Sunday 13 May 2012

10 stories and links I found educative, interesting or just plain weird


Pure evil causes birth defects via Boing Boing by Maggie Koerth-Baker

Unassailable evidence presented by the Institute for Dangerous Research's Department of Mad Biology. UPDATE: This brilliant poster is the work of Allison Lonsdale. She made it for the 2010 San Diego ConDor. You can get a closer look at the poster and its text on the ConDor site. The photo is the work of Jerry Abuan. Thanks to all the readers who filled in the blanks on this amazing work of wonderous awesomeness!
Via penguinchris

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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Ben Jonson was always getting into difficult positions - with colleagues, friends, the law. So it’s fitting that he was buried vertically: head down, feet up... more

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The chilling history behind a museum’s disembodied uterus via Boing Boing by Maggie Koerth-Baker
To be fair, there are really only a few ways that London’s Hunterian Museum would end up with the uterus of a young woman floating in a jar. Given that the museum is home to surgical specimens, many of which were collected in the days before surgery involved anesthesia, it’s easy to guess that the story behind the uterus is not a pretty one.
But at The Chiurgeon's Apprentice blog, we learn that the story is even more grisly than you might have suspected. In fact, it belonged to a woman who committed suicide by drinking arsenic in 1792. She was, at the time, a month or so pregnant.
Read the rest of the story at The Chirurgeon's Apprentice

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Hey Dude via 3quarksdaily by Robin Varghese
Robert Lane Greene in More Intelligent Life (for Sophie Schulte-Hillen):
Slang rarely has staying power. That is part of its charm; the young create it, and discard it as soon as it becomes too common. Slang is a subset of in-group language, and once that gets taken up by the out-group, it’s time for the in-crowd to come up with something new. So the long life of one piece of American slang, albeit in many different guises, is striking. Or as the kids would say, “Dude”!
Read more

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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Bikinis and burkas. Marseille may become the first Muslim-majority city in Western Europe. Can it remain a beacon of cosmopolitan harmony?... more

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Researchers Activate False Memories in the Brain via Big Think by Orion Jones
Scientists have found that by activating just a few brain cells in the hippocampus, the brain’s memory centre, strong memories can be released. MIT researchers first isolated brain cells in mice that were active only when experiencing a new environment, then gave the mice electric shocks.
Read More

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How Alcohol Inspires Creativity via Big Think by Orion Jones
In a study of 40 young men, scientists found that those given vodka cranberry drinks performed better on a standard creativity test than those who stayed sober. Published in Consciousness and Cognition, the research looked at alcohol’s influence on people’s creativity as measured by the “Remote Associates Test”, a word association game.
Read More

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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Armed with expertise from writing two books on the Haymarket riot, a scholar went toe-to-toe with Wikipedia. He lost, badly... more

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In any case, Picasso was right via 3quarksdaily by Morgan Meis
Clar05_3406_01
Modernism is a strange artistic formation. In it, time and again, originality – which remains anachronistically the goal – lies on the other side of subservience. There is no such thing, it turns out in practice, as well-tempered learning in modernism, reasonable apprenticeship, picking and choosing the imitable. And this is a problem particularly for a genteel art culture – for a culture like England’s, whose arrogance over the past century has been most powerfully manifest in its false moderacy. But I get ahead of myself. Two things need establishing. First, that Picasso’s instigation, difficult as it was, did prove time and again in other nations a spur to major art. What Malevich and Tatlin were able to do with Picasso’s Cubism between 1912 and 1917; how Mondrian thought through the same style’s implications in Paris, and what he did, on returning to Holland, to make what he had learned usable in a shared project; the long-distance Picasso-olatry of the New York School; even the scrupulous Cubism of the Czechs before 1914 – these are moments that sum up, for me, the true intensity and dignity of modernism. And for a culture signally to lack such a moment is a weakness – maybe even an indictment.
more from T.J. Clark at the LRB here.

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Download recordings and printable music via Taizé
Here you can access the download area for recordings and printable copies of Taizé music (instrumental and vocal scores) hosted by eXultet-solutions for the Ateliers et Presses de Taizé.
The download area is fully functional, although some improvements will be made to it later.
Click here to continue.
Prices are in Euros (usually 0.99 for a track)
Site seems to provide sample for every track (at least it did for all the ones I tried).




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