There are probably more species of them than any other animal group
via 3 Quarks Daily: Ed Yong in the Atlantic
LOVE NATURE / GETTY IMAGES
When talking about whether theology has anything to learn from science, the British biologist J. B. S. Haldane used to quip that God must have “an inordinate fondness for beetles.”
He had a point. Around 380,000 species of beetle have been described, which accounts for a quarter of all known animal species. There are more species of ladybugs than mammals, of longhorn beetles than birds, of weevils than fish. Textbooks and scientific papers regularly state that beetles are the most speciose group of animals; that is, there are more of them than there are of anything else.
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via About History by Alcibiades
The pre-Christian religion of the Slavs is based on three primary sources. The first are written sources, which include classical writings, Arab travel accounts, Christian teachings discouraging the pagan religion, and medieval chronicles. The second source is the archeological finds, but debates continue over the identification of Slavic and none-Slavic cultures, the extent of migration and diffusion as opposed to autochthonous development . The third source is from folklore and ethnography, folk traditions, epic poems fairytales, ritual songs and dances. Many of these traditions are thought to have continued in modified and fragmentary forms as late as the beginning of the 20th century.
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via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow
Social scientists often promote the value of public provision of infrastructure as a sound, long-term investment in development and prosperity, pushing back against the neoliberal tendency to abandon public goods in favor of private development.
Researchers at the Centre for Economic Policy Research examined the amount of light emitted in territories adjacent to network of roads built millennia ago to service the Roman Empire, using light as a proxy for development and prosperity, comparing the light levels to light emitted by other parts of Europe, both those that were never part of the Roman Empire, and parts that the Empire conquered but did not extend their road network to.
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via Interesting Literature
On Arnold’s little-known meditation on growing older
‘Growing old’s like being increasingly penalised for a crime you haven’t committed.’ So said the great novelist Anthony Powell, summing up the sense of injustice that accompanies the onset of old age. There’s even a word for a fear of growing old: gerascophobia. In one of his less famous poems, the Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold (1822-88) wondered what it means to grow old.
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via 3 Quarks Daily: Edward White at The Paris Review
Killing was in the Sanson blood. The first of the family to act as the royal executioner was Charles-Henri’s great-grandfather, who was coerced into taking the position once his father-in-law had passed away. Over the next century, three other Sanson men inherited the role, before Charles-Henri succeeded in 1778. He was thirty-nine at the time, but already a capital punishment veteran. When his father had succumbed to a debilitating illness in 1754, Charles-Henri had taken over his duties on the scaffold, at the age of just fifteen. The boy exhibited astonishing qualities: a wisdom way beyond his years, and a stomach strong enough to see him through the strangulations, beheadings, and burnings that were his workaday life. While still a teenager, he conducted the last hanging, drawing and quartering in French history, inflicted upon Robert-François Damiens for an attempt on the King’s life. Sanson would later look back on this as a simpler time, when the worst sin imaginable was killing a king.
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via The National Archives Blog by Dr Juliette Desplat
Laing’s sketch of the ruins at Ghadames, 1825 (catalogue reference CO 2/15)
One hundred and ninety years ago, in April 1828, French explorer René Caillé became the first European to reach Timbuktu, in present-day Mali, and return alive. He was awarded 10,000 francs by the Société de Géographie, the French geographical society, and the book he published was funded by the French government. Caillé, however, had been preceded in Timbuktu by an Englishman, Major Alexander Gordon Laing.
In January 1825, Laing was instructed by Lord Bathurst, the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, to ‘proceed from Tripoli to Timbuctoo’ to gather information on the Niger basin and determine the exact location of this city (CO 392/3).
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via the Big Think blog by Robby Berman
Brewing beer is as much science as art, and here are four reasons why.
April 7th is National Beer Day, an ideal time to have a cold one. It commemorates the signing of 1933 Cullen-Harrison act, which made it legal — for the first time since Prohibition began in 1920 — for states to pass laws allowing people to buy, sell, and drink beer.
People have loved drinking beer a long time, possibly as far back as 10,000 BCE in the Godin Tepe settlement of what’s now Iran. There was certainly beer, called kui, being brewed in China by 7,000 BCE.
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via Arts & Letters Daily: David Rundle in the Times Literary Supplement
Benedictional of St Aethelwold, ninth century © The British Library Board
Is it time to compose an elegy for handwriting? Anne Trubek thinks so – indeed, hopes so. She deems the ability to form a cursive script “merely emblematic”, and dreams of a future in which the school curriculum will include it only for art classes. It will remain solely the domain of calligraphers such as Patricia Lovett, who is herself probably Britain’s best-known practitioner, teacher and advocate. Lovett’s latest book is a gorgeously presented survey of the work of masterly scribes from the third century AD to the twenty-first, culminating, appropriately (and with no false modesty), with her own work. Though Lovett would undoubtedly baulk at such a description, her volume constitutes, in Trubek’s logic, an alluring swansong of an “antiquated” skill.
If script is dying, it cannot complain that its day has been short. Its solitary reign may have been ended by the printing press, but it lived on as a citizen in the new republic of letters: official records, account books, botanical drawings, not to mention works for private circulation and personal epistles, continued to be produced by hand for centuries. Then came the typewriter, but even its keys could not strike the death knell of handwriting. Perhaps that machine’s close descendants, the keyboards of our computers and their avatars on our screens, are administering the coup de grâce. Perhaps.
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via About History by Alcibiades
The Serbo-Greek Empire is the name of a medieval Serb state that significantly expanded its territory and took most of Byzantine Balkan possessions in 1250-1355. It reached its end in 1355-1356.
Stephen Dushan, who took Adrianople, died suddenly. An important feature of the creation of the Serbian-Greek Empire was that the Serbian units created it virtually bloodlessly, that is, without a single historically important battle: the former Byzantine cities either voluntarily surrendered to the Serbian army that besieged them, or defected to the side of the Serbs during the chaotic Byzantine civil war, or were occupied by the Serbs after their population was devastated by a plague.
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via Interesting Literature
Are these the greatest funny poems?
What are the funniest comic poems in the English language? What makes for a successfully humorous poem? The following post offers a selection of ten of the best and funniest comic poems in English literature, from the Middle Ages to the present day (or almost). As we’ve confined ourselves to ten poems, we’ve tended to focus on English (or British) poetry, and so have left out a few notable writers of light verse, such as Ogden Nash. Perhaps a follow-up post will have to atone for this, but in the meantime, we hope you enjoy these celebrated comic poems.
Continue reading and discover that Edward Lear is missing from the "best 10".
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