via the Guardian by Susannah Lydon
The discovery of a 100m-year-old spider ancestor with a whip-like tail, bearing a more than slight resemblance to everyone’s favourite parasitoid alien – the facehugger – gained a lot of media interest last week. Some arachnologists were upset by both the language of fear in the coverage (“creepy” and “horrifying” were popular descriptions) and by some folks expressing a desire to nuke it from orbit. It seems that despite (or perhaps because) of the intense responses that spiders evoke in people, there is always an interest in where and how they evolved.
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The article starts with an image of a spider which I have not copied but if you can get past that then it's a very interesting article.
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via Interesting Literature
Housman’s poem about fleeting happiness
Happiness doesn’t tend to stick around for long. As Dianna Wynne Jones put it, ‘Happiness isn’t a thing. You can’t go out and get it like a cup of tea. It’s the way you feel about things.’ But as Robert Frost observed, happiness makes up for in height what it lacks in length. A. E. Housman (1859-1936) was a poet of unhappiness (perhaps the English laureate of unhappiness), but in this short poem, he turns his attention to delight, remarking on how short-lived and rare it is:
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via 3 Quarks Daily: Kenan Malik in Pandaemonium
The painting is ‘Newspaper readers’ by Lyonel Feinenger.
Before Facebook, there was the coffee house. In the 17th-century, panic gripped British royal circles that these newly established drinking salons had become forums for political dissent. In 1672, Charles II issued a proclamation ‘to restrain the Spreading of False News’ that was helping ‘to nourish an universal Jealousie and Dissatisfaction in the minds of all His Majesties good subjects’.
Now, 350 years on, legislators across the world are seeking to do the same. Last week, the House of Commons digital culture, media and sport committee flew to Washington DC to grill representatives of big tech companies, including Facebook, Twitter and Google. The title of their session echoed Charles II: ‘How can social media platforms help stop the spread of fake news?’
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via Big Think by Derek Beres
With his 51st Oscar nomination for Star Wars: The Last Jedi, composer John Williams has mastered the craft of the film score.
John Williams could have probably called it quits after scoring the first Star Wars movie, given the film’s cultural importance: the soundtrack was preserved by the Library of Congress for its historical significance. Yet the industrious grandson of department store owners and cabinetmakers attributes his prolific career to his family’s hands-on work ethic. The just-turned 86-year-old is looking at yet another potential Oscar this year for his musical contribution to Star Wars: The Last Jedi—his 51st Academy Award nomination.
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via the OUP blog by Amelia Carruthers and Steven Fillippi
A gas plume arising from Augustine Volcano, 24 January 2006. Cyrus Read, Geophysicist USGS, Alaska Volcano Observatory, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Volcanoes are incredibly complex geological systems. They are capable of generating many dangerous effects in the form of lava flows, fallout, and lahars – as well as associated hazards such as seismic shocks, tsunamis, or landslides. About 500 million people currently live in regions of the world directly subject to volcanic risk, and it is estimated that about 250,000 persons died during the past two centuries as a direct consequence of volcanic eruptions. Almost 26,000 of these fatalities occurred in the past two decades, above all in developing countries. There is no way to stop a volcano erupting, but in order to keep people safe and manage volcanic risk, scientists need to assess the hazard levels of volcanoes (i.e. previous activity) using techniques such as geological mapping, sedimentological studies, petrologic studies, and structural studies. Part of this process is understanding exactly what happens when a volcano erupts, looking at both the direct and indirect hazards.
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via Arts & Letters Daily: Michael Blanding in The New York Times
For years scholars have debated what inspired William Shakespeare’s writings. Now, with the help of software typically used by professors to nab cheating students, two writers have discovered an unpublished manuscript they believe the Bard of Avon consulted to write “King Lear,” “Macbeth,” “Richard III,” “Henry V” and seven other plays.
The news has caused Shakespeareans to sit up and take notice.
“If it proves to be what they say it is, it is a once-in-a-generation — or several generations — find,” said Michael Witmore, director of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington.
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via 3 Quarks Daily: Christian G. Appy in The Boston Review
Exactly a year before he was murdered, Martin Luther King, Jr., gave one of the greatest speeches of his life, a piercing critique of the war in Vietnam. Two thousand people jammed into New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, to hear King shred the historical, political, and moral claims that U.S. leaders had invoked since the end of World War II to justify their counterrevolutionary foreign policy. The United States had not supported Vietnamese independence and democracy, King argued, but had repeatedly opposed it; the United States had not defended the people of South Vietnam from external communist aggression, but was itself the foreign aggressor—burning and bombing villages, forcing peasants off their ancestral land, and killing, by then, as many as one million Vietnamese. “We are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure,” King said, “while we create a hell for the poor.”
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via Interesting Literature
The greatest goodbye poems
Poets are often at their most poignant when saying goodbye – to lovers, to lost loved ones, or to a part of their lives they have left behind. Here are ten of the greatest poems about saying goodbye or farewell…
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via Boing Boing by Rob Beschizza
Cottereau: This video shows the borders and populations of each country in Europe, for every year since 400 BC. Vassal states and colonies are not included in the count of a country's population." What a mess! One thing I learned is how sparsely-populated Britain was in the Roman age.
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via the Guardian by Richard Aspinall
A decorator crab. The ‘fuzz’ on its legs is in fact an array of invertebrates, including hydrozoans. Photograph: R Aspinall
Every night as the sun goes down, on the coral reefs of the Red Sea small, delicate and slightly fuzzy-looking crabs work their way through the maze of coral. They take up stations atop the corals’ outermost structures, exposing themselves to the current in the plankton-rich waters. These are decorator crabs, of the genus Achaeus, known for their peculiar habit of covering themselves with an array of invertebrates, including delicate hydrozoans: multi-headed creatures with tiny tentacled polyps that feed on plankton.
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