Monday 28 July 2014

Sunday trivia

Western Union: 1931
via Shorpy Historical Photo Archive – Vintage Fine Art Prints by Dave
Western Union: 1931
New York, 1931
“Western Union Telegraph Building, West Broadway. Ralph Walker, architect”
The hulking Art Deco pile now known as 60 Hudson Street, a TriBeCa landmark
Photo by Irving Underhill
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via Big Think by Nick Clairmont
“A drunk mind speaks a sober heart” is a saying often attributed to French Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jaques Rousseau, himself quite a drunk. The idea is that when we are drunk we lose our inhibitions and allow ourselves to verbalise our true thoughts and feelings.
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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Henry James and the Jews. Yes, the novelist was prone to clumsy analogies – likening Jews to worms, monkeys, squirrels, ants. No, he was not an anti-Semite... more

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via How-To Geek
How Epic Solar Winds Make Brilliant Polar Lights 
Have you ever been curious about the science behind the Aurora Borealis and Aurora Australis? Then sit back and enjoy as this terrific video looks at the solar winds and atmospheric reactions that help make these awesome visual phenomena possible.

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The Stone Age Was Not Stone-Age
via Big Think by Kas Thomas
Stonehenge
A fascinating read involving science that I simply had not appreciated before today.

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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Doctor, anthropologist, archaeologist: Gino Fornaciari wants to know how kings, paupers, saints, and warriors lived – and how they died… more

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Control room at the Haunted Mansion
via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow
The Haunted Mansion Backstage tumblr has outdone itself with a set of photos from about 2002 showing the control-room at the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland. These are the photos I’ve dreamed of seeing all my life.
Photos of the Disneyland Mansion’s control room and corridors.

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Is Archaeology A Help Or Hindrance To Development?
by Jennifer chappell (Bircham Dyson Bell) via Mondaq.com
During recent excavation work for Crossrail, the Museum of London Archaeology ("MOLA") uncovered fourteen skeletons lying in carefully laid out rows on the edge of Charterhouse Square in Farringdon, London. The remains are believed to date back to the late 1340s and they may well be Black Death victims.
At Bloomberg Place in the City of London, MOLA continue to excavate a three acre site in the heart of the Roman city. The site is the well-known home of the Roman Temple of Mithras dating from 40 AD to the early 5th century, originally excavated in 1954 by eminent archaeologist W. F Grimes. The current archaeologists have excavated down 7 metres, removed 3500 tonnes of soil and revealed 10,000 findings from the Roman occupation.
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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
“Plenipotentiary instrument”, “master member of the revels”, “maypole”: Oh, the creative heights a mind will scale when trying to write an erotic novel without an obscene word… more

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Study Advances New Theory of How the Brain Is Wired
in Columbia News via 3 Quarks Daily by Claudia Wallis
Speaking. Seeing. Hearing. Thinking. Remembering. Understanding this sentence and making a decision about whether or not to read on. All of this work is handled in the cerebral cortex, the deeply creased, outermost portion of the brain that is the center of all the higher brain functions that make us human. Humans have the thickest cortex of any species but, even so, it measures no more than 4 millimeters (.16 inches) thick.
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