Tag Archives: blog

arts, environment, history, links, medical, science, sexuality

Monthly Links

Our packed monthly round-up of links to items you may have missed …

Science, Technology, Natural World

First up we have to highlight this years Ig Nobel prizes.

Palaeontologists have discovered several new species of extinct bone-crushing Tasmanian Tigers.

At the other end of the size scale, researchers looking in a Tibetan glacier have found over 1700 different frozen viruses.

Still with research reported in Popular Science magazine, the social white-browed sparrow weavers varying nest shapes demonstrate that birds have “culture”. Mind I thought we already knew that from the dialects of Meso-American parrots.

And while with “culture” apparently marmosets have individual “names” for each other.

Grief is well documented emotion in humans, and it seems some other species, but do cats grieve?

Scientists continue to unravel the meaning of our dreams.

So how do you know what that smell is? How does our sense of smell work? [LONG READ]

Leaving the animal world for the geological, in September 2023 something made Earth ring like a bell for nine days. [LONG READ]

Back in the early life of the solar system, it seems that Jupiter’s moon Ganymede was struck by an asteroid bigger than the one which wiped out the dinosaurs.

The asteroid Apophis is due to fly by very close to Earth in 2029, and now an astrophysicist is predicting a very slightly higher chance it may hit us.

Meanwhile, way out in the universe, researchers have discovered the largest jets ever from a black hole – and they make our galaxy look miniscule.

Health, Medicine

So how much proper risk assessment was done around Covid? And by whom? [LOMG READ]

OB/GYN Dr Jen Gunter shares some takeaways from the recent (American) Menopause Society Meeting.

Our bodies are full of nerves, but the longest one orchestrates the connection between brain and body.

While on brains, within the billions of neurons they contain there are trillions of typos – some good, some bad. [LONG READ]

And still on brains, it’s being suggested that many older people don’t just maintain, but actually increase, their cognitive skills. [££££]

And finally with things mental, a Stanford-led research group has identified six different types of depression each of which is likely to respond differently to various treatments. [LONG READ]

Sexuality

Sex historian Dr Kate Lister tries to explain exactly why women masturbate. [££££]

Environment

Nature is like art in many ways as for many humans both are subjective.

Art, Literature, Language, Music

Loughborough has installed a new memorial bell as a tribute to those who died from Covid, and a thank you to NHS and other key workers. And unusually for the UK, it’s a campanile. We need more campaniles.

In which David Hockney stimulates an academic epidemiologist and mathematician to think about four dimensional chairs.

Philip Curtis, the director of The Map House in London, talks about mapping Antarctica.

History, Archaeology, Anthropology

We reported previously that Stonehenge’s altar stone had been identified as originating in NE Scotland. Now it seems that the front runner locations, Orkney, has been ruled out.

Further up into the cold lands, archaeologists are shedding light on a little known ancient culture in northern Greenland. [££££]

In Britain we are generally pretty ignorant about the way in which ancient India shaped science and mathematics.

Archaeologists in Spain have used DNA to uncover some of the secrets of a Christian cave-dwelling medieval community.

Meanwhile in Poland archaeologists have found the burial of two children suspected of being vampires.

Henry VIII did many notable things including accidentally changing the way we write history.

London

Our favourite London blogger, Diamond Geezer, visits Theobalds Grove (one stop outside Greater London). This is my home town; I was brought up just three minutes walk from this station! Needless to say it’s changed quite a bit since I last lived there in late 1970s.

I lived a couple of hundred yards down the road to the right of the church

Lifestyle, Personal Development, Beliefs

So just why do men bother with depilation?

Emma Beddington set out to see what it’s like to spend a day as a dog, and finds it impossible.

People

A German mathematician who lived in France as a hermit, left thousands of pages of work. Now there’s a debate over whether he was a mathematical genius or just a lonely madman. [LONG READ]

Shock, Horror, Humour, Wow!

And finally some pictures of the first UK Hobby Horse Championships.

history, memes

What Happened in 1724?

Here’s our next instalment of things that happened in ..24 years of yore.

Notable Events in 1724

7 April. The premiere performance, of Bach’s St John Passion (BWV 245) at St Nicholas Church, Leipzig.

22 April. Birth of Immanuel Kant, German philosopher (d.1804)

25 August. Birth of George Stubbs, English painter (d.1806)

24 September. The Paris Bourse, the stock exchange for France, is created by order of King Louis XV on the advice of Nicolas Ravot d’Ombreval, four years after a financial panic had shut down trading.

Unknown Date. Construction of Blenheim Palace (below) is completed. It is presented as a gift from the nation to the Duke of Marlborough, for his involvement in the Battle of Blenheim in 1704.

