via Boing Boing by Rob Beschizza
The YouTube channel of Magnetic Games ("all the ways to have fun with magnets") posted high-powered neodymium magnets with names like "The Death Magnet" and "Big Magnet" colliding with one another in high-FPS slo-mo footage. [via]
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via About History by Alcibiades
After the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC, his generals had to decide the fate of the Macedonian Kingdom. After extensive discussions, they decided to partition the huge empire. In the division of the empire, Egypt was given to Ptolemy, who later became known as Soter (Savior).
Continue reading and you will find a simplified family tree [did not look that simple to me] in which you can find Mark Anthony and Cleopatra.
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via Interesting Literature
‘Lapis Lazuli’ belongs to W. B. Yeats’s late phase, in the 1930s. Like a number of Yeats’s other late poems, it is concerned with the place and treatment of art in the modern world, a situation which Yeats considers by taking in all of history. The poem’s ‘argument’ takes a bit of unpicking; before we get to our analysis, here’s a reminder of this mysterious poem.
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via the New Statesman by Nina Caplan
Soil, climate, people, all make a difference, along with that intangible something we can neither name nor forego.
THE PRINT COLLECTOR/GETTY IMAGES
Faith takes many forms; it can have the grandeur of an idol or the shy flicker of a candle flame, and no good wine is poured without a little illogical belief also making it into the glass. When Europeans first came to Australia, they felt certain that a sea channel cut this enormous slab of land in half. An unknown landmass couldn’t be this big and remain so long unfound, they thought – at least, unfound by them. Their imaginary shoreline ran through what is, in fact, desert, and it has a faint, parched echo in the Todd, a central Australian river that’s dry most of the year. The Henley-on-Todd Regatta involves people holding bottomless boats and running, Fred Flintstone-style, along the river bed. A joke or an act of obeisance to the water gods, depending on your point of view.
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via the OUP blog by Stefano Vitale
“Lost in the Milk” by Luke Dahlgren. Public Domain via Unsplash
Rarely has a research field in physics gotten such sustained worldwide press coverage as gravity has received recently. A breathtaking sequence of events has kept gravity in the spotlight for months: the first detection(s) of gravitational waves from black-holes; the amazing success of LISA Pathfinder, ESA’s precursor mission to the LISA gravitational wave detector in space; the observation — first by gravitational waves with LIGO and Virgo, and then by all possible telescopes on Earth and in space — of the merger of two neutron stars, an astrophysical event that likely constitutes the cosmic factory of many of the chemical elements we find around us.
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via Arts & Letters Daily: Anne Ewbank in Atlas Obscura
Pythagoras, pictured here next to a fava bean plant, might have had good reason to fear them. PUBLIC DOMAIN
The Greek mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras, who you might remember from geometry class, had his very own cult. Followers lived communally, studied the cosmos, and ate vegetarian. But unlike today’s vegetarians, they also avoided beans. This wasn’t just a quirk. Like the Ancient Egyptians and Romans, they considered broad beans (also known as fava beans) a supernatural symbol of death. And due to a deadly allergy, the beans likely deserved their reputation.
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via the Big Think blog by Stephen Johnson
Life could be a common phenomenon in many universes beyond our own, suggest a pair of new papers that examine the effects dark energy has on star formation.
The findings center on multiverse theory, which is an idea first proposed in the 1980s that proposes our universe is one of many. Scientists have proposed various theories for the nature of the multiverse, but all hold that each universe abides by a different set of physical laws.
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via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz
According to researcher Kaeli Swift of the University of Washington's Avian Conservation Laboratory, crows hold "funerals." When they see a corpse of their own kind they gather together and squawk loudly. To determine what they may be doing, Swift displayed a taxidermied dead crow to other crows. On some days though, she wore a creepy mask and wig. After multiple experiments with and without her disguise or the dead bird, the crows appeared to remember "the experience with the mask and dead crow and now connected the area with danger."
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via About History by Alcibiades
The Norman invasion of Ireland that lasted from 1169 to 1172 was an expedition of Anglo-Norman feudal lords leading their troops, and later the English King Henry II with his army. They laid the foundation for the English colonization of Ireland.
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via Interesting Literature
On one of Emily Dickinson’s most curious poems
We often talk of being ‘drunk on love’ or ‘drunk on excitement’ or other such things. Here, in ‘I taste a liquor never brewed’, Emily Dickinson takes such an everyday expression and makes it concrete, using the metaphor of drunkenness to describe her heady intoxication with nature.
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