via the Guardian
Since the early 19th century, artists have depicted colourful – if sometimes fictional – dinosaurs and prehistoric environments, mingling science with unbridled fantasy. This art is the subject of a new book: Paleoart
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via Interesting Literature
Flowers are a perennial theme of poetry. Indeed, the word for a book of poems, ‘anthology’, even comes from the Greek for ‘flower’. Given how many classic poems have been written about flowers, it’s difficult to narrow it down to just ten of the best flowery poems – but that is nevertheless what we’ve tried to do below, offering a range of poems (comic, celebratory, romantic, carpe diem) from different periods of English literature.
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I’m quite a fan of poetry but there was only one in that list that I knew. The very obvious daffodils.
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via 3 Quarks Daily by Paul Braterman
In 1957, Charles Keeling of Scripps Institution of Oceanography began regular measurements of carbon dioxide concentration at Mauna Loa, Hawaii. By 1960, he was already in a position to report a steady increase, together with seasonal variations. In the northern atmosphere, CO2 concentration falls during the spring and summer growing season, but recovers during autumn and winter as vegetable matter decays. This sawtooth pattern is superposed, however, on a steady overall increase.
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via Boing Boing by Andrea James
Ribbonesia specializes in gathering, twisting, and tying ribbon into vibrant animals, plants, and other sculpted forms.
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WARNING: If you are into crafting then beware of the Ribbonesia tutorials on YouTube. I had to force myself to come back here and finish writing this item!
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via Big Think by Frank Jacobs
The Roman Empire would not have been possible without its roads. They connected Rome with the furthest corners of its dominion, from the Scottish border to the Arabian sands. Roads were the veins through which flowed the information, goods and soldiers that kept the empire healthy and strong.
But Romans were better road-builders than they were map-makers. No contemporary chart of the road network survives; the closest thing is the 13th-century Tabula Peutingeriana, a 1-by-22-foot copy of a now-lost, but certainly equally unwieldy original. Strangely, it takes a decidedly 20th-century cartographic motif to bring the importance of Rome’s roads truly into focus.
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via OUP Blog by James Delaney
Statue of Rousseau, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was one of the most influential thinkers of the eighteenth century French enlightenment period. Born in Geneva in 1712, Rousseau made important contributions to philosophy, literature, and even music. The work that initially made him famous is the Discourse on the Sciences and Arts, his submission to an essay contest put forth by the Academy of Dijon in 1750. Rousseau’s answer to their prompt “Has the restoration of the sciences and arts tended to purify morals?” won the prize, although his answer was somewhat surprising given the ideals one generally associates with enlightenment. He claimed that advances in the sciences and arts come at the expense of virtue. The argument proceeds on a number of levels, but one of Rousseau’s most striking claims was that societies that value scientific and artistic progress come to praise talent instead of genuine moral goodness. He wrote, “One no longer asks if a man is upright, but rather if he is talented; nor of a book if it is useful, but if it is well written. Rewards are showered on the witty, and virtue is left without honors. There are a thousand prizes for noble discourses, none for noble actions.”
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via ResearchBuzz Firehose: by University of Berne
Climate scientists will now be able to more accurately study the pattern and causes of global surface temperature changes than was previously possible, thanks to a large international team of scientists contributing to PAGES (Past Global Changes), one of the University of Bern’s affiliated climate organizations.
Our knowledge of global temperatures before routine weather measurements relies on so-called “proxy” data – biological and geological sources that provide indirect information on past temperatures. Tree rings, for example, tend to grow thicker in warmer years, allowing indirect estimates of temperature change during the life of the tree. The PAGES2k database includes proxy data from a number of distinct sources including tree rings, corals, glacier ice, and marine and lake sediments as well as historic documents. This vital tool for climate reconstructions and climate modeling has now been published online in the Nature journal Scientific Data. It represents the most transparent, complete and fully described release of the PAGES2k dataset to date, providing an important resource for climate researchers interested in how the climate has changed from 1 AD to the present.
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via Big Think by Robby Berman
CDP’s Carbon Majors Database has just released its Carbon Majors Report 2017, a document for investors looking to understand the extent to which their fossil-fuel holdings are associated with carbon emissions. Short answer? A lot. It’s a remarkable document, packed with all sorts of eye-popping data and insights. Like this: Just 100 state and commercial producers are responsible for 70.6% of all greenhouse gases (GHGs) from 1988-2015. That’s 923 billion tonnes of C02e (a catch-all term that includes carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and refrigerant gases).
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via Interesting Literature
The 10 best novels by David Gemmell, master of heroic fantasy
In the 1980s, with his debut novel Legend (1984), the British author David Gemmell revolutionised heroic fantasy. Drawing on the stories of Robert E. Howard and the novels of Michael Moorcock and J. R. R. Tolkien, Gemmell also took inspiration from his favourite novelist, the prolific writer of Westerns, Louis L’Amour.
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Interesting literature indeed. I have tried several of the books listed and can categorically state that I enjoyed none of them.
Which reminds me of one of my mother’s favourite sayings “if we all liked the same things then the world would be a very dull place”.
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via the Guardian by Dalya Alberge
Never before published or exhibited … excerpt from Landscape beside a lake by Thomas Gainsborough, c. 1745-55. Photograph: Royal Collection Trust
More than two dozen sketches by the 18th-century master Thomas Gainsborough have been discovered at Windsor Castle after going unnoticed in the portfolio of another artist for more than 100 years.
Some 26 drawings, most of which are landscapes, by the renowned painter were found within an album in the Royal Collection created in the 19th century and credited to Sir Edwin Landseer, one of Queen Victoria’s favourite artists.
Leading art historians Lindsay Stainton and James Hamilton now say that they were wrongly attributed and are actually early works by Gainsborough, known for his lifelike portraits and British country landscapes.
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