The Vesuvius Challenge awards its Grand Prize in the contest to read a carbonized scroll from the Villa of the Papyri: "We Can Now Read the First Scroll." Seems to be part of an Epicurean treatise about the pleasure of listening to music.
Kagen Sound's amazing wooden puzzle boxes.
Interesting piece at Reason on some company coal towns in Iowa that seem to have been both integrated and nice places to live – so long as the coal lasted, which wasn't very long.
Cute 10-minute video in which Japanese carpentry students build the frame of a pagoda in the traditional manner, with no nails or screws. As a safety-trained American it freaked me out to see a sharp chisel used on a block held in place by a bare foot.
Pretty good, somewhat anti-trans article in the NY Times about the changing nature of the trans population. One de-transitioning 23-year-old says, “What should be a medical and psychological issue has been morphed into a political one. It’s a mess.”
According to the Guardian, more than 10,000 scientific papers were formally withdrawn last year. This piece focuses, not on the sins of famous scientists, but on the "mills" that are turning out hundreds of dubious papers a year.
Despite claims that we are busier than ever, Americans seem to be sleeping more than we used to. Did you know that sleep number beds collect and share data on your sleep habits?
Grave of an Avar warrior from the 7th century includes a complete set of lamellar (scale) armor.
Chinese people upset about the decline of stock prices have found an interesting place to post their angry comments: as part of a US Embassy thread on giraffe conservation.
A Tumblr displaying the AI-generated paintings of an imaginary 19th-century painter whose stuff looks a lot like William Waterhouse. Very interesting, actually. One the one hand this is bad for artists, but on the other it is good for people like me who want to create images of our fantasy worlds but can't draw. (So far I have put this off as a potential gigantic time sink.)
Fossils of a 350-million-year-old tree provide some insight into the leaves and branches of early trees, which are known mostly from fossils of their trunks. "A perpetual bad-hair day." (Science, NY Times)
Archaeologists find a blacksmith's shop in Oxfordshire that may date back to 770 BC, the beginning of the British Iron Age. Best of all, it's in a range of hills called the Wittenham Clumps.
Scott Siskind notes that people who write books about themselves are not like other people, so memoirs by polyamorous people don't necessarily reveal much about most polyamorous people. This generalizes broadly: people who write about politics are not politically like other people, people who went to January 6 are not representative of Trump voters, people who make videos about their houses do not have normal houses, etc. I wonder all the time about the implications of this for doing history.
Last year the US imported more from Mexico than from China, for the first time in 20 years. (X, NY Times). Some of this is just moving the assembly of final products from China, so there are still a lot of Chinese parts that don't count in the statistics.
Mysterious deposit of black henbane seeds from Roman-period site in the Netherlands; black henbane is one of the plants that is hallucinogenic if you take just the right amount but kills you if you take too much.
Some of the new art in the NYC Subway.
Advice from 1340 on how to recognize a werewolf.
Remarkable pair of two-minute videos documenting the destruction of a small Russian armored column by drones and artillery.
1 comment:
Cute 10-minute video in which Japanese carpentry students build the frame of a pagoda in the traditional manner, with no nails or screws. As a safety-trained American it freaked me out to see a sharp chisel used on a block held in place by a bare foot.
I can understand where the instinct for alarm is coming from, but A) there's actually more than just his foot holding the block, B) even if the block somehow slipped, the chisel is below the level of his foot and can only possible slip sideways or be driven further down through the wood, not somehow come upward to hit and harm his foot, and C) the person in question has, to all appearances, spent an entire lifetime working with chisels and is a true master at the craft.
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