50 years ago The Beatles played on a roof
via Boing Boing by Jason Weisberger
On January 30th, 1969 The Beatles played their last gig.
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via the Big Think blog by Matt Davis
Throughout history, hundreds — sometimes thousands — of people have been spontaneously compelled to dance until collapsing or dying from exhaustion. What explanations are there for this bizarre phenomenon?
- In 1518, Strasbourg, 400 men and women danced until collapsing from exhaustion.
- These "dancing plagues" occurred throughout the Middle Ages.
- Similar spontaneous, mass compulsions have occurred throughout history, some very recently. What are they, and why do they happen?
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via the OUP blog by Lauren du Graf
Film photography by 15299. Public Domain via Pixabay.
Say you’re an intellectual, a writer. You love going to the movies and are a devoted student of cinematic culture. You also identify as a woman. Over the years, you have had to deal with the fact that the women you see onscreen often appear in the service of male desire; they are meant to be spanked, to be kissed, to oblige and to support men. The rehearsal of this asymmetrical gender dynamic disturbs you, but as a student of cinematic culture, you’ve learned to hold your nose and keep watching to learn the language of film, and in turn the world. You treasure the movies for their unique capacity to frame and reveal truths about the world that are elusive off-screen.
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What is neuroscience doing to art?
via Arts & Letters Daily: by Kevin Berger in Nautilus
Gustav Klimt (1862–1918)
Adele Bloch-Bauer I, 1907
Oil, silver, and gold on canvas
Neue Galerie New York. Acquired through the generosity of Ronald S. Lauder, the heirs of the Estates of Ferdinand and Adele Bloch-Bauer, and the Estée Lauder Fund
The neuroscientist was in the art gallery and there were many things to learn. So Eric Kandel excitedly guided me through the bright lobby of the Neue Galerie New York, a museum of fin de siècle Austrian and German art, located in a Beaux-Art mansion, across from Central Park. The Nobel laureate was dressed in a dark blue suit with white pinstripes and red bowtie. I was dressed, well, less elegantly.
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via Boing Boing by Jason Weisberger
More here
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via Interesting Literature
Memorably used by The Beatles as the lyrics for their song of the same name on the Abbey Road LP, ‘Golden Slumbers’ is a lullaby from Thomas Dekker’s 1603 play Patient Grissel, written with Henry Chettle and William Haughton. This is one of the most soothing short Renaissance poems – and perhaps the best-known Renaissance lullaby, or ‘cradle song’, out there.
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via the Big Think blog by Stephen Johnson
Some of them were surprisingly astute.
In 1983, the Toronto Star asked science fiction writer Isaac Asimov to predict what the world would be like in 2019.
His predictions about computerization were mostly accurate, though some of his forecasts about education and space utilization were overly optimistic.
Asimov's predictions highlight just how difficult it is to predict the future of technology.
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via the OUP blog by Sydney Cameron
Bee on Lavander by Alfonso Navarro on Unsplash.
Great truths are often so pervasive or in such plain view as to be invisible. This is the case with bees and their food plants, the world’s quarter million flowering plant species, especially because it’s easy to overlook small things in a world in which whales and elephants hold the imagination of the public. Little do most of us know that the more than 20,000 species of wild bees (Hymenoptera: Apoidea: Anthophila) on our planet are working behind the scenes to pollinate most fruit and vegetable crops and wild plants, providing approximately one-third of the food humans consume. We are familiar, of course, with the domesticated honey bee and its large social colonies, and the occasional bumble bee seen in the garden. But behind the scenes are thousands of small, solitary bees living in the soil and in the pithy stems of overwintering plants, each of which plays an important role in pollinating much of the world’s flora.
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via About History
Background and Reason
In 1851-1864, the Qing Empire was in a civil war. The weakening power of the Manchu emperors after the First Opium War was a turning point in the history for this state. On the territory of the empire the Taiping State was formed, with which the Manchu government struggled against it. At the outset of the civil war, foreign traders and missionaries sympathized with the Taiping.
Continue reading and discover that Trump was not the first to instigate a trade war with China!
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via Interesting Literature
From rainbows and glorious cerulean blue during the day to blackness and bright stars at night, the sky has provided poets with plenty of inspiration over the centuries.
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