via About History
Hussars played a decisive role in many battles in which it participated: the battle of Orsha in 1514, and the battle of Obertyn in 1531. The outcome of the battle of Lyubeshov (1577) predetermined the actions of the hussar Stephen Báthory. Then followed a series of victories in the war with Russia (1577–1582). Further victories were achieved over the Habsburgs of Bychin (1588) and over the Moldavians under Bukov in 1600. Hussars at that time accounted for 75% of the entire Polish cavalry and were considered invincible. Then came triumphant victories over the Swedish army, numerically superior to the Poles, at Kokenhausen (1601), Wassenstein (1604) and at the Battle of Kirholm in 1605, and also over the Russian-Swedish army at Klushin in 1610.
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via the New Statesman by Philip Hoare
John Ruskin led a crusade against Victorian rectitude and attacked capitalism. His mind was wild and unstable, but we need his utopian visions today as we find ourselves evermore distanced from the natural world.
In 1964, Kenneth Clark set out the problems of loving John Ruskin. One was his fame itself. Like his sometime pupil Oscar Wilde (who, along with other of his Oxford students he persuaded to dig a road in Hinksey in order that they learn the dignity of labour), Ruskin defined the art and culture of his century. “For almost 50 years,” Clark wrote in his book, Ruskin Today, “to read Ruskin was accepted as proof of the possession of a soul.” Gladstone would have made him poet laureate “and was only prevented from doing so by the fact that [Ruskin] was out of his mind”.
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via Interesting Literature
‘Song of Myself’ is perhaps the definitive achievement of the great nineteenth-century American poet Walt Whitman (1819-92), so we felt that it was a good choice for the second in our ‘post a poem a day’ feature. ‘Song of Myself’ is long, but well worth devoting ten or fifteen minutes to reading, whether you’re familiar with Whitman’s distinctive and psalmic free verse style or new to the world of Walt Whitman’s poetry. Below is the 1892 version of the poem, completed shortly before Whitman’s death in the same year.
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via the OUP blog by Bioscience, Integrative Comparative Biology, the Auk and the Condor
Bald Eagle Perched Raptor by skeeze, CC0 via Pixabay.
From Bald Eagle Appreciation Days in Wisconsin to soaring Golden Eagles as a tradition at Auburn University, North American eagles are viewed as stately and powerful creatures. However, these two resident eagles of North America have not survived without a struggle.
Officials removed Bald Eagles from the US federal list of threatened and endangered species in 2007 after years of illegal hunting and habitat and food destruction diminished the population. Though Golden Eagles are not currently on a watch list, human impact causes an estimated 70 percent of Golden Eagle deaths. Fortunately, the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act of 1940 protects both eagles.
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via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
You've probably played with one of those toy cars that you drag back to wind up and then let go to let it zoom across the floor. In this video, Jared Owen uses 3D animation to clearly show how the mechanism works. This guy deserves a lot more subscribers than he has. Check out some of his other cool explainer videos here
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Psychedelics are crude drugs. Could neuroscience and super-intelligent AI help us design something better?
via the Big Think blog by Ben Goertzel
- The illegal status of psychedelic substances is a terrible thing, says Ben Goertzel. With everything happening behind closed doors, our societies are not developing the right set of cultural institutions to guide people in the productive use of psychedelics.
- Once scientists have mastered artificial general intelligence (AGI), the psychedelic experience could be engineered for the modern world – it would be safer, less haphazard, and more meaningful. We would "trip" by jacking our brains into the superhuman AGI mind cloud.
- "We're going to be exploring states of consciousness that go way beyond anything we can imagine now and way beyond anything that the very crude psychedelic drugs that exist allow us access to," Goertzel says.
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via About History
In the second quarter of the twelfth century, the single state broke up into independent principalities. The chronological beginning of the period of fragmentation is considered by the modern historiographic tradition in 1132, when after the death of Mstislav the Great, the son of Vladimir Monomakh, the power of the Kiev prince ceased to recognize Polotsk (1132) and Novgorod (1136), and the title itself became an object of struggle between various dynastic and territorial unions of Rurik. The chronicler under the year 1134 in connection with the schism in the medium of Monomakh wrote down “the whole Russian land was torn.” The outbreaks of civil strife did not concern the greatest reign, but after the death of Yaropolk Vladimirovich (1139), the next Monomakhovich Vyacheslav was expelled from Kiev by Vsevolod Olgovich Chernigovsky. Russia disintegrated into separate principalities, including (on the territory of modern Ukraine) the principality of Kiev, the Chernigov principality, the principality of Galicia, the Vladimir-Volyn principality, and partly the Turovo-Pinsk principality, as well as the Pereyaslav principality.
Continue reading if for no other reason than to find all these unfamiliar place names on the map.
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via Interesting Literature
Rupert Brooke remains known for two poems: ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’, which offers a powerful vision of dreamy English life before the outbreak of the First World War; and ‘The Soldier’, a patriotic sonnet written shortly after the outbreak of the war. But although Brooke was not a prolific poet – he died while still in his twenties – he wrote more than these two anthology favourites. His poem ‘Heaven’ is another classic, although less famous, and deserves a few words of analysis devoted to its quietly satirical tone and clever use of metaphor.
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via the OUP blog by E. Douglas Bomberger
James Reese Europe and his band play American jazz for hospital patients in Paris, 1918. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
The entrance of the United States into World War I on 6 April 1917 inspired a flood of new music from popular songwriters. Simultaneously, the first recording of instrumental jazz was released in April 1917, touching off a fad for the new style and inspiring record companies to promote other artists before year’s end. Victor and Columbia, the industry leaders, developed technological innovations that made possible the first recordings of a full symphony orchestra. These recordings are a sample of the rich variety of recordings released in this era.
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via Boing Boing by Seamus Bellamy
Documents. Newspapers. Ancient tomes of forbidden knowledge. Golden tickets. Movies and television shows are full of such seemingly banal objects. But each and every one that you see on film has either been stored, cataloged and trotted out for a particular scene by a prop master, or made it's been made specifically for a project. This short film provides some insight into a man who's dedicated his life to the latter.
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