a post by Samuel Cohn for the OUP blog
‘The Triumph of Death’. Painting by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, c.1562. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
A scholarly consensus persists: across time, from the Plague of Athens to AIDS, epidemics provoke hate and blame of the ‘other’. As the Danish-German statesman and ancient historian, Barthold Georg Niebuhr proclaimed in 1816: “Times of plague are always those in which the bestial and diabolical side of human nature gains the upper hand.” In the 1950s, the French historian René Baehrel reasoned: epidemics induce ‘class hatred (La haine de classe)’; such emotions have been and are a part of our ‘structures mentales … constantes psychologiques’. With the rise of AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s, this chorus resounded. According to Carlo Ginzburg, ‘great pestilences intensified the search for a scapegoat on which fears, hatreds and tension … could be discharged’. For Dorothy Nelkin and Sander Gilman, ‘Blaming has always been a means to make mysterious and devastating diseases comprehensible’. Roy Porter concurred with Susan Sontag: ‘deadly diseases’, especially when ‘there is no cure to hand … spawn sinister connotations’. More recently from earthquake wrecked, cholera-hit Haiti, Paul Farmer concluded: ‘Blame was, after all, a calling card of all transnational epidemics.’ Others can easily be added. The problem is: these scholars have produced only a handful of examples—sometimes, the Black Death in 1348-51 and the burning of Jews; sometimes, the rise of Malfrancese (or Syphilis) at the end of the fifteenth century; sometimes, cholera riots in the nineteenth century; and AIDS in the 1980s (but usually from the U.S. alone).
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via BBC by Sean Coughlan, BBC News education and family correspondent
The researchers say cyan could be added or taken away to prevent or encourage sleep
The colour cyan - between green and blue - is a hidden factor in encouraging or preventing sleep, according to biologists.
University of Manchester researchers say higher levels of cyan keep people awake, while reducing cyan is associated with helping sleep.
The impact was felt even if colour changes were not visible to the eye.
The researchers want to produce devices for computer screens and phones that could increase or decrease cyan levels.
Sleep researchers have already established links between colours and sleep - with blue light having been identified as more likely to delay sleep.
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via Interesting Literature
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses the lasting appeal of H. G. Wells’s first great ‘scientific romance’
In some ways, H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) is a ‘timeless’ text: it continues to enjoy huge popularity (as witnessed by big film adaptations in 1960 and 2002, as well as the fact that the novel itself has never been out of print and is available in a range of editions), it continues to exert a considerable influence on the literature and cinema produced since, and its very narrative structure – with much of the action of the novel taking place in a time that hasn’t happened yet, the year 802,701 – in a sense absenting it from its own context. But an analysis of Wells’s novella that sees it floating completely free of its 1890s context, much as the Time Traveller himself succeeds in leaving his late Victorian world behind, risks overlooking the extent to which The Time Machine is a novella deeply rooted in late nineteenth-century concerns. These concerns are neatly covered in Roger Luckhurst’s introduction to the recent Oxford edition of the novella, The Time Machine (Oxford World’s Classics).
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via Boing Boing
Most carillons are fixed in bell towers, but Chime Masters makes a mobile carillon, used here to play a lovely Beatles cover.
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via Killer Web Directory by Administrator
Here is a decent infographic produced by the website called Globe Packaging that offers information about the fascinating history of the material plastic. Learn all about how it began, how we went from celluloid to synthetic plastic, how we went from from polyvinyl chloride to PET and more.
Click through to view
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via About History by Alcibiades
The war of the Third Coalition (also known as the Russo-Austro-French War of 1805) was one of the Napoleonic Wars that lasted from 1803 to 1815. It was fought between France, Spain, Bavaria, and Italy, against the Third Anti-French Coalition, which included Austria, Russia, Britain, Sweden and the Kingdom of Naples.
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via the Big Think blog by Scotty Hendricks
Think of how many celebrities you know with personal lives for the world to see. How many of them do you share hobbies with? How many of them have made a humanizing slip-up?
People have been gossiping about celebrity lifestyles since the dawn of fame, but we often focus our attention on the lives of actors, athletes, and attention seekers. Famous academics and philosophers usually get a little more privacy.
This doesn’t mean their lives are any less interesting, however. An entire book, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laërtius, was written on the subject in the third century. A new edition reminds us that even eggheads can be just as amusing as rock stars.
Here are some of the most demystifying life stories of 10 famous philosophers. Take some of the details here with a grain of salt though, the book is rather uncritically written, and many details lack sources. Other details are supposedly confirmed by sources long since lost.
This hasn’t stopped other philosophers, Nietzsche and Montaigne among them, from admiring the text and it shouldn't stop you.
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via Interesting Literature
‘The Passionate Shepherd to His Love’ is Christopher Marlowe’s most widely anthologised and best-known poem (he also wrote plays, including The Jew of Malta and Dr Faustus, which would influence Shakespeare’s early plays). A classic of the pastoral tradition of English poetry, ‘The Passionate Shepherd to His Love’ deserves closer analysis because it contains so many features of pastoral verse and, in many ways, is the finest embodiment of the genre in English literature.
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via Boing Boing by Rusty Blazenhoff
Here where I live in Alameda, California, there's a Chinese restaurant where they hand-pull noodles behind a window in the back of the room. The atmosphere at Ark feels dated but the food's pretty good and watching the guy swinging around noodle dough makes it worth the trip. However, there's no opportunity to talk to the noodle maker and learn his story.
So, I was thrilled to see this Tasty video show up today. It gives insight on the artistry of hand-pulling noodles by two noodle masters, Peter Song of Kung Fu Kitchen in New York City and Shuichi Kotani, the CEO of Worldwide-Soba. Come for their stories but stay for the awesome footage of two pros making noodles dance (or vice versa).
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via About History by Alcibiades
Nabis was the last king of independent Sparta. He ruled from 207 BC to 192 BC. He was the last in a series of Spartan social reformers. After the defeat of Sparta in the Clement War, lasting from 229 to 222 BC, there were no citizens of royal origin left in the city who could take the throne. After the short rule of Lycurgus, power was given to a minor Pelops, whose regents were Machanidas (until his death at the Battle of Mantine in 207 BC) and later Nabis.
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