Tuesday 10 March 2015

Trivia (should have been 6 December)

Small Businessman: 1924
via Shorpy Historical Photo Archive – Vintage Fine Art Prints by Dave
Small Businessman: 1924
“Probably the smallest plane in the world. Built by Edmund Allen of Wash­ington, D.C., who was formerly test pilot for Army Air Service during the world war. Plane is equipped with 9-horsepower motorcycle engine and weighs only 205 pounds with wingspread of 27 feet. Mr. Allen, in cockpit, flies it often and recently attained height of 1800 feet capable of making 63 mph.”
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Linguistic necromancy: a guide for the uninitiated
via OUP Blog by George Walkden
It’s fairly common knowledge that languages, like people, have families. English, for instance, is a member of the Germanic family, with sister languages including Dutch, German, and the Scandinavian languages. Germanic, in turn, is a branch of a larger family, Indo-European, whose other members include the Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish, and more), Russian, Greek, and Persian.
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Fascinating if you like order and clarity.

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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Virtues of know-nothing criticism
Does great expertise make for great criticism? Not always. Knowing everything about a topic forecloses on original and unexpected takes… more

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Shakespeare and Company
via An Awfully BIG Blog Adventure by Lucy Coats

There have been many bookshops marking all the pages of my life from childhood onwards. There was Mr Oxley’s in Alresford, there was the first ever Hammicks, there were all the bookshops of Hay, there was James Thin in Edinburgh, the Libreria Aqua in Venice – each has a special place in my heart. But the one I love most is in Paris.
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Coffee and Your Health: A Complex Genetic Web
via Big Think by Orion Jones
Coffee_vintage
New research suggests that drinking coffee has more to do with your genes than previously thought. Geneticists at the Harvard School of Public Health recently discovered six new genetic variants that predispose certain individuals toward caffeine consumption. It may help explain why some people differ in their reactions to caffeine: while half a cup of coffee makes some jittery, others can drink caffeine all day with little or no change in behaviour.
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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Beethoven’s personal life
Lionized in his own time, Beethoven was nonetheless in a perpetual rage. Thus his fondness for exclamation points… more

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Timeless Soul
via Prospero by K.Y.W.
NOSTALGIA, the latest album from Annie Lennox, the British singer-songwriter, recalls an era of smoky clubs and street-corner swing. Many of the tracks, including Hoagy Carmichael’s “Memphis in June” and “Georgia on My Mind,” George Gershwin’s “Summertime” and Abel Meeropol’s “Strange Fruit”, are from the classic American songbook.
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The lost cyber-crayolas of the mid-1990s
via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow

Circuit board green, cyber space orange, floppy yellow, graphic green, green.com, infra red, megabyte blue, megahertz maroon, on-line orange, plug & play pink, point & click green, transistor yellow, ultra violet, web surfin' blue, world wide web yellow, www.purple.
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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Essays of Irving Howe
American Orwell. Irving Howe was a tender polemicist, a socialist with conservative cultural tastes and a deep commitment to heterodoxy… more

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Study: Being Bored Can Be as Stressful as Being Overworked
via Big Think by Robert Montenegro
Shutterstock_171929309
No doubt we've all felt the frustrating exhaustion that comes with being overworked. Sleep gets sacrificed. Patience wears thing. Endless tasks surround you like quicksand. In short: stress gets to the best of us when we've reached our duty capacity.
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