via Boing Boing by Seamus Bellamy
When it comes to making rope, there's no school like the old school. I love that, despite the advances made in the areas of fabrication and industrial automation, there are still products made using methods that haven't changed in a century. Some things, as this video from How it's Made illustrates, are better off without updates.
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via the Guardian by Sophie Elmhirst
The World Ploughing Championships 2018 in Germany. Photograph: Kuratorium Weltpflügen 2018 EV
Some compare it to snooker, others to figure skating. But for those who have given their lives to competitive ploughing, it’s more than a sport, it’s a way of life.
On 31 August, the night before the first day of the World Ploughing Championship, the bar of the Hotel Fortuna in the small German town of Reutlingen was crammed with the global ploughing elite. The scene resembled a low-key United Nations afterparty – Swiss, Kenyans, Australians, Latvians, Canadians and French, all slugging back long glasses of German beer. The top flight of international ploughing is a limited pool, the same faces recurring every year, and so the atmosphere was jovial, like a school reunion, 50-odd ploughmen and two ploughwomen (the sport has historically been dominated by men) hailing each other affectionately across the room. Much of the talk concerned the wild boar who had apparently dug up the field where the following day’s competition would take place. But there was something else in the air too, a bonhomie edged with rivalry. They were here to win.
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via the Big Think blog by Mike Colagrossi
The ancients had a cornucopia of holidays and festivities.
- A great deal of modern holidays derived from Ancient Roman festivities.
- The changes of the seasons was a popular time to hold reverence for local gods and goddesses.
- Nearly every culture in the past had a unique holiday in which they celebrated, venerated and worshipped.
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via Interesting Literature
The poem beginning ‘Oft when my spirit doth spread her bolder wings’ is part of Edmund Spenser’s sonnet sequence Amoretti, which the Elizabethan poet wrote about his courtship of his wife.
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via Arts & Lwrrwes Daily: Hannah Long in the Washington Examiner
The extraordinary fidelity of Christopher Tolkien, last of the Inklings.
In 1975, Christopher Tolkien left his fellowship at New College, Oxford, to edit his late father’s massive legendarium. The prospect was daunting. The 50-year-old medievalist found himself confronted with 70 boxes of unpublished work. Thousands of pages of notes and fragments and poems, some dating back more than six decades, were stuffed haphazardly into the boxes. Handwritten texts were hurriedly scrawled in pencil and annotated with a jumble of notes and corrections. One early story was drafted in a high school exercise book.
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via Boing Boing by Rob Beschizza
Photo: Chelsea G. Summers
Chelsea G. Summers’ beautiful article about a beatiful place recalls its ugly history: the murder of 91 “witches” in Vardø, Norway, part of a century-long persecution against which the Salem witch trials pale in comparison.
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via the Guardian by Adam Vaughan
Drilling for geothermal power has started to tap the potential heat and electricity from Cornish hot rocks. Photograph: Mike Newman
A trailblazing energy project has started drilling the UK’s deepest ever borehole in Cornwall in a bid to use heat from hot rocks as a zero-carbon source of electricity.
The team behind the £18m scheme hopes to create the UK’s first deep geothermal power station and ignite a renewed interest in the technology’s wider potential.
The project near Redruth involves two deep holes being drilled over a course of around six months. Drilling began on Tuesday, with one hole expected to be 1.6 miles (2.5km) deep and the other as far as 2.8 miles (4.5km) down, which would be a UK record for a borehole.
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via the Big Think blog by Frank Jacobs
Like Stevenson, Tolkien and other creators of fantasy worlds, Ursula K. Le Guin was a cartographer as well as a writer
- Stevenson, Tolkien and Le Guin have all made maps to 'illustrate' their stories.
- Despite the iconic status of Le Guin's 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness, her hand-drawn map of planet Gethen is quite unknown.
- The map focuses on Karhide and Orgoryen, the two main nations on the frozen planet and the locus of the action in Left Hand.
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via Interesting Literature
The American poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850-1919) is not usually lauded as a great poet. Indeed, quite the opposite: in his The Joy of Bad Verse, a glorious celebration of ‘good bad poetry’ in English, Nicholas T. Parsons includes a chapter on Wilcox, discussing the bad reception her poetry received among American soldiers during the First World War. However, Wilcox could write not just good bad poems, but passably good ones: see her popular poem ‘Solitude’, for instance. And then there’s the less well-known poem ‘Dawn’. A tender depiction of the moment daylight begins to take over from the darkness of night, ‘Dawn’ is a little gem of a morning poem.
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via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
YouTuber Kaplamino makes ingenious chain reaction tricks with marbles and dominoes. His latest, Blue Marble 2, is loaded with delightful little mechanisms that release their stored energy when a marble comes into contact with them.
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