Saturday, August 29, 2020

The mind cannot bear too much reality

We think linearly, in terms of cause and effect. But the world is an object lesson in  complexity  

 


Murder hornets and drunken wasps find ‘perfect breeding ground’.


 Survey says people who make their beds get better sleep, have more sex.



Clever Ep. 127: Artist & Designer Bethan Laura Wood


"Here are the greatest novels ever written about every sport."


People have made countless attempts to train animals to speak our language. Maybe we should learn to speak theirs  


36 Movie Sex Scenes That Changed Absolutely Everything


The least read masterpiece of 20th century thought? Carlo Michelstaedter’s Persuasion and Rhetoric, overlooked in part because the author killed himself at 23   Carlo on Thoughts 


Lead was not turned into gold, and astrology got us nowhere — what such magical impulses reveal is that the mind cannot bear too much reality...  Bearing Pain



Over 25 years, almost every book and map of value vanished from the Carnegie Library. How did the thief  pull it off?  



A word in your ear – why the rise of audiobooks is a story worth celebrating - The Guardian: “…audiobooks have been riding a wave of popularity in the past three years, and it appears that lockdown only intensified our engagement with the spoken word. A recent report by Deloitte put some numbers on the phenomenal rise. Global sales have been growing at 25-30% per annum for the past three years and will hit $3.5bn in 2020, driven by the US and China, which each make up around a third of the market (for comparison, global print book sales are a whopping $145bn per annum). 


Britain comes in fourth, accounting for a mere 2% of the global market Deloitte points out that it doesn’t appear that the growth in audiobook sales is at the expense of printed books. Audiobook listeners tend to be younger – in their 20s and 30s on average – and it may be that audiobooks are taking market share from ebooks, whose sales have been declining in recent years (Deloitte predicts that audiobook sales are likely to overtake ebooks in the next few years). The report also suggests that audiobooks could be reaching people who had previously eschewed books altogether, but were now devouring this new medium..”


Study: Singing Is No Riskier Than Talking

The project, called Perform, looked at the amount of aerosols and droplets generated by performers. The findings could have implications for live indoor performances, which resumed in England this week. They are currently only allowed to take place under strict social distancing guidelines. – BBC