Thursday 20 August 2015

Trivia (should have been 10 May)

8 Places To Visit Before It’s Too Late
via Lifehack by Tracey Tullis
places to visit
Do you have a wish list of amazing places you want to visit on this Earth? If so, this article is for you. Climate change, environmental disasters, and over development threaten to wipe out some of the planet’s most spectacular places. If any of the eight discussed in this article are on your list you should move up the date for your trip. These places may deny access or disappear altogether in as little as a few decades.
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The robot built from drinking straws
via BBC by Jane Wakefield
Digital making is exploding around the UK in schools and after-school clubs as part of a push to increase digital skills and introduce more children to coding.
Tech reporter Jane Wakefield decided to give it a go with her own children on a wet day during half-term in February.
They opted to build something very simple – a robot made of drinking straws.
Watch the video result

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Beefalo are causing problems in the Grand Canyon
via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
Zubron - hybrid of domestic cattle and european bison. Image: Shutterstock
Zubron - hybrid of domestic cattle and european bison. Image: Shutterstock
Herds of beefalo (a bison-cattle hybrid) are causing massive damage to vegetation, water supplies, other animal species, and American Indian cliff dwellings in the Grand Canyon.
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A newly discovered trove of unknown fairy tales
via 3 Quarks Daily: Michael Dirda at The Washington Post
9780143107422_large_The_Turnip_Princess_and_Other_Newly_Discovered_Fairy_Tales
In 2012, in the municipal archive of Regensburg, Germany, scholar Erika Eichenseer discovered 30 boxes containing more than 500 hitherto unknown fairy tales. A high-ranking civil servant named Franz Xaver von Schönwerth (1810-1886) had spent much of his spare time collecting the oral and traditional stories of Bavaria. This unexpected find rocked the fairy-tale establishment.
I love that phrase “the fairy-tale establishment”.
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How to make tasty unsweetened ginger ale
via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
ginger-glass
So easy! Find out how

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Thinking about how we think about morality
via OUP Blog by Jennifer Cole Wright
cropped
Morality is a funny thing. On the one hand, it stands as a normative boundary – a barrier between us and the evils that threaten our lives and humanity. It protects us from the darkness, both outside and within ourselves. It structures and guides our conception of what it is to be good (decent, honorable, honest, compassionate) and to live well.
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Encyclopedia of Imaginary and Mythical Places
Stuart James review in Reference Reviews Volume 29 Number 3 (2015)
Product Details
At £106 I will not be buying this in a hurry. Only £24 for the Kindle version but I imagine that the beauty of a book like this gets completely lost when it’s electronic.

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Young dolphins learn to spin
via Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder
Scientists have two hypotheses about why dolphins leap out of the water and spin. One is that they are getting rid of parasites. The other is that they making an emotional “exclamation point” about something that just happened.
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Old Orleans: 1890
via Shorpy Historical Photo Archive – Vintage Fine Art Prints by Dave
Old Orleans: 1890
New Orleans circa 1880s-1890s
“Street in the French Quarter”
Take care not to trip on the guttersnipes
5x7 glass negative by William Henry Jackson. Attribution based on Catalogue of the W.H. Jackson Views (1898)
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The 10 best shows for music directors, in no particular order, for several reasons
via OUP Blog by Joseph Church
9780199993413 (1)
Listing the ten best shows for a music director to work on is as subjective as choosing the ten greatest composers, or painters, or novelists, so it’s worthwhile to stipulate some qualities the winners must have, subjectively speaking. These qualities can only reveal themselves by working through the reasoning of what makes a show a music director’s favourite.
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