via New Statesman
THE BEATLES. PHOTO: GETTY
The album wasn’t a recognisable art form before the Beatles. If the British pop stars of the time, Cliff, Billy, Marty or Adam released an LP it was to earn extra royalties from their regurgitated singles. When, in February 1964, Cathy McGowan broke the news on Ready, Steady,Go! that the Beatles had reached No 1 in the US charts, her teenage audience knew that “I Want to Hold Your Hand” wasn’t destined to be reproduced as an album track. For UK followers, the Beatles could be relied upon to invariably provide only new music for the extra outlay required to buy an LP.
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What Is It Like to Be a Bee?
A philosophical and neurobiological look into the apian mind.
via Arts & Letters Daily: Natasha Frost in Atlas Obscura
A single pound of honey is the lifetime work for about 768 bees, made up of visits to two million flowers. USGS BEE INVENTORY AND MONITORING LAB/PUBLIC DOMAIN
You’re a honeybee. Despite being around 700,000 times smaller than the average human, you’ve got more of almost everything. Instead of four articulated limbs, you have six, each with six segments. (Your bee’s knees, sadly, don’t exist.) You’re exceptionally hairy. A shock of bristly setae covers your body and face to help you keep warm, collect pollen, and even detect movement. Your straw-like tongue stretches far beyond the end of your jaw, but has no taste buds on it. Instead, you “taste” with other, specialized hairs, called sensillae, that you use to sense the chemicals that brush against particular parts of your body.
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via the Big Think blog by Derek Beres
Oxytocin is sometimes marketed as a wonder hormone. This “trust molecule,” which acts a neurotransmitter in your brain, plays a role in mother-child bonding and is implicated in helping promote empathy and generosity. It is especially popular in modern lore for its role in sex: the “love hormone” is stimulated when hugging, kissing, and copulating. It is also delivered via breast milk, hushing the aggravated infant in a flood of chemical bliss.
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via the Guardian by Judith Kerr
Judith Kerr: ‘I’ve spent 94 years looking at things.’ Illustration: Alan Vest
Mine isn’t really a writing day, it is a drawing day and it varies according to the time of year. I can draw by artificial light, but I can’t colour or paint by it, so I always hope to finish a book before the clocks go back. In the summer it is wonderful, I can work until 9pm if I want to, but in the winter I try to get on with it in the morning. The summers are very carefree because I can go out for a walk during the day, knowing I can work the rest of the day.
I need to walk in order to think about work. I feel lucky to be alive at this time: I’ve had two cataract operations so my sight is fine and I’ve got a new hip so I can walk. I live in Barnes, west London, so I walk along the river or to the duck pond or into the village. At the moment, I walk after dark so as not to waste the light. I like it too: everything looks good in the dark. The other day I got to the end of a book, which I’d worked particularly hard on, I’d only had one day off in the last month, and though it’s always nice to finish something, this time I felt strangely triumphant. So I went out for a walk at about eight in the evening and suddenly there were fireworks going off all around me. I hadn’t realised it was Guy Fawkes night. All these fireworks were going off and the church bells started to ring. I thought: this is very kind, but it’s only a little picture book. It was such a happy thing.
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via Interesting Literature
A reading of a classic poem about England
‘Oh, to be in England’: the opening line of Robert Browning’s poem praising England while abroad has become more famous than the poem’s actual title, ‘Home-Thoughts, from Abroad’. Before we proceed to an analysis of the poem’s language and meaning, here’s a reminder of it.
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via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
You are no doubt aware that models of our solar system are not to scale. These guys went to Black Rock Desert to create a scale model of our solar system, starting with an Earth the size of a marble. This required seven miles of empty desert to add the other planets (not including Pluto). There's an awful lot of space between these little spheres.Continue reading (and watch)
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via the Big Think blog by Robby Berman
Isle Royale is an 893 square mile island in the northwest corner of Lake Superior, about a four-hour boat ride from Houghton, Michigan on the Keweenaw Peninsula. It’s a pretty rustic place with little development, and as such makes a fascinating isolated ecosystem for the study of the few species that live there, most significantly 1,600 moose and one or two wolves, interrupted only sometimes by visiting scientists or nature lovers.
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via the Guardian by Gregory Porter
King of cool … Nat King Cole in 1951. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
When I was five or six, I wrote a love song: “Once upon a time I had a dreamboat / Once upon a time I had a love / Once upon a time I had a dreamboat / And upon that boat I found my love.” I sang it in a crooner style into a tape recorder and played it to my mother. “Boy, you sound like Nat King Cole,” she said. I remember thinking: what a strange name. I must have been old enough to spell out at least N-A-T.
I went to her record collection and, among the Mahalia Jackson and Ella discs, there were five or six by Nat. I put one on, looked at this very sharply dressed, elegant man on the album covers, and out of the speakers came the warm, nurturing sound of his extraordinary voice.
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via Interesting Literature
Classic poems about long flowing locks and keepsakes
Lady Lilith by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, via Wikimedia Commons.
Poets and hair: now that would make for an interesting literary study. There’s Lord Byron, of course, who, when he received requests from admiring young women for a lock of his hair, would send them some hair snipped from his dog. But many poets (Byron included) have written poems in praise of hair, or about the beauty of hair. Here are ten of the best poems on a hairy theme.
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via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz
Archaeologists digging in the sand dunes of Santa Barbara County, California discovered a 300-pound sphinx head. Notably, the artifact does not date back to ancient times but is only 95-years-old. The sphinx is actually a prop from pioneering filmmaker Cecile DeMille's 1923 movie The Ten Commandments. It was part of the so-called "Lost City of DeMille," a massive Egyptian set made for the movie.
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