via the Black Stump
A database of paper airplanes with easy to follow folding instructions, video tutorials and printable folding plans. Find the best paper airplanes that fly the furthest and stay aloft the longest.
Visit website
Planes are categorised as easy, medium, hard and expert.
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via the New Statesman by Rowan Williams
A James Gillray cartoon from 1810, satirising support for Catholic rights
AMES GILLRAY/ COURTESY OF THE WARDEN AND SCHOLARS OF NEW COLLEGE, OXFORD / BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
This not-so-distant mirror shows how political anxieties are displaced on to minorities.
Three hundred years ago, the United Kingdom (then including the whole of Ireland) was – like most European countries – a strictly “confessional” state; that is, one in which religious minorities were subject to varying degrees of legal disability. If you did not attend Anglican public worship and sign your name to various required statements and oaths, you could not hold civic office, receive a university education, practice the law and a good many other things besides. But the system pressed most heavily on Roman Catholics. Apart from the fact that Catholic worship was technically prohibited, the law encouraged and rewarded informers who could identify illegally operating priests and denied Catholics the right to inherit property or even to buy land.
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via Arts & Letters Daily: David Naimon in VQR: a national journal of Literature and Discussion
Ursula K. Le Guin left behind a legacy unparalleled in American letters when she passed away this January [2018] at the age of eighty-eight. Named a Living Legend by the Library of Congress for her contributions to America’s cultural heritage—the author of more than sixty books of fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, children’s literature, drama, criticism, and translation—she was one of only a select few writers (the others being Eudora Welty, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth) to have their life’s work enshrined in the Library of America while still actively writing. … But she was best known for her fiction, most notably her novels, and most specifically her books of science fiction and fantasy. And fiction, the genre she admittedly felt most comfortable talking about, was the occasion for the conversation that follows.
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via the Big Think blog by Robby Berman
As far as we knew, we were the only species that identified individuals by name. A new study, however, finds that we’re not: Dolphins, or at least the bottlenose males of Shark Bay, Australia do it, too. We understood that dolphins were smart but this is still pretty wild. The team behind the study, just published in Current Biology, was led by research fellow Stephanie King of the University of Western Australia.
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via Interesting Literature
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reads Paul Dickson’s Authorisms: Words Wrought by Writers
All words have to start somewhere, of course. But many of them are of anonymous authorship. The small amount of success I’ve had in getting the word ‘bibliosmia’ into general circulation has demonstrated that, even if a word has a clear origin and originator, this is soon of less consequence than the usefulness of the word itself. Yet some words do have clear origins and clear creators. Sometimes, a famous word was also coined by a famous person. And it’s of little surprise that writers have been especially proficient at coining new words.
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I personally found this piece fascinating. Not that I don’t enjoy all the items I include in my “Ten for Today” but this stood out particularly.
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via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz
In the early 1970s, Levi's ran these fantastic psychedelic TV commercials with narration by Ken Nordine, the beat creator of the pioneering Word Jazz albums of the 1950s that melded far-out poetry with hip musical accompaniment. Far ******* out.
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via About History by Alcibiades
The crisis of the Roman Empire was the period between the death of Alexander Severus in 235 and the proclamation of Emperor Diocletian in 284. This period is characterized by an economic crisis, reflected in handcrafts, trade, as well as the instability of state power, internal and external military clashes and Rome’s temporary loss of control, particularly Galia and Eastern territories. Causes of the crisis differ in varied schools of thought historical schools, including the opinion that there is no need to single out the period in history. But this period will serve as a transition from Principate to Dominate and will transform the Roman Emperor completely, from religious, economic and social aspects.
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via the OUP blog by Sujatha Fernandes
Black white vintage by rawpixel. Public domain via Unsplash
In his seminal essay “The Storyteller,” published in 1936, the German philosopher Walter Benjamin decried the loss of the craft of oral storytelling marked by the advent of the short story and the novel. Modern society, he lamented, had abbreviated storytelling.
Fast forward to the era of Facebook, where the story has become an easily digestible soundbite on your news feed or timeline. The popular stories on social media are those that are accessible. Complexity is eschewed in an effort to create warm and relatable portraits of others who are just like us. If modern society abbreviated storytelling, the digital era has eviscerated it.
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via the Guardian Nicola Davis
A bumblebee walks across the surface of an artificial flower, working out the pattern of scent that has been made by placing peppermint oil in some of the holes. Photograph: Dave Lawson, University of Bristol
Pollinators don’t just wing it when it comes to finding a sweet treat: the shape, colour, perfume and even electrical charge of flowers are all known to offer clues.
But now researchers say bumblebees also use another floral feature to guide them: how the concentration of a scent varies across the flower’s surface.
“[This study shows that] bees can tell the difference between flowers where the only difference is their spatial arrangement of scent – and that suggests they could use that information to make their foraging more efficient,” said Dr David Lawson, co-author of from the University of Bristol.
What’s more, scientists found that bees appear able to apply what they have learnt from patterns of scent to patterns of colour, suggesting the fuzzy critters might be even smarter than suspected.
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via Interesting Literature
On one of Mansfield’s finest stories
‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’: as titles go, it is one of Katherine Mansfield’s more helpfully instructive. This modernist short story from 1922 focuses on Josephine and Constantia, or ‘Jug’ and ‘Con’ as they affectionately know each other, two sisters whose father, the ‘late colonel’ of the story’s title, has recently died, leaving them on their own in the family home.
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