via Boing Boing by Rob Beschizza
It turns out that ink is made largely by mixing pigments with liquids! Various emulsifiers and such also factor in. How about that! The bright sheets of colorful slime are very satisfying and relaxing, and the Printing Ink Company's trade videos seem, somehow, to understand the appeal of this. I want to eat the ink.
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via Interesting Literature
‘Youth and Age’, as the title suggests, explores the passing of time and the onset of old age. What does it mean to grow old? In this great Romantic poem about ageing, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) grapples with this very question.
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The philosophy and science of standing up straight.
via Arts & Letters Daily: Sander L. Gilman in Nautilus
The very notion of what in the ancient world defines the human being in contrast to all other living things is simple: upright posture. Best known of the ancient commentators is Plato, who, according to legend, is claimed to have seen the human as bipedal and featherless. To describe humans as “featherless” sounds odder to modern ears than does the functional association of bipedalism and intelligence, but Plato sees the absence of bodily covering as a move away from the base toward the human, for he is quite aware that the other bipedal animal is the bird. Greek thought gives the bird a middle role between the human and the gods, since birds are connected to the gods through their use in divination. Responding to Plato’s contorted definition of man, Diogenes of Sinope, known as the Cynic, notoriously plucked a (bipedal) chicken and took it to Plato’s Academy, declaring, “Here is Plato’s man”.
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via the Guardian by Hannah Devlin, Science correspondent
Gaia’s all-sky view of our Milky Way galaxy and neighbouring galaxies, based on measurements of nearly 1.7 billion stars. Photograph: ESA/Gaia/DPAC
A crisis of cosmic proportions is brewing: the universe is expanding 9% faster than it ought to be and scientists are not sure why.
The latest, most precise, estimate of the universe’s current rate of expansion - a value known as the Hubble constant - comes from , which is conducting the most detailed ever three-dimensional survey of the Milky Way.
The data has allowed the rate of expansion to be pinned down to a supposed accuracy of a couple of percent. However, this newest estimate stands in stark contradiction with an independent measure of the Hubble constant based on observations of ancient light that was released shortly after the Big Bang. In short, the universe is getting bigger quicker than it should be.
The mismatch is significant and problematic because the Hubble constant is widely regarded as the most fundamental number in cosmology.
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via Interesting Literature
On one of Woolf’s most iconic short stories
Virginia Woolf’s distinctive talents did not arrive fully formed in her first published work. One of her very first published pieces of writing was actually produced when she was still very young: it was an obituary for the family dog, Shag. When Woolf published her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1915, there were a few signs that she would become a great modernist writer, but not many. The Mrs Dalloway who appears in this first, altogether more conventional novel is markedly different from her reincarnation, in the novel Mrs Dalloway, ten years later. In the ten years that intervened, Woolf had forged a new path for herself, and published two further novels. But it was in short fiction that she first perfected the modernist style that would make her one of the great writers of the twentieth century.
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via About History by Alcibiades
The Battle of Pydna occurred during the Third Macedonian War. It was fought on 22 June, 168 BC. This battle was decisive, and led to the complete subjugation of Macedonia to Rome. The exact date of the battle has been determined by the lunar eclipse that occurred the day before the battle.
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via the OUP blog Michal Kucewicz
Image by Laura Miller, Mayo Clinic laboratory. Used with permission
It is almost philosophical to think that our mental representations, imagery, reasoning, and reflections are generated by electrical activity of interconnected brain cells. And even more so is to think that these abstract phenomena of the mind could be enhanced by passing electricity through specific cellular networks in the brain.Continue reading
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via Boing Boing by Jason Weisberger
PBS asked experts a question intended to inflame the masses: Which is smarter, a dog or a cat?
A neuroscientist gave the best answer, with some 'measured neuron density shows dogs in the lead' answer.
Breed-specific cognitive and behavioral specialists hemmed and hawed about how every species is special.
No one doubts the raccoons will kill us all.
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via the Big Think blog by Jennifer Chu (MIT News Office)
Black holes in these environments could combine repeatedly to form objects bigger than anything a single star could produce.
When LIGO’s twin detectors first picked up faint wobbles in their respective, identical mirrors, the signal didn’t just provide first direct detection of gravitational waves — it also confirmed the existence of stellar binary black holes, which gave rise to the signal in the first place.
Stellar binary black holes are formed when two black holes, created out of the remnants of massive stars, begin to orbit each other. Eventually, the black holes merge in a spectacular collision that, according to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, should release a huge amount of energy in the form of gravitational waves.
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via Interesting Literature
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reads the work of a forgotten war poet
The poetry of Wilfred Owen is the most widely-studied writing about the First World War, written by a man who experienced the fighting first-hand. Poets like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound – who, unlike Owen, were part of modernism as well as being modern – didn’t experience the horrors of the trenches themselves, although they both wrote about the war afterwards. Eliot’s The Waste Land is full of war imagery, while Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley contains one of the most brilliantly angry and impassioned diatribes about the war’s sheer waste of life to be found anywhere in modern literature.
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