YES: Let Children Get Bored Again: Boredom teaches us that life isn’t a parade of amusements. More important, it spawns creativity and self-sufficiency
Editing Isaiah Berlin: “You will surely by now not be surprised by my total inaccuracy, vagueness and tremendous distortion of Quotations
Philosophers tend to speak to one another. But so-called public philosophy aspires to liberate the field from the academy. Is that a good thing
Big Think – Or how I learned to stop worrying and love my tsundoku…
- “Many readers buy books with every intention of reading them only to let them linger on the shelf.
- Statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb believes surrounding ourselves with unread books enriches our lives as they remind us of all we don’t know.
- The Japanese call this practice tsundoku, and it may provide lasting benefits.” [Yes, thank you – read on….]
Life Is So Beautiful, Hugh Hollowell shares a story of doomsday, neighbors, and goodwill.
I was particularly interested to learn about Death, a Detroit band that the NY Times called “Punk Before Punk Was Punk”:
Turns out animal intelligence is not so different from our own
LIKE THEIR PARENTS, MILLENNIALS ARE BUYING WATER BEDS: “It’s like salmon. They’ll return to the place where they were spawned
Sierra Club – Does a Bear Think in the Woods?: “…Seen through this lens, a bear’s landscape is a place inscribed with the etchings of society. That would make the woods something we might call a neighborhood rather than mere habitat; it might prompt us to consider the residents as thinking, feeling individuals as opposed to mere creatures. Chris Darimont, a conservation scientist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, has suggested that people should view wildlife habitat issues in a new light: Environmental degradation isn’t just about animal population trends; it’s also about animals’ lived experience of hardship.
In this time lapse filmed by Jan van IJken, the embryo of a salamander is shown transforming into a hatched tadpole, from a single cell to a complex organism in a three-week process that’s condensed into just six minutes of video.
The first stages of embryonic development are roughly the same for all animals, including humans. In the film, we can observe a universal process which normally is invisible: the very beginning of an animal’s life. A single cell is transformed into a complete, complex living organism with a beating heart and running bloodstream.
The Royal Mail in the UK have released a set of stamps that feature drawings done by Leonardo da Vinci.
The Royal Collection holds the greatest collection of Leonardo’s drawings in existence, housed in the Print Room at Windsor Castle. Because they have been protected from light, fire and flood, they are in almost pristine condition and allow us to see exactly what Leonardo intended — and to observe his hand and mind at work, after a span of five centuries. These drawings are among the greatest artistic treasures of the United Kingdom.
The drawings are all taken from a collection owned by the royal family and will be featured in a distributed exhibition of Leonardo’s drawings happening around the UK this year. (via colossal)
A Detailed Map of Medieval Trade Routes in Europe, Asia, and Africa
Vice. Inventive filmmaking from McKay. Watching parts of this was difficult though…Cheney is a ghoul. (B+)
Bird Box. Mindless but fun. The aliens made no sense… (B)
Rainbrow. Faces weren’t designed to control games. I think I may have sprained my eyebrows? (C+)
Roma. A masterpiece from Cuarón. My pick for the best film of 2018. (A)
A Fish Called Wanda. What was the middle one again? (B+)
The Apollo 13 series on the Brady Heywood Podcast. Sean Brady is a forensic engineer and in this five-part series about the Apollo 13 mission, he does a play-by-play of what went wrong on the mission and how the NASA and the three astronauts worked together to solve it. This is five hours of storytelling stuffed full of technical details and I was completely riveted the entire time. A thrilling engineering tale. (A)
Uplift standing desk. Still getting used to it, but I like being able to alternate between sitting and standing. (B+)
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I read the Simon Armitage translation to the kids as our bedtime story over the course of a few weeks. The English epic was not the fan favorite that Harry Potter or the Odyssey were. (B)
The Departed. Probably not the best Scorsese film but perhaps my favorite? (A)
Desktop Tower Defense. I still love this game. (A-)
Coming of Age in the Milky Way by Timothy Ferris. A bracing history of how humans learned where and when we are in the universe. (B+)
They Shall Not Grow Old. The restoration & colorization brought World War Iright into the present, but I found myself wondering if all the digital editing & sound effects crossed the line into fiction. (B+)
