via Eurozine by Alexei Korolyov
Russian railway carriage. Photo: Bernt Rostad. Source: Flickr
A 30-hour train journey from Vienna to Moscow offers the chance to connect with the Russian past: contraband, bribery and all. Alexei Korolyov returns to the place of his birth.
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via Boing Boing by Andrea James
Artist and designer Rus Khasanov (previously) has created a bright and highly-detailed montage of colors colliding. What really sets this apart is the beautiful music by Dmitry Evgrafov.
Have a look for yourself fascinating
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A team of archaeologists has discovered 3,200-year-old cheese after analyzing artifacts found in an ancient Egyptian tomb. It could be the oldest known cheese sample in the world.
via the Big Thionk blog by Stephen Johnson
A team of archaeologists has discovered 3,200-year-old cheese after analyzing artifacts found in an ancient Egyptian tomb. It could be the oldest known cheese sample in the world.
The tomb that held the cheese lies in the desert sands south of Cairo. It was first discovered in the 19th century by treasure hunters, who eventually lost the knowledge of its location, leaving the Saharan sands to once again conceal the tomb.
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DNA research adds to evidence soldiers heading east struck up relationships with locals
via the Guardian by Nicola Davis
Bones believed to belong to crusaders, found in a burial pit in Sidon, Lebanon. Photograph: Claude Doumet-Serhal/American Journal of Human Genetics
Crusader armies were made up of people from remarkably genetically diverse backgrounds, hailing not just from western Europe but also much further east, according to a new study that gives unprecedented insight into the fighters’ lives.
The Crusades to the Holy Land were spread over two centuries, with many Europeans heading east to fight, and others turning up to trade.
While experts say it is well known that high-ranking crusaders entered into marriages with Armenians to shore up political allegiances, the study adds to evidence that footsoldiers were also striking up relationships as they headed east.
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via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow
One of the holy grails of computer science is unsupervised machine learning, where you tell an algorithm what goal you want it to attain, and give it some data to practice on, and the algorithm uses statistics to invent surprising ways of solving your problem.
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via Interesting Literature
‘London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down’: this line appears towards the end of one of the greatest poems of the twentieth century, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Of course, the nursery rhyme or children’s song from which Eliot borrowed this line is much older. But what’s the story behind ‘London Bridge Is Falling Down’?
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via About History by Alcibiades
Background on trade
From the very beginning of the commercial relations between Britain and China, the trade balance had a noticeable bias in favor of Chinese exports. While in Europe, Chinese goods were considered exotic and a sign of chic, the policy of the emperors of the Qing Dynasty was aimed at isolating the country, protecting it from foreign influence. Thus, only one port of Guangzhou was opened to foreign merchant ships, and the merchants themselves were not only forbidden to leave its territory, but to even learn Chinese.
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via the OUP blog by David Brenner
Close Up Photography of Microphone by Suvan Chowdhury. Public domain via Pexels
Rebels are central actors in civil wars. However, their perspectives and lifeworlds remain little understood. In fact, many studies on civil war suffer from what Ranajit Guha criticised as the “prose of counterinsurgency”: scholars often infer the logic of rebellion from second-hand accounts, many of which are produced in the interest of state power. Insofar as scholarship has been interested in the rebel perspective, it mostly focuses on the strategic calculus of revolutionary elites. Understanding the aspirations of rank-and-file rebels and grassroots supporters of rebel movements however is important. They form the social foundations of rebellion and rebel leaders rely on their support. This makes them an important part of revolutionary politics.
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via Boing Boing by Seamus Bellamy
This video churned out by the BBC in 2017, offers a number of frank, intelligent conversations about the microdosing of LSD and magic mushrooms. Those interviewed seem sincere in how the practice has improved their everyday lives in a manner that's medicinal, not recreational. As a guy who's traditionally limited his drug use to booze and coffee, I was fascinated by what they had to say.
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