via About History by Alcibiades
Justinian the Great 482 -565 was a Byzantine Emperor from 527 until his death in 565. He was the last Emperor that united the eastern and western parts of Rome.
ORIGIN
Most likely, he was an Illyrian, born to a family of peasants in Macedonia, but thanks to his uncle, he received his education in Constantinople. The childless Justin I quickly approached the promising nephew, who, with the help of an influential relative, made a great career as commander of the capital’s military garrison. Subsequently, Justin I adopted Justinian and made him his successor.
Like Napoleon, Justinian slept very little. He was extremely vigorous and attentive to details. In addition, Justinian I was the true personification of “Byzantine politics.” Hypocritical, outspoken and clever, he neglected contracts and promises to achieve his own goals. He was strongly influenced by his wife Theodore, a former dancer and courtesan. After her death, he became less enthusiastic as a ruler.
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via the OUP blog by Roy Livermore
Space by Melmak. CC0 via Pixabay
One of the questions currently keeping astrobiologists (the people who would like to study life on other planets if only they could find some) awake at night is, what is the crucial difference that allowed the emergence and evolution of life on Earth, while its neighbours remained sterile?
In their violent youth, all the inner planets started out with so much surplus heat energy—from planetary accretion and radioactive decay—that their surfaces melted to form magma oceans hundreds or thousands of kilometres deep. Such oceans lose internal heat to space rapidly—so rapidly that within a few tens of millions of years, the surface of a young planet cools and solidifies to create a hot stagnant lid above a vigorously convecting mantle.
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Reminds me that “astrobiologist” is an occupation whilst the anthropology of “extra-terrestrial beings” is a subject of learning and that I used both of these terms when doing basic classification training.
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via Boing Boing by Andrea James
Artist Peter Combe turns hardware store paint swatches into gorgeous pixellated portraits.
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via the Big Think blog by Robby Berman
A new study reveals that babies as young as one year old can think logically.
When you think logically to figure something out, do you think in words? Most of us do. For many, there’s a constant conversation going on in our minds: commentary, queries, and personal deliberations that rarely cease. But here’s an interesting question: When we were infants, before we knew words, were we capable of such logical thought? A new study published in the journal Science by a team of psychologists suggests that babies think logically in spite of their lack of language, at least if they’re 12 months or older.
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via Interesting Literature
A powerful Easter poem by one of the most famous atheist poets
The poet A. E. Housman (1859-1936) published just two volumes of poems in his lifetime: A Shropshire Lad (1896) and Last Poems (1922). Yet he remains one of the most widely-read poets of his era, on the strength of these two books and a selection of posthumously published poems. ‘Easter Hymn’ opens More Poems, which was published shortly after Housman’s death in 1936.
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via the OUP blog by Corey Tazzara
Castello del Boccale, Livorno by Etienne (Li). CC-BY-SA-3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
The Medici had everything, almost. They got immensely rich as bankers during the fifteenth century. As patrons of the arts they assembled some of the finest collections in Italy. They placed two scions on the papal throne as Leo X and Clement VII. They won political control over the city of Florence—first as informal rulers and, after 1530, as hereditary dukes. The Medici lacked only one thing to render their earthly felicity complete: they lacked a port city.
The Medici dynasty had big ambitions for their little state, and they turned to the malaria-ridden village of Livorno to realize them. The alchemically-inclined Francesco I (r. 1574-87) began the process of planning a new port in Livorno. His brother Ferdinando I (r. 1587-1609) put aside his cardinal’s cap to take up the grand duchy when Francesco died, perhaps by poison. It was Ferdinando who turned Livorno into “one of the most famous places for trade in all Christendom,” as one English merchant put it.
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via About History by Christian
In 1868, a hunter discovered one of the best surviving examples of pre historic Iberian life in the cave walls of Altamira near Santander. Bison, wild boar, horses and anthropomorphic figures were painted on the walls, dating to the Magdelanian period, around 15,000-9,000 BC. Other proof of a Paleolithic hunting culture can be seen in Cuevas de Nerja (Andalucia). By 6,000 BC the inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula were farming and practicing animal husbandry. The first megalithic stone monuments were made around 3,500 BC. The best example of this sort of monument can be found at Antequera. By the end of the Bronze Age, excavated tombs indicate that there were periodic invasions with a new breed of settlers.
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via Big Think by Stephen Johnson
DNA testing of the remains of nine women with elongated skulls suggests a strange explanation for how they likely ended up hundreds of miles from their homeland.
Scientists have a strange theory for how the 1,500-year-old remains of women who possessed features completely unlike the local population—including elongated skulls—ended up in present-day Bavaria.
Joachim Burger, an anthropologist and population geneticist at Johannes Gutenberg University, and colleagues posit the women were high-status “treaty brides” from Romania and Bulgaria, sent to marry men of distant tribes to strengthen political ties.
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via Interesting Literature
Notes towards a commentary on Donne’s ‘The Extasie’
John Donne (1572-1631) didn’t write ordinary love poems. Arguably the first of the ‘metaphysical poets’, Donne writes about love in a refreshingly direct and honest way. And yet, as the label ‘metaphysical’ suggests, his poetry is also full of complex and convoluted images and analogies, and decidedly indirect ideas that circle around the thing he is discussing. This paradox of Donne’s poetry is neatly exemplified by ‘The Ecstasy’ (sometimes the poem’s title is given as ‘The Extasie’, preserving its original Early Modern spelling), so a few words of analysis may help to elucidate what is a challenging and complex love poem.
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via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow
Richard J. Ridel's all-wooden, mechanical Turing machine uses the smallest set of data elements capable of computing any calculation: 0, 1 and blank; it was inspired by Ridel's viewing of The Imitation Game.
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