The massive number of casualties and injuries created during these battles necessitated some quick, creative ideas... some of which we still have today.
via the Big Think blog by Brandon A. Weber
- The war resulted in more than 600,000 deaths.
- About 500,000 were wounded.
- The war created a massive need for inventions of various kinds and led to rapid advancement in medicine
The "Murphy" Inhaler, late 1850s. Image source: Antique Scientifica
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Brilliant leader, kind horseman and friend of Socrates: Xenophon’s writings inspire a humane, practical approach to life
via Arts & Letters Daily: Eve Browning in Aeon
Socratic dancing as imagined by Honore Daumier. Courtesy Musée Carnavalet, Paris
The band of mercenary soldiers had been on the move through hostile territory for several months when they were told they had enlisted under a lie. They weren’t marching to put down a rebellion; they were instead marching in rebellion. Offers of special duty pay from their leader, Cyrus the Younger, however, calmed their anger and doubt, and on they advanced, dusty boots through the desert, as the heat of late-summer Persia rose around them in shimmering waves. The villages they passed by were hostile and strange: alien languages, customs, religions. There was little fresh water.
They has assembled under Cyrus in order to overthrow his brother and rival, Artaxerxes II, king of Persia. Before they reached his defensive line, they were harried on their flanks and from behind, depleting morale and using up their supplies. At a small village named Canaxa 50 miles north of Baghdad, they finally met the Persian king’s forces, on a day when the noon temperature could have fried a pork chop. As the battle began, Cyrus rashly charged Artaxerxes himself. He was pierced through by a javelin thrown by one of Artaxerxes’ guards, and died on the spot.
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via Daily Writing Tips by Michael
William Shakespeare (1564-1616), considered the greatest writer in the English language, used more than 24,000 words in his writings, more than any other author. Of those words, more than 1,700 were first used by him, as far we can tell. He may have made up many of them himself.
How can you possibly understand someone who keeps making up new words? Because Shakespeare made up his new words from old, familiar words: nouns into verbs, verbs into adverbs, adverbs into nouns. He added new prefixes and suffixes to existing words. For example, gloom was already a noun that meant ‘darkness’ and even a verb, but Shakespeare turned it into a adjective, as in ‘the ruthless, vast and gloomy woods’ in Titus Andronicus.
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via About History
Background
In the XV century, the Turks, occupying Asia Minor, began the conquest of the Balkan Peninsula, the Middle East and North Africa. After the conquest of Constantinople, the Ottoman Empire, which had formed, began to incorporate vast territories in the eastern Mediterranean, in the Black Sea region, and in western Asia. On these lands lived a lot of people differing from the Turks by religion, nationality and worldview.
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via Interesting Literature
‘Ode to a Nightingale’ was admired by contemporary critics and reviewers of Keats’s work. According to one account it was written by Keats under a plum tree in the garden of Keats House, London in May 1819. Keats was inspired by hearing the sound of birdsong and penned this poem in praise of the nightingale. Like ‘Bright Star’ it is a brilliant poem about mortality and the lure of death and escape. F. Scott Fitzgerald took the phrase ‘tender is the night’ from this poem and used it as the title for his 1934 novel.
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Takes me back a few years! This was one of the set pieces for my O-level in 1959. Loved it then and love it still.
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via Arts & Letters Daily: Tom Stevenson on the recent history of political assassination in the Times Literary Supplement
Andrei Karlov, the Russian ambassador to Turkey, and his assassin, Mevlut Mert Altıntaş, Ankara, December 19, 2016
Kwame Nkrumah survived at least five assassination attempts. The first three were bombings targeting his car or house. A grenade was thrown at him, causing minor injuries. In January 1964 an assailant entered the Ghanaian presidential residence, Flagstaff House, and fired five shots from close range. A security guard was killed but Nkrumah was unscathed. “Business went on as usual in Accra”, the New York Times reported. The trouble with many attempted assassinations is that the subject refuses to die. A more recent example was the attack on the then presidential candidate, Jair Bolsonaro, in Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais, in September 2018. Adélio Bispo de Oliveira stabbed Bolsonaro at a rally, piercing his liver and lungs, but Bolsonaro was up and campaigning again within a couple of weeks and went on to win Brazil’s presidency in October. Would-be assassins consistently overestimate the lethality of their chosen tools, believing it easier to kill a man than it really is.
A Study of Assassination was an anonymously authored CIA handbook for covert political murder written in 1953 and declassified in 1997. The handbook was produced as a “training file” for operation PBSUCCESS, the codename of a CIA plot launched by the Eisenhower administration to topple the Guatemalan government. The CIA planned to assassinate Guatemala’s democratically elected President, Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán, before opting for a coup in 1954 and the institution of a military regime that went on to kill tens of thousands. But the Study is not only a practical guide. It is also a thorough exploration of assassination with a scholarly, if macabre, sensibility in which the author spends nineteen pages contemplating the finer points of murder.
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via the Big Think blog by Mike Colagrossi
From the cosmic blast into another being's mind, to rolling bliss or obedient mind-slavery, fictional drugs have it all.
- Fictional drugs are a major part of the lore and foundation for many science fiction stories.
- The unique effects they have on their characters is an interesting new way to explore important issues.
- Many of these fictional drugs are synonymous with the stories that have been told.
via the OUP blog by Charles Edworthy
African painted dog, or African wild dog, Lycaon pictus at Savuti, Chobe National Park, Botswana by Derek Keats. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.
The endangered painted wolves are unusual in the animal kingdom for their cooperative social system, through which the majority of animals never reproduce despite reaching reproductive age. It is estimated that less than 5,500 of these creatures exist in the wild, mainly due to human disturbances, in addition to the threat of disease and rival predators.
In the penultimate episode of BBC’s Dynasties, Sir David Attenborough is educating us about painted wolves – also known as ‘African wild dogs’– and we’ve gathered some facts for you to enjoy as an accompaniment to the show.
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I’ve looked and you will need to buy the DVD of the whole series in order to see this episode – or maybe you can beg or borrow. Please do not steal!
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via Boing Boing by Rusty Blazenhoff
This stunning line of geologically-inspired jigsaw puzzles, named Geode, is the creation of Massachusetts-based generative design studio and retailer Nervous System. [Keep your debit card safely in your pocket!]
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via Interesting Literature
‘Beloved, thou hast brought me many flowers’, one of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, is a fine love poem about her courtship and eventual marriage to her fellow poet, Robert Browning.
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