Sunday 26 April 2015

Trivia (should have been 24 January)

A Case of the Mondays: 1925
via Shorpy Historical Photo Archive – Vintage Fine Art Prints by Dave
A Case of the Mondays: 1925
There’s no caption for this yellowing print of a lady at an office desk with postage stamps (quite possibly on October 19, 1925). Yet there must be some reason it’s in the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Online Catalog.
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The Hierarchy of Disagreement, by Paul Graham
via Stephen’s Lighthouse
climateadaptation:

The Hierarchy of Disagreement, by Paul Graham.
No comment is required but if you would like to see this in a more readable form here is the place to be.

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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Travelling corpse
What the story of one dead man pulled through the snow by another man says about history, historical fiction, and the human imagination… more

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Which Endangered Species Would You Save?
via 3 Quarks Daily by Carrie Arnold in Nautilus
Image result for blobfish image
You have just been appointed Conservation Czar. But there is a catch. You can only save three animals...After you make your choices, you will learn about the endangered status of each animal.
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Museum switches on historic computer
via BBC Technology
Edsac
A project to recreate one of Britain’s pioneering computers has reached a key milestone. The first recreated parts of the re-built Edsac machine have been switched on at The National Museum of Computing. The Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator first ran in 1949 and was created to serve scientists at Cambridge University.
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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Electric shock studies
Stanley Milgram’s studies endure not because they clarify our capacity for evil, but because his work doesn’t prove what he claimed it does… more

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Humans Really Have Seven Senses (Don't Forget Proprioception and Vestibular Sensation)
via Big Think by Orion Jones
Smelling_flowers
The way we understand the world is mediated by our five senses: touch, taste, sound, smell, and sight. Right? Well it turns out that humans have more than five senses, if by sense you mean way of knowing about the physical world. Here are two additional senses that don’t easily fit into the customary five:
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The literature and history of Chaucer
via OUP Blog by Stephen Rigby
1280px-Blake_Canterbury_Pilgrims_engraving2
To read Chaucer today is, in some measure, to read him historically. For instance, when the poet tells us in the ‘General Prologue’ to the Canterbury Tales that the Knight’s crusading experiences include service with the Teutonic Order in ‘Lettow’ (i.e. Lithuania), comprehension of the literal sense or denotation of the text requires some knowledge of fourteenth-century institutions, ideas and events. More generally, discussions of whether the Knight’s crusading activities are being held up for approval or disapproval in the ‘General Prologue’ (i.e., of the text’s connotations), are likely to cite the various, and sometimes conflicting, ways in which the morality of crusading, and in particular of campaigns mounted by the Teutonic Order against the Lithuanians, were regarded in Chaucer’s own day.
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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Artists under Hitler
Art and the Third Reich. Why did artists cooperate with the régime? Their motivation came down to – what else? – self-interest and ego… more

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Weapon: A Visual History of Arms and Armor
via Boing Boing

As with other books from DK, Weapon: A Visual History of Arms and Armor is filled with high quality photographs along with neatly organized informative captions.
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