- In The Guardian: why we are fascinated by miniature books. And when they say “miniature,” they really mean it: the smallest is less than 100 micrometers (around the diameter of a human hair) in width and height and has pages that have to be turned with a sharpened needle. ※ David Bowie’s 100 Favorite Books doesn’t include any miniatures, but it’s fun to browse anyway.
- I hear Grover swearing in this Sesame Street clip and now I can’t unhear it. But, an audiologist explains that it’s all in my ears. What do you hear?
- In The New York Times and in The Atlantic, stories about the discovery of flecks of lapis lazuli in the tartar of a 10th century-nun and what it tell us about forgotten medieval female scribes.
- I’ve featured various kinds of typewriter art and sculpture here before, but Jeremy Mayer’s human(ish) sculptures made of typewriter parts are a whole different thing.
- @TerribleMaps on Twitter. Trust me.
- This American Life‘s “The Room of Requirement” is extraordinary for its range (the Brautigan Library!) and emotion (homeless girl befriends children’s librarian, ultimately becomes one herself, and then journeys back to meet the woman who changed her life). ※ See also: the 110-Year-Old Dead Tree that is Now a Magical Little Library.
- The story of Justin Alexander is one of spiritual seeking, sadhus, suspicion and disappearance in a remote region of the Indian Himalayas.
- A treat for your eyes: Booooooom‘s 64 Favorite Photos by 64 Photographers: 2018 Edition ※ See also: Anastasia Pottinger’s Centenarians and Time Lapse Video of Keith WIlliams Making Geodesic Spheres
- The occasional weird links dump: silver skivvies and Costco’s 7-pound tub of Nutella (plus the Quartz Obsession: Nutella) and HATETRIS and The Influencer who Didn’t Influence and ► 15 Minutes by Tim Minchin and Who is Little Debbie?.
- Today in 1935, comedian Rip Taylor is born in Washington, D.C. The handlebar mustache and toupee wearing, confetti and prop wielding comic was Carrot Top (but actually funny) before there was a Carrot Top. Taylor was a regular on the Ed Sullivan Show, a regular Atlantic City performer, a 1970s TV game show fixture, a voice on various cartoons from Scooby-Doo to The Addams Family, touring partner with Judy Garland, Debbie Reynolds and Mickey Rooney, and a guest on various 80s and 90s sitcom and a part of the Jackass, umm, universe. ※ Watch Taylor’s appearance on David Letterman in 1987, an early 80s interview with Taylor, Phyllis Diller, Marcia Lewis and Melanie Chartoff and his appearance on “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver”.
The Lighthouse
Made from over 14,000 photographs and constructed over seven years, Simon Schreiber’s short stop-motion film ► The Lighthouse tells the story of “a lighthouse keeper’s surprising discovery pulls him out of his monotonous, daily routine and takes him onto a journey into uncharted territory.”
Masayo Fukuda’s Kirie/Kirigami
from Arcadia (Tom Stoppard)
It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing. People were talking about the end of physics. Relativity and quantum looked as if they were going to clean out the whole problem between them. A theory of everything. But they only explained the very big and the very small. The universe, the elementary particles. The ordinary-sized stuff which is our Jives, the things people write poetry about—clouds—daffodils—waterfalls—and what happens in a cup of coffee when the cream goes in—these things are full of mystery, as mysterious to us as the heavens were to the Greeks. We’re better at predicting events at the edge of the galaxy or inside the nucleus of an atom than whether it’ll rain on auntie’s garden party three Sundays from now. Because the problem turns out to be different. We can’t even predict the next drip from a dripping tap when it gets irregular. Each drip sets up the conditions for the next, the smallest variation blows prediction apart, and the weather is unpredictable the same way, will always be unpredictable. When you push the numbers through the computer you can see it on the screen. The future is disorder. A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It’s the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.
—Tom Stoppard
—from Arcadia: A Play in Two Acts
galore
galore /gə-LORE/. adjective. In large quantity; in abundance. From Irish go leor, from Gaelic gu leòr (to sufficiency).
[Read more…]WEB: January 6, 2019
- Yeet! It’s the first newsletter of the year, which means it’s time for Word(s) of the Year! First, WOTY winners and short lists: American Dialect Society (and nominees), Merriam-Webster’s, Dictionary.com, Collins, Oxford, Cambridge Dictionaries, Australian National Dictionary Centre, LinguiBishes and Geoff Nunberg. ※ Plus, WOTYs in German, Dutch and Japanese. ※ Finally, some grist for the mill on such lists: Language nerds worked really hard on that ‘Words of the Year’ list and Language Jones on the problematic nature of such lists.
- Let the Fountain Pens Flow! is a solid story about the ongoing renaissance of fountain pen use, including some of my favorite pen world personalities.
- The fascinating story of David Maurer, the dean of criminal language.
- The story of Wilson Bentley’s Crystal castles: the first snowflake photos — in pictures is a visually arresting story with a sadly ironic end. Via MR TH.INK which I encourage you to subscribe to. ※ While I’m at it, I discovered the captivating, and occasionally terrifying, profile The Whalers’ Odyssey in that wonderful newsletter too.
- The Mind is a Collection is a “born-digital museum of early-modern cognitive models.” ※ The Mind is a Metaphor is a “collection of eighteenth-century metaphors of mind.”
- RIP Bob Einstein. Many know him best as ► Super Dave and he appeared on all kinds of media since those days, where he inevitably stole the show. Others will remember him as Curb Your Enthusiasm regular Marty Funkhouser, where he provided one of my ► favorite (and most profane, definitely NSFW) tv comedy moments of all time.
- A look at children texting with (often solely) emoji and digital-age language learning. ※ See also: Teenage Girls Have Led Language Innovation for Centuries.
- “Copyrights, patents and trademarks are all important, but the term ‘intellectual property’ is nonsensical and pernicious.” I couldn’t agree more (convince me I’m wrong)!
- I’m “152: Emotions & senses” — Which Dewey Decimal Number Are You?
- Today in 1987, astronomers report witnessing the birth of a galaxy for the first time. The New York Times described the event as “detecting evidence that perhaps a billion suns ignited within a huge gas cloud 71 billion trillion miles from Earth.” Given the evocative name Radio Galaxy 3C 326, this area would later yield photos of one galaxy, 3C 326 North, “stealing” gases from its smaller neighbor, 3C 326 South. Incidentally, a “billion trillion” is also known as a sextillion (1 followed by 21 zeros) and, according to the Light Speed Calculator, light from that galaxy would take more than 170 million years to reach Earth. And in 2010, astronomers asserted that ‘Trillions Of Earths’ Could Be Orbiting 300 Sextillion Stars in our universe, three times as many as previously estimated.
Four Generations
The ► Four Generations meme is so simple and delightful…and joyous.
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