Friday 15 September 2017

Odd but, I hope, interesting. Around the world (almost) in ten items.

Spelling and knowhow: the oddest English spellings, part 23
via OUP Blog by Anatoly Liberman
You see William Tell, the unbowed Swiss hero. He had another arrow to his bow, but, fortunately, it was not needed.
You see William Tell, the unbowed Swiss hero. He had another arrow to his bow, but, fortunately, it was not needed.
We are so used to the horrors of English spelling that experience no inconvenience at reading the word knowhow. Why don’t know and how rhyme if they look so similar? Because such is life. In addition to the ignominious bow, as in low bow, one can have two strings to one’s bow, and I witnessed an incident at a hockey game, when a certain Mr. Prow kicked up a row, complaining of an inconvenient row, but the crowd pacified him, and, as a result, he had to eat crow. By the way, the man’s family name Prow, as he later told me, is pronounced with the vowel of grow, not of prowess or proud. In return, I explained to him that prow (a ship’s forepart) rhymed with grow for centuries and then changed its pronunciation, perhaps to align itself with bow (which bow? Its synonym of course) or for another equally obscure reason (see below). Such changes are trivial. More surprising is the fact that millions of people who are ready to protest anything on the slightest provocation tolerate English spelling and sometimes even defend it for sentimental reasons. Since when have we become so docile and conservative on both sides of the Atlantic? Answer: Since roughly the late Middle Ages.
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Tracing the political history of Cairo's coffeehouses
via The National Archives Blog by Alon Tam
19th and 20th century coffeehouses in Cairo, Egypt, were an urban hub for revolutionaries, intellectuals, writers, middle- and upper-class men and women, workers, immigrants, and people from different ethnic, racial, and religious groups. Beyond the daily leisure activities they enjoyed there, coffeehouses were a place to get the news, discuss personal or public affairs, and even recruit and organise for political action.
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Watch skateboarders skate on frozen sand
via Boing Boing by Andrea James

Norway is one of the few places cold enough to support the seasonal sport of frozen sand skateboarding. Worth a watch just for the gorgeous vistas with the sun on the horizon.
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Playing Dirty
The Political Orchestra: The Vienna and Berlin Philharmonics during the Third Reich by Fritz Trümpi (Translated by Kenneth Kronenberg)
via Arts & Letters Daily: Norman Lebrecht in Literary Review
One morning in January 1946, an old man living in southeast London received a letter from the chairman of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra inviting him to return as leader, a position he had been kicked out of as a Jew in March 1938, when Austria became part of Hitler’s Germany.
Arnold Rosé replied by return of post. The elderly refugee, now eighty-two, had led the Vienna Philharmonic from the first violin’s seat for more than half a century. He had married the sister of its conductor Gustav Mahler; his quartet had given the premiere of Arnold Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet, the piece that crashed through the barriers into atonality. No living musician wielded more Viennese tradition than he. But Rosé was not about to return.
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Aboriginal DNA study reveals 50,000-year story of sacred ties to land
via the Guardian by Melissa Davey
A woman shows edible red berries in Arnhem Land
DNA collected from hair samples in the 1900s has revealed a continuous connection to regions of Australia going back thousands of years. Photograph: Richard I'Anson/Getty Images/Lonely Planet Images
A study of ancient Aboriginal hair samples has revealed distinct Aboriginal populations were present in Australia with little geographical movement for up to 50,000 years.
The discovery of such a long, continuous presence in the those regions emphasised why land was so sacred to Aboriginal people, researchers said.
The results emerged after researchers led by the University of Adelaide’s Australian centre for ancient DNA analysed the mitochondrial DNA from 111 hair samples collected during anthropological expeditions in the early to mid-1900s. The samples are stored at the South Australian Museum.
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The 100 Websites That Rule the Internet
via the Lone Wolf Librarian

Click through to get a bigger image from Visual Capitalist [and note that this infographic is based on traffic in the USA]

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Crazy unearthly planetary phenomena described
via Boing Boing by Andrea James

22,000 mile per hour winds, magma clouds that rain rocks, and planets where you could fly by flapping your arms in a wingsuit. These are some of the remarkable phenomena scientists believe are possible on nearby planetary bodies.
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A Map of Lexical Distances Between Europe’s Languages
via Big Think by Frank Jacobs
Article Image
A Finn and a Spaniard walk into a bar. How do they strike up a conversation? It would be exceptional for either to speak each other’s language. And it would be rare for both to be fluent enough in French, German, Esperanto or Russian – all languages which once had the ambition to become Europe’s lingua franca.
No, that Finn and that Spaniard will talk to each other and order drinks in English, the true second language of the continent. Also, the bartender is probably Irish anyway.
Europe’s defining trait is its diversity. Europeans don’t have to travel far to immerse themselves in a different culture. And if each only spoke their own language, they wouldn’t even be able to make heads or tails of it.
Or would they?
Continue reading and study the map at a size that allows it to make sense!

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A Fanny Mendelssohn masterpiece finally gets its due
via the Guardian by Sheila Hayman
Extraordinary passions … an 1881 wood engraving of Fanny Mendelssohn by her husband, the artist Wilhelm Hensel.
Extraordinary passions … an 1881 wood engraving of Fanny Mendelssohn by her husband, the artist Wilhelm Hensel. Photograph: Alamy
It’s unusual to have five Twitter accounts. Especially if you’ve been dead for 170 years. But my great-great-great grandmother, Fanny Mendelssohn, was an unusual woman, and even today she inspires extraordinary passions. In her lifetime, despite a crooked back and thick spectacles, she was adored for her musicality and warmth, but feared for her fierce intellect (so unfeminine!) and general intolerance of amateurism.
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Fifty years later, the same flight takes longer. Why?
via Boing Boing by Andrea James
Fifty years ago, American Airlines' flight from New York to Los Angeles took 5 hours and 43 minutes. The same flight is 6 hours and 27 minutes today. Wendover Productions examines why planes don't fly faster in this interesting video [via the link].


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