via Boing Boing by Clive Thompson
It turns out that 18th-century pirates liked to curl up a with a good book.
In 1718, Queen Anne's Revenge – the flagship of the infamous pirate Blackbeard -- went aground offshore of North Carolina. The wreck was found in 1996, and last year conservators discovered a mass of wet textile pieces inside a breech-loading cannon. Several of the scraps were printed with uniformly-oriented text, and the conservators realized they'd found tiny fragments of a book.
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via the OUP blog by Tom Hamilton
Le massacre de la Saint-Barthélemy by François Dubois. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
When the church bells rang out in Paris on Saint Bartholomew’s Day, 24 August 1572, they heralded a massacre.
At dawn, on royal orders, the Catholic civic militia assassinated the admiral Gaspard de Coligny and other Protestant leaders. Their cry that “the king wills it!” preceded thousands of killings of Protestants in cities across France during the month that followed. These deaths reignited the Wars of Religion that a royal wedding a few days earlier—between the Catholic Marguerite de Valois and the Protestant Henri de Navarre—had hoped to extinguish.
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via the Guardian by Jamie Doward
The hanging of the ‘witches’ in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1650. Photograph: Getty Images
It was a terrifying phenomenon that continues to cast a shadow over certain parts of Europe even today. The great age of witch trials, which ran between 1550 and 1700, fascinates and repels in equal measure. Over the course of a century and a half, 80,000 people were tried for witchcraft and half of them were executed, often burned alive.
And then trials disappeared almost completely.
Their appearance was all the more strange because between 900 and 1400 the Christian authorities had refused to acknowledge that witches existed, let alone try someone for the crime of being one. This was despite the fact that belief in witches was common in medieval Europe, and in 1258 Pope Alexander IV had to issue a canon to prevent prosecutions.
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via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz
Is there anybody out there? If we don't listen for the answer, we certainly won't hear it. Over at the Planetary Society, Jason Davis posted an excellent survey of the past, present, and future of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
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via Big Think by Raymond Coppinger and Mark Feinstein
A Jack Russell terrier tears in and out of its doggie door, skidding and sliding on a hardwood floor, only to repeat the performance over and over again. A Border collie in the park leaps to catch a ball, runs and drops it back at the owner’s feet with a look of anxious anticipation. There’s no food treat in store for these animals, no pats on the head – they seem to do it out of sheer playful exuberance. But what are they really up to? What does it mean for a dog to ‘play’?
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via Interesting Literature
Five classic works of Stoicism
Stoic philosophy has been around for several centuries now, but the principles of Stoicism are not as widely known as the word itself. We tend to use the words ‘stoic’ and ‘stoicism’ to refer to a sort of ‘stiff upper lip’ attitude to life – the sort of thing that Rudyard Kipling recommended in his classic poem, ‘If’. Below, we’ve picked five of the best ancient works on Stoicism and related philosophical ideas. Modern titles are, of course, available – but these might be considered the founding texts of the Stoic worldview.
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via Library Link: Shankar Vedantam, Rhaina Cohen and Tara Boyle in Hidden Brain
Nora Carol Photography/Nora Carol Photography/AFP/Getty Images
"Fake news" is a phrase that may seem specific to our particular moment and time in American history.
But Columbia University Professor Andie Tucher says fake news is deeply rooted in American journalism.
The first newspaper published in North America got shut down in 1690 after printing fabricated information. Nineteenth-century newspapers often didn't agree on basic facts. In covering a lurid murder in 1836, one major newspaper implicated the man who'd been accused of the crime, while a competing newspaper described the accused as the victim of an intricate conspiracy.
It's no coincidence that newspapers covered stories like this one in dramatically different ways. "They both looked at the same crime and had entirely different interpretations based on what they thought their readers would prefer to hear," says Tucher, who researches the history of fake news. Different newspapers had different audiences, so journalists catered to the tastes and sympathies of their particular readerships.
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Plant roots evolved at least twice, and step by step
The discover of a unique rooting anatomy from 407m years ago supports theory roots evolved at least twice, and step by step
via the Guardian by Susannah Lydon
Exceptional cellular preservation of a meristem. Photograph: Handout
Most of us do not spend much time contemplating plant roots. Not only do they suffer from the wider issue of plant blindness, but they are also the bit of the plant that is not visible. In terms of getting people excited about plant science, it’s a tough gig. This is a shame, because plant roots are critical to all of our lives: no roots means no food. Roots provide anchorage, and allow plants to gain water and nutrients from the soil. They also form a key symbiotic relationship with mycorrhizal fungi, which provide minerals from the soil in return for a steady supply of carbs from the plant.
In the modern world, we can easily divide plants into the ones that have roots and the ones that don’t. The flowering plants (angiosperms) and the other vascular plant groups (conifers and other seed plants, ferns, horsetails and clubmosses) all have a recognisable root, defined by having a meristem of rapidly-dividing, undifferentiated cells, and by having a root cap, which protects the apex of the growing root and which is where the plant perceives gravity.
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via the New Statesman by David Olusoga
Jamaican technicians in Britain during the Second World War
The stories of the thousands who came to Britain from the colonies and the occupied nations of Europe during World War II have often been marginalised and forgotten.
The word immigration and the phrase postwar are commonly paired. Those who study black history often talk of the existence of a “Windrush Myth”, a widely held notion that the presence of non-white people in Britain began in the summer of 1948, when that famous ship docked at Tilbury in Essex. To counter this, historians point to the long history of black and Asian people living in Britain, stretching back for many centuries. Yet when reaching for this deeper history, what is sometimes overlooked is a brief but remarkable era of diversity and encounter that, in 1948, was a recent national memory. For some of those on board the Windrush, many of whom were veterans of the Second World War returning (rather than emigrating) to Britain, it was personal experience.
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via Interesting Literature
Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130 (‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun’) has to be one of the top five most famous poems from the sequence of 154 sonnets, and it divides critical opinion. Is this poem a touching paean to inner beauty (opposed to superficiality) or is it misogynist trash? The jury is still out, as we’ll see. Anyway, before we proceed to our analysis of this divisive poem, here is Sonnet 130.
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