliot, but was instead taking on a ‘foe’ closer to home: the Edwardians – that is, writers of the Edwardian era in British history (1901-1910, the reign of Edward VII). The problem with this era of British fiction, for Woolf, is that it was dominated by novelists like H. G. Wells, John Galsworthy, and Arnold Bennett (who is the only novelist we know to have a famous omelette named after him). Bennett is the ‘Mr Bennett’ referred to in Woolf’s title.
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via OUP blog by Yugin Nagasawa
sunlight sunrise sunset dawn by 5hashank. Public domain via Pixabay
When Kurt Gödel, one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, died in 1978 he left mysterious notes filled with logical symbols. Towards the end of his life a rumour circulated that this enigmatic genius was engaged in a secret project that was not directly relevant to his usual mathematical work. According to the rumour, he had tried to develop a logical proof of the existence of God. The notes that Gödel left, which were published a decade after his death, confirmed that the rumour was indeed correct. Gödel had invented a version of the so-called modal ontological argument for God’s existence.Continue reading
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