via Boing Boing by Seamua Bellamy
Yes, a PR video and yes, the music is kind of terrible. But man, I learned so much watching this video churned out by the folks at Victorinox. Given the ubiquitous nature of the Swiss Army knife, I'm surprised by how much of the tool's production is still done with human intervention. Being as the video was only produced two years ago, I have to assume that they're still making their knives in the same manner. If anyone knows different, I'd love to hear about it.
If you've ever owned a Swiss Army Knife or want to understand more about how an iconic piece of hardware is created, taking in this 13-minute film is time well-spent.
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via About History by Alcibiades
The invincible Armada, or the Great and Glorious Armada, was a large navy of about 130 ships collected by Spain in 1586-1588 to invade England during the Anglo-Spanish War 1585 -1604. The Armada’s expedition took place in May-September 1588, under the command of Alonso Perez de Guzman, Duke of Medina Sidonia.
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via Arts & Letters Daily: Dominic Green in the weekly Standard
Impulse! Records
The Renaissance, taking man as the measure of all things, produced music for soloists. The Age of Revolutions, gestating democracy and the nation at arms, expressed its collectivism in orchestral music. The 20th century saw the triumph of capitalism, eventually, and the musical format of the market economy was the quartet. A quartet is the cheapest way to mimic an orchestra’s range. Ringo plays the rhythm, Paul holds down the bass, John adds the chords, and George does the decorations. The logical consequence, economically if not musically, was for all four members to sing a bit and write their own tunes. Hence the Beatles, self-contained and self-commodified, with a little help from their friend Brian Epstein.Continue reading
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via the Guardian by Anthea Lacchia
The wolf pup remains uncovered near Dawson, Yukon. The specimen is complete, with head, tail, fur and skin all intact. Photograph: Government of Yukon
The Klondike region of Canada is famous for its gold, but now other remarkable ancient treasures have been unearthed from the melting permafrost.
Two mummified ice age mammals – a wolf pup and a caribou calf – were discovered by gold miners in the area in 2016 and unveiled on Thursday at a ceremony in Dawson in Yukon.
It is extremely rare for fur, skin and muscle tissues to be preserved in the fossil record, but all three are present on these specimens, which have been radiocarbon-dated to more than 50,000 years old.
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via Interesting Literature
‘For each ecstatic instant’ is a short lyric by Emily Dickinson about the relationship between pleasure and pain, joy and suffering. The Earl of Rochester, in the seventeenth century, had asked, ‘All this to love and rapture’s due; / Must we not pay a debt to pleasure too?’ In ‘For each ecstatic instant’, Emily Dickinson answers with a resounding, if regretful, Yes.
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via the Big Think blog by Matt Davis
Believe it or not, insects today are really tiny. How did pre-historic insects get so colossal, and why have they now shrunk in size?
Over the course of its 4.5 billion years, Earth has gone through some pretty significant changes. Insectophobes can celebrate the fact that humanity's time on this planet mercifully came a full 360 million years after the period when Earth was covered in Meganeura, predatory dragonflies with two-foot-long wingspans. At the same time, the “lung scorpion," a scorpion the size of a skateboard, scurried around beneath these giant dragonflies, accompanied by the eight-foot-long Arthropleura millipede. This terrible time on planet Earth is known as the Carboniferous period.
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via About History by Alcibiades
The first Anglo-Afghan war was between Britain and Afghanistan in 1838-1842. During the 19th century, the progression of Russia to the Caucasus and Middle Asia forced England to defend Afghanistan. The embassy, sent to Kabul in 1808, for the first time establishing friendly relations with Shah-Shuja, gave the British a better understanding of Afghanistan, which until then was completely unknown to them.
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via Boing Boing by Rob Beschizza
Enjoy this history of the Mac startup sound, which Apple got rid of in the 2016 MacBooks after three decades of bongggggg.
Here's a video featuring just the startup sounds, complete with crash chimes.
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via The New Yorker by Adam Gopnik
Four nineteenth-century authors offered blueprints for a better world—but their progressive visions had a dark side.
Nineteenth-century utopians offered a radiantly progressive vision, if you put aside the eugenics, anti-Semitism, and racism.
Michael Robertson’s “The Last Utopians: Four Late Nineteenth-Century Visionaries and Their Legacy” (Princeton) is instructive and touching, if sometimes inadvertently funny. The instructive parts rise from Robertson’s evocation and analysis of a series of authors who aren’t likely to be well known to American readers, even those of a radical turn of mind. All four wrote books and imagined ideal societies with far more of an effect on their time than we now remember. The touching parts flow from the quixotic and earnest imaginations of his heroes and heroine: the pundit Edward Bellamy, the designer William Morris, the pioneering gay writer Edward Carpenter, and the feminist social reformer Charlotte Perkins Gilman. His utopians showed enormous courage in imagining and, to one degree or another, trying to create new worlds against the grain of the one they had inherited. They made blueprints of a better place, detailed right down to the wallpaper, and a pleasing aura of pious intent rises from these pages.
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via Interesting Literature
Are these the greatest football poems?
Literature and football may not seen like natural bedfellows, although it’s worth remembering that Albert Camus, the philosopher and author, was a goalkeeper, and that the American football team the Baltimore Ravens are named in honour of Edgar Allan Poe’s classic poem ‘The Raven’. Robert Frost once said, ‘Poetry is play. I’d even rather have you think of it as a sport. For instance, like football.’ And poets down the ages have put into words the magic and wonder of football. Here are five classic poems about football by Victorian, twentieth-century, and contemporary poets.
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