via About History by Alcibiades
Tribes
According to many scientists, the formation of the Slavic people took place in Poland. In the middle of the 6th century, the Gothic historian Jordan pointed out the location of the Slavs: “From the place of birth of the Vistula River, a populous tribe of Venets settled in immeasurable spaces”. In the “ Bavarian Geographer ” of the 9th century, among the tribes that lived north of the Danube are mentioned Lendzians, Slozians, and Wislens. In the middle reaches of the Warta, there was a clearing, from which the name of the nationality originated – the Poles. Here also lived Mazovshans, Kuyavians, or Goplyans. Pomeranian tribes lived in Pomerania.
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The ultimate fate of the universe is a mind-bogglingly thing to think about. So what’s the final outcome for it all?
via the Big Think blog by Mike Colagrossi
One of the furthest reaches of time we dare to predict is the end of the universe. As far as we know this is the end of not only life as we know it but everything that’s ever existed. No more matter, no more light, no more particles, no more nothing. It’s a harrowing reality to fathom, but it’s one we need not worry about too much – if the universe does end, it will be in an unfathomable amount of time as it eclipses trillions upon trillions of years. We must be triumphant on the edge of nothingness as we look forth to the fate of the universe.
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via the Guardian by Bob Stanley
Matthew, who has died aged 88, entertained generations: he was a tangible connection with the 1960s, a charismatic storyteller – and generous company
Actually an item from two years ago that was hiding in the back of the “read later” file.
Friendly and authoritative … Brian Matthew. Photograph: Mark Harrison/BBC/PA
When Brian Matthew got his first broadcasting job for forces radio in Hamburg in the late 1940s, the chief announcer there – future Tomorrow’s World presenter Raymond Baxter – gave him two pieces of advice: don’t go on air drunk, and don’t swear. “Of course I broke all the rules … not intentionally.”
Seventy years later, Matthew would say “this is your old mate Brian Matthew” to listeners on Radio 2’s Sounds of the Sixties, and that was exactly how they thought of him. By then, he had been the voice of Saturday mornings for two, maybe three generations. There were enough Sounds of the Sixties “avids” to give the show the highest listening figures on weekend Radio 2 for many years. He was a tangible connection to the music of that decade, with first-hand anecdotes on everyone from Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent to the Beatles, the Kinks, Jimi Hendrix and Jethro Tull.
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via The National Archives Blog by Sarah Radford
St Paul’s Cathedral illustration, 1813. Catalogue reference WORK 38/166
Westminster Abbey. St Martin in the Fields. St George’s Hanover Square. St John the Evangelist, John Smith Square. Spurgeon’s Tabernacle.
These and other church buildings were among those targeted by the Suffragettes during their militant campaign for suffrage. At Westminster Abbey, a bomb damaged the coronation chair in St Edward the Confessor’s Chapel; at St Martin in the Fields, pews in the south aisle were ripped apart by gunpowder. At St John the Evangelist, stained glass windows were destroyed. At Spurgeon’s Tabernacle, a bomb was left with a postcard bearing the words: ‘Put your religion into practice and give the women freedom.’
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via Interesting Literature
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle revisits Homer’s Odyssey, the epic poem that resists our analysis
Of all the epic poems from the classical era, Homer’s Odyssey is the most modern. In ancient Rome, at the court of the Emperor Nero, Petronius parodied its episodic style for his scurrilous and daringly modern ‘novel’ the Satyricon; nearly 2,000 years later, James Joyce used its episodic structure for his scurrilous and daringly modern ‘novel’ Ulysses. There is something novelistic even in Homer’s original poem. Far from being solely a glamorous epic idealising heroes and glorifying war and adventure, Homer’s Odyssey is also about how heroism and adventure often fail to live up to our expectations of them.
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via Boing Boing by Andrea James
Sharp-eyed ornithologists noticed that some specimens of Vogelkop Superb Bird-of-Paradise that they observed looked different enough that they may be a separate species. They captured video of the other kind for comparison.
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via About History by Alcibiades
The battle on the Frigidus River is a battle in the eastern Alps between the army of the Eastern Roman Empire under the command of the Emperor Theodosius the Great and the army of the Western Roman Empire under the Emperor Eugenius on September 6, 394. The battle was the end of the internal conflict in the Roman Empire, which arose in 392 as a result of Eugenius seizing imperial power in the western part of the Empire. During the battle, the usurper Eugenius was captured and executed by order of Theodosius, who after that became the sole ruler of the entire Roman Empire.
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via Arts & BLetters Daily: Bianca Bosker in the Atlantic
Gerta keller was waiting for me at the Mumbai airport so we could catch a flight to Hyderabad and go hunt rocks. “You won’t die,” she told me cheerfully as soon as I’d said hello. “I’ll bring you back.”
Death was not something I’d considered as a possible consequence of traveling with Keller, a 73-year-old paleontology and geology professor at Princeton University. She looked harmless enough: thin, with a blunt bob, wearing gray nylon pants and hiking boots, and carrying an insulated ShopRite supermarket bag by way of a purse.
I quickly learned that Keller felt such reassurances were necessary because, appropriately for someone who studies mass extinctions, she has a tendency to attract disaster. Long before our 90-minute flight touched down, she’d told me about having narrowly escaped death four times—once while attempting suicide, once from hepatitis contracted during an Algerian coup, once from getting shot in a robbery gone wrong, and once from food poisoning in India—and this was by no means an exhaustive list. She has crisscrossed dozens of countries doing field research and can claim near-death experiences in many of them: with a jaguar in Belize, a boa in Madagascar, a mob in Haiti, an uprising in Mexico.*
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Allow yourself plenty of time if this looks like something that would interest you as it did me. It’s a long read.
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via the OUP blog by Anatoly Liberman
Jaguar Sisters by Friday Bredesen. Public Domain via Unsplash
There is a feeling that idioms resist interference. A red herring cannot change its color any more than the leopard can change its spots. And yet variation here is common. For instance, talk a blue streak coexists with swear (curse) a blue streak. One even finds to swear like blue blazes (only the color remains intact). A drop in the bucket means the same as a drop in the ocean. We can cut something to bits or to pieces, and so forth. Specialists have described this type of variation in minute detail. A less trivial case is the use of what I would like to call a substitution table. For instance, what can be on one side? We’ll soon find out. A man from Peddleton (Lancashire) wrote in 1875: “All on one side like Rooden Lane is a common expression hereabouts. It arises from the fact of the village—Rooden Lane—being all on one side on the road, the other side being the high wall of Heaton Park, the residence of the Earl of Wilton.” Good information to store up, and nothing to wonder at: the park was private property, and a wall around it could be expected.
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via the Big Think blog by Mike Colagrossi
The history of art has given us an innumerable amount of stunning works throughout the years. It is no small feat to limit the contributions of the artistic sphere to just ten greatest works. But many art critics and art lovers alike can agree that there are some works so majestic and timeless that they’ve earned their place to hang like canvases in the hall of the greats. Mixed in with some of the more famous works are a few unknown paintings that have stood the test of time for their craftsmanship and beauty.
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