via 3 Quarks Daily by Leanne Ogasawara
Once upon a time, the world was full of miracles.
And oh, that was the miracle of those two spires of Chartres Cathedral! Separated in time by some four hundred years, the spires can still be glimpsed past fields of wheat, rising up over the low town; a town which itself has somehow retained its old medieval quality. Very much like the legendary first view of Mont Saint-Michel one gets from a distance, it is the unexpected vision of those cathedral spires arising out of the clear blue sky that makes arriving at Chartres so emotionally stirring an experience.
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via the Guardian by Ian Sample Science editor
WARNING: Image at the start of the piece is fairly graphic!
In what can safely be assumed to be horrifying news for arachnophobes around the world, scientists have discovered the beautifully-preserved remains of prehistoric “proto-spiders” that sported tails longer than their bodies.
Fossil hunters found the extraordinary creatures suspended in lumps of amber that formed 100m years ago in what is now Myanmar. The ancient arachnids are described as “chimeras” after the hybrid beast of Greek mythology, because they have a curious mix of primitive and modern body parts.
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via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
Kaplamino's "The Blue Marble" is made from ordinary items like rubber bands, magnets, blocks of wood, pencils, bottle caps, and plastic forks, but he turns it into an almost magical chain reaction machine on a tilted wood plane.
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via the OUP blog by David Carslake
Weight by TeroVesalainen. CC0 public domain via Pixabay
The body mass index (BMI) is a crude but useful measure of how heavy someone is for their weight. It consists of your weight in kilograms, divided by the square of your height in metres. Guidelines suggest that a BMI between 18.5 and 25 is healthy for most people. You are classed as overweight if it is 25-30 and obese if it is more than 30. You might think that establishing the healthiest BMI is simple. You take a large, representative sample of people and put them into groups according to their BMI. In each group you then measure some aspect of average health, such as the average lifespan. If you take this approach, which I’ll call the observed association, you find that the apparent ideal BMI is a little over 25. People classed as overweight actually live a little longer, on average, than those with a BMI in the recommended range. This has prompted numerous press articles advising people not to worry about being overweight, and some have accused scientists of deliberately misleading the public. But it’s a little bit more complicated than that.
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via The National Archives blog by Dr Juliette Desplat
After the First World War, the League of Nations granted France a Mandate on Syria and the Lebanon. If you have read some of my other blog posts, you won’t be surprised to hear that it led to archaeological issues.
By the 1930s, archaeology was thriving in Syria. Nationalism was growing in Iraq and many archaeologists relocated to the Sanjak of Alexandretta, in the northeast. They were well aware of the generous disposition of the Mandate towards foreign expeditions and took full advantage of it.
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via Arts & Letters Daily: Noel Malcom in Standpoint
John Selden: From radical to conservative, but always an innovator
John Selden is famous, but not at all well known. His fame was earned as a lawyer (one of the cleverest, and absolutely the most learned, in 17th-century England), and as an MP who played a significant role in English political history from the 1620s to the 1640s. In the earlier period he helped to lead the House of Commons’s opposition to Charles I, being awarded several years of imprisonment in the Tower of London for his pains; but in the 1640s his energies turned more to opposing abuses of parliamentary power, such as the “Act of Attainder” against the Earl of Strafford — a kind of murder by legislative decree — or the exclusion of bishops from the Lords.
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via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
I am a great admirer of Terry Gilliam's cut-out animations in Monty Python's Flying Circus.
They were an inspiration when I animated this blockchain explainer video for Institute for the Future:
In the above video from 1974, Gilliam shares how he made his animations. It's a complete course in cut-up animation in 15 minutes! I wish I'd seen this many years ago.
Two videos to watch
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via the Bog Think blog by Paul Ratner
Researchers find that an ancient chunk of North America is now a part of Australia, shedding light on Earth's first supercontinent Nuna.
Geologists from Australia’s Curtin University made the surprising discovery that a part of Australia was once attached to North America.
By comparing sandstone sedimentary rocks from the Georgetown region of Northern Queensland in Australia to rocks in present-day Canada, researchers concluded that they were very similar and that the Georgetown area broke off from North America about 1.7 billion years ago. And a 100 million years after that, this landmass crashed into what is now the Mount Isa region of northern Australia.
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via the OUP blog by Edmin L Gallgher and John D Meade
Saint Jerome in His Study by Vincenzo Catena (1470–1531). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
One of the side effects of the Protestant Reformation was intense scrutiny of the biblical canon and its contents. Martin Luther did not broach the issue in his 95 Theses, but not long after he drove that fateful nail into the door of the Wittenberg chapel, it became clear that the exact contents of the biblical canon would need to be addressed. Luther increasingly claimed that Christian doctrine should rest on biblical authority, a proposition made somewhat difficult if there is disagreement on which books can confer “biblical authority.” (Consider, e.g., the role of 2 Maccabees at the Leipzig Debate.) There was disagreement—and there had been disagreement for a millennium or more beforehand. Almost always, the sixteenth-century disputants pointed back to Christian authors in the fourth century or thereabouts for authoritative statements on the content of the Bible.
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via Interesting Literature
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle salutes the Welsh wizard of horror fiction
Arthur Machen (1863-1947) is one of those writers who seem destined to fall in and out of fashion. Having attained fame, swiftly followed by notoriety, in 1895 when his book The Three Impostors scandalised the London literary world with its account of debauched pagan rituals, Machen had to wait twelve years to get his next novel, The Hill of Dreams, published.
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