1. How ancient Greek statues really looked
Original Greek statues were brightly painted, but after thousands of years, those paints have worn away. Find out how shining a light on the statues can be all that’s required to see them as they were thousands of years ago.
2. A Classical Singer Analyzes 5 Classic Male Metal Singers
On Iron Maiden: Initial reaction: “The first two guys are so impeccable that they’re each in their own way presenting a manifesto on how to sing well, irrespective of musical genre”.I have nothing but admiration for this singer. Listen how he starts off with a soft growl, then moves seamlessly into a well-supported, sustained high full-voice sound that then evolves into an effortless long scream! His diction is easily intelligible, regardless of the range he’s singing in or the effect he’s going for. He achieves an intensely rhythmic delivery of the lyrics without losing legato and musical momentum, something a lot of classical singers struggle with, especially when interpreting the many staccato and accent markings that crowd scores by Bellini, Donizetti, etc.
(Via: Gene Veith )
3. Does Peter Parker Have a Moral Responsibility to Be Spider-Man?
Science wiz Peter Parker gains superpowers from the bite of a radioactive spider. Soon after, he presents himself to the world as the amazing Spider-Man, New York City’s friendly neighborhood superhero who helps the helpless, thwarts criminals, and in general tries to further the public good. Often, Peter wonders whether he should remain Spider-Man. The role taxes him significantly, hurting his studies and his personal life. Is Peter morally permitted to throw in his costume?
4. Teaching philosophy with Batman
For years, fans of the Batman comics have puzzled over a mystery at the heart of the series: why doesn’t Batman just kill his arch-nemesis, the murderous Joker?The two have engaged in a prolonged game of cat-and-mouse. The Joker commits a crime, Batman catches him, the Joker is locked up, and then invariably escapes.
Wouldn’t all this be much simpler if Batman just killed the Joker? What’s stopping him?
Enter philosopher Immanuel Kant and the deontological theory of ethics.
5. The class distention between Superman and Batman
Bruce Wayne is a rich man. He’s an artistocrat. Superman grew up as Clark Kent on a farm bailing hay, and he’s got a boss that shouts at him if he’s late to work. He’s actually more human; Batman is the fetish fantasy psyche of the aristocrat overlord who can do anything he wants, and that’s fascinating. The class difference between the two of them is important.
6. Bear News of the Week (Part I): Near Lake Tahoe There’s a Bear So Tough, Bullets Bounce Off His Head
7. Bear News of the Week (Part II): ‘Tame’ bears guard Canadian marijuana farm
8. Quote of the Week: “One has to care rather a lot about one’s reviews to go to the trouble of not reading them.” - Alain de Botton on the writerly ego.
9. Why do parachutes have holes?
10. Alan Jacobs on boredom :
In Boredom: the Literary History of a State of Mind , Patricia Meyer Spacks explains that boredom as such is a relatively recent invention, from the eighteenth century at the latest. Before that we had melancholy (which was a kind of affliction of the spirit) and, further back still, acedia (which was a sin). What’s distinctive about boredom is that we don’t see it as either a condition of our own selves or a sin, but rather something that just happens to us. When we’re bored, we don’t think there’s anything wrong with us: we think the world is at fault. Stupid old world — it doesn’t interest me. And interesting me is the world’s job.
11. When to use i.e., in a sentence
12. Image of the Week: Land of the Giants
american firm choi + shine architects recently received the 2010 boston society of architects award for unbuilt architecture for their project ‘the land of giants’, which they originally designed for the icelandic high voltage electrical pylon competition back in 2008.
13. Why Did Dutch People Wear Wooden Shoes?
14. 3-year-old recites “Litany” a 30 line poem by Billy Collins
15. How to Make Justin Bieber Sound Incredible: Slow Him Down 800 Percent
16. Infographic of the Week: The Stats on Slacking
17. 25 Bizarre Coins that are legal tender
18. Complicated mechanisms explained with GIFs
19. Jack London’s Dark Side
The United States has a startling ability to take its most angry, edgy radicals and turn them into cuddly eunuchs. The process begins the moment they die. Mark Twain is remembered as a quipster forever floating down the Mississippi River at sunset, while his polemics against the violent birth of the American empire lie unread and unremembered. Martin Luther King is remembered for his prose-poetry about children holding hands on a hill in Alabama, but few recall that he said the U.S. government was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”But perhaps the greatest act of historical castration is of Jack London. This man was the most-read revolutionary Socialist in American history, agitating for violent overthrow of the government and the assassination of political leaders—and he is remembered now for writing a cute story about a dog. It’s as if the Black Panthers were remembered, a century from now, for adding a pink tint to their afros.
20. 10 reasons why Goats are the most awesome animals
21. Trent Hamm: 48 Things Frugality Has Taught Me
1. I really like sun tea.2. The patience and effort in teaching yourself something new is incredibly rewarding when you begin to succeed at it (like my piano playing).
3. When you’re sitting around a table with friends, it really doesn’t matter where you’re at.
22. HistoricalLOL of the Week
23. The 50 best cookbooks of all time
24. The Most Isolated Man on the Planet
The most isolated man on the planet will spend tonight inside a leafy palm-thatch hut in the Brazilian Amazon. As always, insects will darn the air. Spider monkeys will patrol the treetops. Wild pigs will root in the undergrowth. And the man will remain a quietly anonymous fixture of the landscape, camouflaged to the point of near invisibility.
25. 10 Telephone Inventions That Failed Miserably
26. Why Salvador Dalí’s paintings are the junk food of art
The paintings are cosmic junkyards. Dalí fills them with ideas about atomic structure and topology derived from pop physics and math; with naked or nearly naked men in various states of perfection or dissolution; and with cultish renderings of the artist’s wife, Gala, impersonating the Madonna or Galatea or Saint Helena. These canvases, with their megalomaniacal variations on Christological themes, are the damnedest mix of busyness and desolation. There is much too much in them. There is also far too little. Your eyes are simultaneously over-stimulated and starved for something to look at. This is the visual equivalent of junk food.
27. How-To of the Week: Pour champagne correctly
28. The Switch and 17 Other Happy Rom-Coms That Are Actually Horrible and Cruel
29. Peru battles rabid vampire bats after 500 people bitten
Peru’s health ministry has sent emergency teams to a remote Amazon region to battle an outbreak of rabies spread by vampire bats.Four children in the Awajun indigenous tribe died after being bitten by the bloodsucking mammals.
Health workers have given rabies vaccine to more than 500 people who have also been attacked.
30. The 10 Highest-Paid Authors
31. Rubik’s Cube and God’s Algorithm
Every solver of the Cube uses an algorithm, which is a sequence of steps for solving the Cube . . . There are many different algorithms, varying in complexity and number of moves required, but those that can be memorized by a mortal typically require more than forty moves. One may suppose God would use a much more efficient algorithm, one that always uses the shortest sequence of moves; this is known as God’s Algorithm. The number of moves this algorithm would take in the worst case is called God’s Number. At long last, God’s Number has been shown to be 20.
32. Another 33 Things
33. Pole dancing, Indian style
Additional sources: The Presurfer , Neatorama , The Browser
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