via Stephen’s LIghthouse by Jason Kottke
This is a short video profile of Martin Frost, who might be the last remaining professional fore-edge painter in the world.
Dating back centuries, the delicate art form places intricate scenes on the side of books, cheekily hidden beneath gold gilded pages. The beautiful paintings are only visible to the trained eye, but once you unlock the secret, you’ll find pure magic.I love the two-way paintings… you fan the book’s pages out one way it depicts one scene and if you fan them out the other, you get another scene.
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via Interesting Literature
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses a science-fiction classic
Many of Richard Matheson’s narratives focus on lonely men. It was Matheson who wrote the screenplay for an early Steven Spielberg film, Duel (1971), which was based on one of Matheson’s own short stories. Like many of Matheson’s most famous stories, such as The Shrinking Man and I Am Legend, it is ultimately about the loneliness of modern man. The latter book, in which Robert Neville – played by Will Smith in the book’s most recent adaptation – finds himself the last human survivor of the zombie apocalypse, has tended to obscure the former. But The Shrinking Man is no minor work of throwaway genre fiction: the novel contains great themes and tackles deep-rooted human concerns, especially male concerns.
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via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
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via About History by Alcibiades
Cleopatra VII 69-30 BC is the last queen of Hellenistic Egypt from the Macedonian Ptolemaic dynasty. She was glorified by the dramatic love story with the Roman commander Mark Antony. In the last years of her rule, Egypt was conquered by Rome.
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via Arts & Letters Daily: Dan Perry in The Conversation
A series of floods that hit the ancient city of Angkor would have overwhelmed and destroyed its vast water network, according to a new study that provides an explanation for the downfall of the world’s biggest pre-industrial city.
Our research, published in Science Advances, explains how the damage to this vital network would have triggered a series of “cascading failures” that ultimately toppled the entire city. And it holds lessons for today’s cities about the danger posed when crucial infrastructure is overwhelmed.
Angkor, in modern-day Cambodia, was founded in 802 AD and abandoned during the 15th century. Its demise coincided with a period of highly variable rainfall in the late 14th and early 15th centuries, with prolonged droughts and extremely wet years.
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via the Guardian by Laurence Blair in Espíritu Pampa
The city of Espíritu Pampa, also known as Old Vilcabamba, photographed in 2018. Photograph: Laurie Blair
Espíritu Pampa, forgotten for centuries, was cleared, and the latest findings, a planned site museum and fieldwork are bringing attention to the last stronghold of the Incas.
Jorge Cobos follows the remnants of an Inca road down the eastern slopes of Peru’s Andes, through cloud forest and over swaying plank bridges, edging along narrow paths beside sheer drops.
Finally, after a four-day trek, he clears a patch of undergrowth with his machete, revealing a moss-covered wall. Thick roots are entwined around fallen lintels. Elsewhere, the stonework is still daubed with orange plaster.
“Imagine – there are lots of buildings left to discover in the forest,” he said. “And beyond, in the mountains: who knows?”
The sprawling ruins are, scholars agree, the last capital of Vilcabamba: a holdout Inca state that resisted for decades after the conquistadors landed in Peru in 1532, executed the emperor Atahualpa, and occupied the Inca capital of Cusco.
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via the Big THink blog by Stephen Johnson
Scientists have identified a new shape called the scutoid, and it helps explain the how cells in the body arrange themselves in tightly packed three-dimensional structures to form tissues.
Scientists have identified a new shape called the scutoid, a discovery that helps explain how cells arrange themselves in tightly packed three-dimensional structures that serve as protective barriers in the body.
The shape was discovered while a team of researchers was studying epithelial cells, which are the safety shields of the body that make up the cell walls lining our blood vessels and organs. As tissues and organs develop, epithelial cells squish together, twisting and turning into highly efficient and complex three-dimensional structures that help block microbes from entering our skin or organs.
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via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz
A mysterious metal object washed up on a beach in Corolla on the Outer Banks in North Carolina and nobody seems to know its origin. Is it part of a Russian nuclear sub? An ocean buoy? Advanced alien technology? Or something far stranger?
From the Charlotte Observer:
Cape Hatteras National Seashore, which controls much of the land along the Outer Banks, says the object is outside its jurisdiction. "I don't know what the object is," said Mike Barber, a spokesman for the National Park Service.
Sam Walker, news director at Max Radio of the Carolinas in Nags Head, is the one who first started asking questions about the object. He says it's sitting far from any beach access ramp, making it tough for heavy equipment to remove it. "Stuff washes up all the time, and if it's not bothering anything, it just stays," he told the Observer. "There's no telling how deep this thing is in the sand."
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via About History by Alcibiades
The War of the Augsburg League, also known as the Nine Years War was fought between France and the Augsburg League in 1688-1697. The war took place not only in continental Europe but also in North America, as well as in Ireland, Scotland, and Guinea.
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via Interesting Literature
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle travels to Elizabethan England for Robert Greene’s comedy
Robert Greene is probably best-known, in the British popular consciousness at least, for two things. The first is for penning what was perhaps the first, and one of the most memorable, philippics against William Shakespeare: as he lay dying, Greene attacked the Stratford playwright as an ‘upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a country.’ The second is for being played (in a comical tour de force) by Mark Heap in the BBC sitcom Upstart Crow, in which David Mitchell plays the up-and-coming Bard and the lovely Liza Tarbuck plays Anne Hathaway. (I feel I must give Liza a mention, as she once called me ‘bouncy’ on national radio and the compliment has always stuck with me. But that’s another story…)
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