Blenheim Palace

Unknown Date. Founding of Longman, the oldest surviving publishing house in England.

amusements, quotes

Monthly Quotes

So here we are with this month’s selection of recently encountered quotes.

Five signs I’m probably a dragon:
• I hoard useless shiny things
• I eat too much
• I sleep too much
• I don’t like leaving my cave
• I have an excessive desire to flame annoying humans
[unknown]

I’m not angry, I am overstimulated.
I am not in a mood, I am recharging my limited social battery.
I am not being difficult, I need to understand the full context before I participate.
[unknown]

We are all meant to be naturalists, each in his own degree, and it is inexcusable to live in a world so full of the marvels of plant & animal life and to care for none of these things.
[Charlotte Mason]

Unfortunately some people were not put here to evolve. They are here to remind you what it looks like if you don’t.
[unknown]

Microsoft has actually brilliantly leveraged the lousy security landscape – for which they are in no small part responsible – to capture even larger market-share, as we now need commercial entities to produce the software required to protect us from their failures, and therefore need a more uniform environment to achieve the necessary scale. The uniformity then guarantees an ever greater scale for the inevitable conflagration. Monocultures guarantee one big fire instead of a bunch of small survivable ones. We really have no interest in learning from evolution, in no small part because it would produce fewer billionaires.
[Local Cranky IT Guy, via @adub, https://kolektiva.social/@adub]

In the thorny acacia trees of the Kalahari Desert, avian construction crews are hard at work.
[https://www.popsci.com/environment/bird-culture/]
That should be a great opening sentence for a Terry Pratchett novel!

The world is very very beautiful if you look at it, but most people don’t look very much.
[David Hockney]

Don’t think about making art. Just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it’s good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they’re deciding, make more art.
[Andy Warhol]

Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
[Denis Diderot, French philosopher]

A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence.
[David Hume (1711-1776), Scottish Philosopher]

But, good God! what an age is this, and what a world is this! that a man cannot live without playing the knave and dissimulation.
[Samuel Pepys]

Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.
[Henry David Thoreau]

amusements, books, memes, words

September Quiz Answers

Literature

  1. What is Shakespeare’s shortest play?  The Comedy of Errors, with 1,787 lines and 14,369 words
  2. The Chronicles of Narnia is a children’s book series written by which author?  CS Lewis
  3. What German loanword means a novel that focuses on the psychological and personal growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood?  Bildungsroman
  4. Who is the author of the play The Importance of Being Earnest?  Oscar Wilde
  5. Who wrote the line “Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker”?  Ogden Nash

Answers were correct when questions were compiled in late 2023.

food+drink

Culinary Adventures #113: Fennel Slaw

This one is so dead easy and quick that it almost doesn’t justify a post of its own!

I wanted something fairly plain but a good contrast to tonight’s barbeque-ish pork ribs – see my recipe of long ago. My first thought was coleslaw, but not only is it a bit hackneyed, we didn’t have the ingredients. Then I thought, if the supermarket can sell us a slaw made with celeriac … I wonder how well it would work with fennel. It did, and of course it’s so easy to do – so easy I’m not even going to write a traditional-style recipe.

I used two small “banana” shallots, finely sliced (but a small onion would do); plus a nice fat, fresh bulb of fennel, also finely sliced. Add a couple of tablespoons of chopped fresh herbs (I had mint and parsley), a good grind of black pepper, and a couple of generous tablespoons of (light) mayonnaise. Mix well, cover, and chill in the fridge until needed (but preferably not too much more than an hour).

It worked extremely well with the ribs and garlic roast potatoes.

amusements, books, memes, words

September Quiz Questions

Each month we’re posing five pub quiz style questions, with a different subject each month. As before, they’re not difficult, but it is unlikely everyone will know all the answers – so hopefully you’ll learn something new, as well as having a bit of fun.

Literature

  1. What is Shakespeare’s shortest play?
  2. The Chronicles of Narnia is a children’s book series written by which author?
  3. What German loanword means a novel that focuses on the psychological and personal growth of the protagonist from youth to adulthood?
  4. Who is the author of the play The Importance of Being Earnest?
  5. Who wrote the line “Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker”?

Answers will be posted in 2 weeks time.

history, memes

September 1924

Our look at some of the significant happenings 100 years ago this month.

2. Born. Daniel arap Moi, 2nd President of Kenya (d. 2020)

4. Born. Joan Aiken, English writer (d. 2004)

16. Born. Lauren Bacall, American actress (d. 2014)

28. US Army pilots John Harding and Erik Nelson complete the first aerial circumnavigation of the globe; it has taken them 175 days and 74 stops before their return to Seattle

30. Born. Truman Capote, American author (d. 1984)