via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
Watch the Nicholas Brothers dance the “Jumpin' Jive” in the 1943 musical, Stormy Weather. Fred Astaire said it was “the greatest dancing he had ever seen on film”.
Continue reading and if you liked this then do scroll down to the comments. Some really great stuff IMO.
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via Interesting Literature
A delightful little paean to the poet’s mother
‘Tribute to Mother’ is a short poem in which the American Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-92) recalls the time when he was a small child and sat beside his mother’s knee.
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via the About History blog by Alciblades
1) WRESTLING:
Perhaps the oldest sport to have been recorded in any shape or form in history would be wrestling. The earliest form of combat became one of the most well-known sports, depicted in cave paintings in Lascaux, France, hieroglyphed in Egypt, written in the Illiad etc. Requiring a decent amount of strength, dexterity and a lot of maneuverability alongside tactics to pin your opponent down and keep him or her locked for a short countdown for the match to be over, it offered contestants to test their chances of winning dating back all the way to 15,300 BC.
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via the New Statesman by Angela Saini
SCIENCE AND SOCIETY PICTURE LIBRARY
You might assume that there’s not much left to be written about the suffragette movement. But what has been ignored is that in the quiet corridors of university science departments, important battles were fought by women whose names were quickly forgotten. They weren’t always high-profile campaigners, but by forcing open the gates to the male-dominated worlds of science and engineering they helped shed stereotypes about women’s abilities.
In A Lab of One’s Own, the Cambridge historian Patricia Fara documents these scientists’ stories, painting a picture of a world that clearly wanted to remain male. It was the First World War that gave women unprecedented access to careers for which they had until then been deemed unsuitable. From all walks of life, they began working in munitions factories, developing chemical weapons (at one point, 90 per cent of industrial chemists were women) and building war machinery, while male scientists were on the battlefield.
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The year 1932 saw Picasso at the height of his fame and painting his most explicitly sexual work, fuelled by his torrid affair with his young model, Marie-Thérèse Walter
via Arts & Letters Daily: Lara Marlowe, Paris Correspondent, in The Irish Times
Reclining Nude, Musée national Picasso, Paris
By 1932, Pablo Picasso was already the most famous artist in the world. He was 50 years old, lived in a luxurious apartment in central Paris, owned a château in Normandy, and commuted between the two in a chauffeur-driven Hispano-Suiza.
Picasso had a wife, a son and a mistress. The wife, Russian ballet dancer Olga Khokhlova, aged 41, had given up dancing after an ankle injury to devote herself to home-making. Their son Paulo was 11 years old and already taller than his 5ft 3in father. From the outside, the Picassos looked like a happy, bourgeois family. Pablo attended his son’s first communion in Paris and worked less during school holidays, to be with Paulo. In September, the three travelled together to Switzerland when the first Picasso retrospective, organised in Paris in June, moved to Zurich.
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via Interesting Literature
The greatest dark poems
Poetry isn’t all sweetness and light, of course. In fact, much of it is concerned with the darker aspects of the natural world, whether it’s the mystery or solemnity of night-time darkness or some other, more abstract or metaphorical kind of darkness (‘O dark dark dark’, as T. S. Eliot put it in Four Quartets). Here, we offer ten of the best poems about darkness of various kinds.
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via the Big Think blog by Orion Jones
Caffeine is the world's most popular psychostimulant. In the United States, more than 90 percent of adults regularly consume caffeine and the average 'user' takes in about 300 milligrams per day, the equivalent of 3 cups of coffee.
Beverages infused with caffeine are by far the most common way the chemical is administered. As a mild stimulant, caffeine is prized for its effects on cognition, attention and alertness. Drinking coffee, tea or soda is an essential and acceptable part of the day for many adults while other psychostimulants—like amphetamines and cocaine—remain highly controlled.
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via 3 Quarks Daily: Alan Taylor at Literary Review
Like the much-mythologised Wild West, the Debatable Land was terra nullius, where the writ of law was by and large ignored and bad men roamed at will. Situated where the northwest of England meets the southwest of Scotland, it was long an inhospitable, inhuman corner of the country: hilly, boggy, inaccessible and, five centuries and more ago, a tapestry of trees. The weather was similarly forbidding. When it rains in these parts, which it does more often than not, it is with torrential relentlessness.
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via Arts & Letters Daily: Melissa Holbrook Pierson in The Washington Post
A farmer in Iowa still used draft horses to work his property last year, but such scenes are increasingly rare in the United States. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)
One animal was so decisive in shaping human history that the eminent historian Reinhart Koselleck proposed it as the sole organizing principle in a schema outlining the world’s three great epochs. These three ages, he believed, should be called pre-horse, horse and post-horse. The middle era lasted some 6,000 years. Transition to the post-horse period dates to the mid-20th century. In “Farewell to the Horse,” Ulrich Raulff has composed nothing less than a requiem Mass for this long-suffering, noble creature — a complex and lyrical argument that places the horse in a central role in the creation of the modern world. In his excavations of the 150-year period that makes up this long farewell, the author discovered something marvelous: “Horses had more meanings than bones.”
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via Boing Boing by Andrea James
Multiplying large numbers before calculators led to a number of ingenious inventions to make things easier, like these Genaille-Lucas rulers demonstrated by the fine folks at DONG.
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Reminds me of my father trying to teach me how to use a slide rule. I never did get the hang of it.
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