via 3 Quarks Daily: Charlotte Salley in The American Scholar
Larissa Leite/Flickr
Patricia Hampl’s new book, The Art of the Wasted Day, is so delightfully nebulous—dangling somewhere between travelogue, literary criticism, memoir, and love letter, with a couple of philosophical deadlifts thrown in—that it’s worth summarizing her argument right from the get-go: reveries and daydreams are not throwaway instances that we should shrug off or snap out of. Times when we are lost in thought, far away from quotidian woes, are moments to seek out and cultivate. The central concern of her book is to show us how to do just that—how to live a life of the mind in a humdrum world.
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via the Big Think blog by Brandon A. Weber
A little peek into our past reveals tantalizing details.
In 2008, an asteroid exploded 37km above ground across the Nubian desert of northern Sudan. The fragments contained both rock and rough diamonds.
What scientists have figured out since, after gathering about 50 pieces of what was left, is that it came from the first 10 million years of our solar system — from a planet around the size of Mars or Mercury that ultimately was destroyed.
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via Boing Boing by Andrea James
YouTuber JerryRigEverything had a chance to fire some bullets at a bullet-proof car. The physics are interesting to watch as the energy disperses into the materials in slow motion.
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via Interesting Literature
A commentary on one of Eliot’s classic quatrain poems
‘Sweeney among the Nightingales’ is one of a number of quatrain poems which T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) included in his second collection, Poems (1920). Eliot wrote several poems featuring ‘Sweeney’ – a fictional modern-day knuckle-dragger, a brutish but also smart and dapper man, the twentieth century’s answer to a Neanderthal (if that’s not being too hard on Neanderthals). In the other Sweeney poems, we’ve already seen him frequenting a brothel house and taking a bath. Now, he’s in another house of ill-repute, but it’s Sweeney ‘among the nightingales’. What nightingales? This poem takes even more unravelling and analysis than the other quatrain poems, so this is what we’re going to do now.
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an article by Kat Jungnickel published in the Guardian
Patents by female inventors from the 1890s reveal the creative ways women made their body mobile through clothing
An advertisement for Stower’s Lime Juice Cordial from around 1898 showing a fashionable Victorian woman relaxing while having a refreshing drink. Photograph: Alamy
Much has been written about the bicycle’s role as a vehicle of women’s liberation. But far less is known about another critical technology women used to forge new mobile and public lives – cyclewear. I have been studying what Victorian women wore when they started cycling. Researching how early cyclists made their bodies mobile through clothing reveals much about the social and physical barriers they were navigating and brings to light fascinating tales of ingenious inventions.
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via About History by Alcibiades
The Battle of the Hydaspes was between Alexander the Great and the army of King Porus on the river Hydaspes in Punjab in July 326 BC. Macedonian troops defeated the army of King Porus. He was captured, and then became an ally and vassal of Alexander the Great. The battle was the last major battle in Alexander’s life.
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via 3 Quarks Daily: Barbara Kingsolver in the New York Times
Olaf Hajek
Trees do most of the things you do, just more slowly. They compete for their livelihoods and take care of their families, sometimes making huge sacrifices for their children. They breathe, eat and have sex. They give gifts, communicate, learn, remember and record the important events of their lives. With relatives and non-kin alike they cooperate, forming neighborhood watch committees — to name one example — with rapid response networks to alert others to a threatening intruder. They manage their resources in bank accounts, using past market trends to predict future needs. They mine and farm the land, and sometimes move their families across great distances for better opportunities. Some of this might take centuries, but for a creature with a life span of hundreds or thousands of years, time must surely have a different feel about it.
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via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
The world is dependent on a steady supply of rare-earth elements such as yttrium, europium, terbium, dysprosium. They go into computers, phones, electric cars, solar panels, batteries, and electronic equipment. China is the world's biggest supplier of rare-earth elements, and uses its monopoly position as an effective bargaining chip. But Japan just announced that it has discovered a massive lode of rare earth materials that could satisfy the world's requirements on a "semi-infinite basis" (love that term).
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via the Big Think blog by Lucia Perez Diaz
A large crack, stretching several kilometres, made a sudden appearance recently in south-western Kenya. The tear, which continues to grow, caused part of the Nairobi-Narok highway to collapse and was accompanied by seismic activity in the area.
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via Interesting Literature
The greatest poems about keeping things hidden
Great poetry should not be a secret, although there is something nice about serendipitously stumbling upon a hidden gem of a poem. The following great poems shouldn’t be secrets, but they are about a secret, or something being kept secret.
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