Sunday 4 December 2011

10 non-work-related items that I found fun or interesting

International Potato Center
How the Potato Changed the World via 3quarksdaily by Azra Raza
From Smithsonian:
When potato plants bloom, they send up five-lobed flowers that spangle fields like fat purple stars. By some accounts, Marie Antoinette liked the blossoms so much that she put them in her hair. Her husband, Louis XVI, put one in his buttonhole, inspiring a brief vogue in which the French aristocracy swanned around with potato plants on their clothes. The flowers were part of an attempt to persuade French farmers to plant and French diners to eat this strange new species. Today the potato is the fifth most important crop worldwide, after wheat, corn, rice and sugar cane. More here.

Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Quantum mechanics is one of the most reliable theories in science, but that doesn't mean physicists understand it... more

Mysterious Brain Connections via Big Think by Big Think Editors
Researchers were recently surprised to find that brains missing a corpus callosum, which links the two hemispheres of the brain, were able to communicate information between the two halves quite effectively. Is the brain capable of using electromagnetic waves to ...
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Why Are the Letters in ABC Order? via Stephen’s Lighthouse
Read the history and philosophy at mental_floss Blog by Matt Soniak and the evolution of the alphabet as a moving image here

Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Google wants to know your reading habits, taste in music, and where you are right now. You are not Google's customer. You are its product... more

Was Vincent Van Gogh Murdered? via Big Think by Bob Duggan
Every art lover knows the story. Sad, mad Vincent Van Gogh went into the wheat fields of Auvers-sur-Oise on the morning of July 27, 1890 to paint Wheatfield with Crows, his visual suicide note to posterity, before shooting himself in the chest. Read More

The Dark Side of High Achievement via Big Think by Peter Saalfield
It is a familiar tale, one told many times by writers and filmmakers from Shakespeare to Orson Welles. A dynamic thinker sets out on his or her career and makes an impact almost immediately. He brings new ideas to the table, sees angles that others do not, and consequently …
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via Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
No more Manhattan Projects. Technological innovation has stalled, says Peter Thiel. Scientists are ignored. Today a letter from Einstein would get lost in the White House mailroom... more

Welcome to the Moral Sciences Club via Big Think by Will Wilkinson
Welcome to the club. Let’s begin with the name, which is swiped from the Cambridge Moral Sciences Club, a philosophy discussion group founded in 1878 for Cambridge men who were doing or had done the “moral sciences tripos”, a defunct course of study for the honours B.A. The original Cambridge …
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Delicious or Disgusting? Depends on Where You’re Sitting via Big Think by David Berreby
When I hand my one-year-old son something to eat, he spends a short time looking at it and a long time looking at me: Is this good? Is it tasty? Is this what we eat? The answer (olive from me, yes; bug from floor, no) has a bit to do with the chemical and physiological process of perceiving the … Read More


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