via ResearchBuzz Firehose: Freya Parr in the BBC Music Magazine
The Royal College of Music has launched a brand new database of musical instruments. MINIM-UK brings together over 20,000 instruments from more than 200 UK collections, making them digitally available to the public for the first time.
Britain’s musical heritage is documented by thousands of instruments. Many of these reside in remote local collections, or linger in museum storage where they are inaccessible to the public. However, these instruments often relate to important historical events, people and places. They all tell the story of the diversity and richness of national and regional music traditions in British homes, churches, and theatres, as well as on streets and battlefields. Cataloguers working on the MINIM project have travelled over 10,000 miles for 180 days to collect photographs, sound recordings and stories of instrument collections everywhere from Aberdeen to Bournemouth. All of the information they have gathered is now freely available online.
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via Arts & Letters Daily: Ivan Kreilkamp in Public Books
When Joni Mitchell first came to prominence, in the late-1960s “Summer of Love” era, she was often perceived as a kind of “poetess” or “nightingale” folk singer: a putatively pure origin of beautifully natural-seeming songs (“The Circle Game,” “Chelsea Morning, and “Both Sides, Now,” among many others).1 When the rapper Q-Tip declared (on Janet Jackson’s 1997 song “Got ’Til it’s Gone”) that “Joni Mitchell never lies,” he articulated a familiar understanding of the singer as, above all, truthful and authentic.
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via the OUP blog by Christopher Hilliard
Royal Courts of Justice, London by bortescristian. CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Today we take it for granted that anyone convicted of a crime should be able to appeal to a higher court. However, this wasn’t always so. English lawyers traditionally set great store in the deterrent value of swift and final justice. Over the course of the nineteenth century, reformers pressed for the establishment of a court that could review sentencing and order retrials on points of law or new evidence. These advocates of change met with fierce resistance from the judiciary and much of the legal profession, and the cause of reform had little success until a spectacular miscarriage of justice came to light.
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via Boing Boing by Andrea James
The Royal Ocean Film Society looks at the work of pioneering animator Richard Williams, whose work on Pink Panther and Roger Rabbit bucked animation trends and pushed for a more exaggerated style of movement.
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via the Big Think blog by Robby Berman
Archaeologists find the largest frozen Scythian burial site ever found in Siberia.
The Uyuk River Valley in the Russian republic of Tuva has been known to archeologists for some time as the site of ancient princely tombs belonging to fearsome and tattooed horse-riding nomadic troublemakers referred to by historians as the Scythians. The area is known as the “Siberian Valley of Kings,” and in it are a group of burial structures, or “kurgans,” built on river terraces. Archeologists have named them Arzhan 1-5, and Chinge-Tei 1. Now there’s Tunnug 1, lying frozen and buried in a swamp along the Uyuk River. It’s the earliest Scythian kurgan ever found, and may also be the most undisturbed, thanks to being so well-hidden in this already-remote region, and through preservation from permafrost. Bern University archaeologist Gino Caspari recently published Tunnug 1’s discovery in Archaeological Research in Asia.
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via The National Archives Blog by Eleanor Johnson Ward
Recently, while researching documents to use as part of a document display, I chanced upon a file relating to a murder which had occurred in the 1930s, very close to my childhood home. Idle curiosity led me to order the document and have a look at it.
There among the neatly-typed police reports and statements I was greatly surprised to find a letter penned by one of the greats of twentieth century detective fiction – Dorothy L Sayers – who had found herself drawn into the case by a bizarre and unexpected telephone call.
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via Arts & Letters Daily: Micah Mattix in the Weekly Standard
Satan Exulting Over Eve, one of William Blake's illustrations of Milton's Paradise Lost
In 2016, during the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death, the Bard was feted by dozens of books, hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles, performances of his plays, lectures, and a Shakespeare Day gala attended by Prince Charles himself. The London Tube map replaced the names of its stops with titles of Shakespeare’s plays. Google, of course, did a doodle.
In 2017, it was all Jane Austen—the 200th anniversary of the novelist’s death. Like Shakespeare the year before, she was everywhere, not least in the pages of the New York Times, which ran some 20 articles on her, musing about everything from what she might tell us about Brexit to why the alt-right loves her so much. The Atlantic stated unambiguously that “ Jane Austen Is Everything,” and it sure did feel that way. Her face now graces the UK’s new £10 note.
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via the Big Think blog by Philip Perry
Picture this: you’re playing basketball after school with your friends. Just as you’re about to make a three pointer, a streak of fire cuts across the sky and the object causing it lands just a few yards away, embedding itself in the blacktop. You rush over to the site of a small, smoldering crater, where a meteorite appears. And that meteorite is carrying biological material from another planet. This might sound like the opening scene to the next big sci-fi thriller. But it actually occurred in real life.
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via Boing Boing by Clive Thompson
Here's a paper outlining a way to make logic gates out of nothing but links and rotary joints.
It's quite ingenious -- binary states are indicated by the lean of the mechanisms, so you do calculations via entirely mechanical means, with the links shifting back and forth on the joints. They've worked out how you'd build everything from AND gates to NAND, NOR, NOT, OR, XNOR and XOR.
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via Interesting Literature
The meaning of Dickinson’s great dog poem
‘A little Dog that wags his tail’ is not one of Emily Dickinson’s best-known poems, so a few words of analysis may help to clarify its meaning. It starts off sounding as though it’s going to be a dog poem – a sort of companion-piece to Dickinson’s celebrated poem about a cat – but then it quickly turns into a poem about something else entirely…
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