via About History by Alcibiades
1. The emperor/empress, as well as with senators, wore clothing dyed in purple, made from murex seashells. It was a status symbol for the highest royalty and was treasonous for anyone else to wear it.
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via The National Archives blog by Chris Heather
Horatio Holland was only ten years old when he received 12 strokes of the birch on his bare back in 1867. This was not some bullying incident at an inner city school: it was justice as seen by Borough Justices Joseph Bateson and Edwin Erwin, intended to prevent Horatio from breaking the law again following his theft of a copper tap worth seven shillings from the Urinal Yard at Leeds Station.
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via the Big Think blog by Philip Perry
The results have implications for psychology, neurology, robotics and A.I.
How honey bees as a group decide on things, such as where to build their nest, mimics the operation of the human brain, with each bee in the “superorganism” acting like a neuron in the gray or white matter, researchers at the University of Sheffield, in the UK, have announced. Their findings were published in the journal Scientific Reports. This has implications not only for neurology and entomology, but robotics and A.I. as well.
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via the OUP blog by Claire White-Kravette
Many modern Western corpses look more like sleeping beauty than a dead person. Woman, female, portrait and face HD by Alex Blăjan. CC0 public domain via Unsplash
Modern western mortuary practices are characterized by the professionalization of the management and presentation of the corpse. These practices serve as a stark contrast to those in traditional societies across the world and those throughout history. Changes to how we treat and dispose of the dead are such that industrialized societies have become outliers on the spectrum of the world’s cultures. Modernity has afforded us with a more efficient system for handling the dead, yet research suggests that these alterations may be negatively impacting long-term grief outcomes.
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via Interesting Literature
On Dickinson’s wonderful summer poem
‘A drop fell on the apple tree’ is sometimes known by the title ‘Summer Shower’, although Dickinson (1830-86), famously, didn’t give titles to most of her poems. (It was Dickinson’s original editors, Mabel Loomis Todd and T. W. Higginson, who gave the poem the title by which it has become most familiar.)
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via Arts & Letters Daily: Iwan Rhys Morus in AEON
Fantasies about new power sources for human ambitions go back a century or more. Could these past visions energise our own future?
Installation of the first successful solar panel and solar battery (a solar array), for the Georgia telephone carrier Americus, 4 October 1955. Photo by Getty Images
In his short story ‘Let There Be Light’, the science-fiction author Robert A Heinlein introduced the energy source that would power his Future History series of stories and novels. First published in Super Science Stories magazine in May 1940, it described the Douglas-Martin sunpower screens that would provide (almost) free and inexhaustible energy to fuel the future in subsequent instalments of his alternative timeline. It was simple, robust and reliable technology. ‘We can bank ’em in series to get any required voltage; we can bank in parallel to get any required current, and the power is absolutely free, except for the installation costs,’ marvelled one of the inventors as they worked out the new technology’s potential for rupturing the social order of the future.
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via the Guardian by Hannah Devlin Science correspondent
Scientists surprised to find NGC 1052-DF2 devoid of mysterious substance, but say its absence strengthens case for its existence
An image of galaxy NGC 1052-DF2 taken by the Hubble space telescope. The lack of dark matter in the galaxy has stumped scientists. Photograph: Pieter van Dokkum/AP
A distant galaxy that appears completely devoid of dark matter has baffled astronomers and deepened the mystery of the universe’s most elusive substance.
The absence of dark matter from a small patch of sky might appear to be a non-problem, given that astronomers have never directly observed dark matter anywhere. However, most current theories of the universe suggest that everywhere that ordinary matter is found, dark matter ought to be lurking too, making the newly observed galaxy an odd exception.
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via Boing Boing by Clive Thompson
CC-licensed photo via Martijn Munneke
The Aral Sea is one of the worst human-authored environmental disasters in history. It used to be the world's fourth-largest freshwater lake, until the Soviet Union in the 1960s diverted its two main river-sources for cotton production. In three decades the sea shrank to barely 10% of its former size, splitting into two much-smaller bodies, the North and South Aral seas.
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via About History by Christian
The early Celts lived in an enormous region, stretching from modern day Turkey through eastern and central Europe and westward and northward into much of Spain, Portugal, France, Belgium, Britain and Ireland. This wide spread made a difference in the religion of the Celts in various regions. The Celts worshiped a variety of deities, male and female. Some of these deities were associated with cosmos (sun, moon, stars), some with the local manifestations of the natural world (hills, rivers, wells, lakes, trees and mountains), others with cultural aspects such as wisdom and skill, healing and protection, magic, poetry, fertility and abundance.
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via Interesting Literature
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys some good bad poetry courtesy of The Joy of Bad Verse
I’ve long been a fan of Nicholas Parsons. No, not that one – although who could fail to appreciate the sharp wit of the Just a Minute host? – but Nicholas T. Parsons, the author of one of the best books of literary trivia out there (The Book of Literary Lists), an enjoyable history of the guidebook (Worth the Detour: A History of the Guidebook), and what I’d consider his Magnificent Octopus, The Joy of Bad Verse. This book was published in 1988, so you can consider this ‘review’ a sort of 30-year retrospective. It’s well worth tracking down.
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