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Dr Alun Withey
To Tip or Not To Tip: A Victorian Traveller’s Perspective Like it or not, tipping is a big part of hospitality and the service industry. Debates about how...
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Like it or not, tipping is a big part of hospitality and the service industry. Debates about how much/whether to tip rumble on, but they are not new. Even in the 18th and 19th centuries, travellers were complaining about the amount of unwanted or unexpected extras they had to pay...
Wrong Side of...
Britain's sinking reputation The Anglo diaspora is horrified by the old country
8 months ago
Open Culture
The Skeleton Dance, Voted the 18th Best Cartoon of All Time, Is Now in the Public Domain (1929) The July 17, 1929 issue of Variety carried a notice about a laugh-filled new short film in which...
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The July 17, 1929 issue of Variety carried a notice about a laugh-filled new short film in which “skeletons hoof and frolic,” the peak of whose hilarity “is reached when one skeleton plays the spine of another in xylophone fashion, using a pair of thigh bones as hammers.” The...
The Scholar's Stage
Observations From India In November 2024, I traveled to India as part of a delegation hosted by the India Foundation. The...
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In November 2024, I traveled to India as part of a delegation hosted by the India Foundation. The foundation is a part of the new nationalist establishment steering Indian society. As they see things, India’s relationship with America has been mediated by hostile parties for too...
Classical Wisdom
Weekend Roundup Wisdom for the New Year
8 months ago
Overcoming Bias
Feels Gone Wrong The films A Complete Unknown, on Bob Dylan, and In Restless Dreams, on Paul Simon, make vivid to me...
8 months ago
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The films A Complete Unknown, on Bob Dylan, and In Restless Dreams, on Paul Simon, make vivid to me the huge emotional appeal of becoming a musician like them.
African History...
The pre-Islamic civilizations of west Africa While West Africa has been part of the Muslim world since the late Middle Ages, as famously...
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While West Africa has been part of the Muslim world since the late Middle Ages, as famously demonstrated by the golden pilgrimage of Mali's Mansa Musa in 1324, Islam had only arrived in the region at the close of the 1st millennium.
Flashbak
Welcome To Holy Land USA: Inside America’s Jerusalem, 1980 “You can tell that Garry Winogrand was my hero. I learned so much from him about how to tell a story...
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“You can tell that Garry Winogrand was my hero. I learned so much from him about how to tell a story or a joke within a frame” – Lisa Barlow, Holy Land, USA     In 1980s, Lisa Barlow found Jerusalem in a turning off Connecticut’s Route 69. A huge cross on the roadside alerted …...
Patterns in Humanity
2024 in writing A brief recap of my 2024 posts
8 months ago
Flashbak
Jean And Rose – A Paris Photo Love Story From 1929 In 1929, Jean, 20, was living on rue Clairault, Paris. He worked at a brokerage house on rue de la...
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In 1929, Jean, 20, was living on rue Clairault, Paris. He worked at a brokerage house on rue de la Grange Batelière. On December 11, Jean met Rose, 18, at the city’s Saint-Lazare metro station. She lived in the 15th arrondissement, and took classes in hairdressing at the École...
A Collection of...
Collections: Coinage and the Tyranny of Fantasy ‘Gold’ This week on the blog I want to take a brief detour into discussing historical coinage, particularly...
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This week on the blog I want to take a brief detour into discussing historical coinage, particularly in the context of modern fantasy and roleplaying settings. In particular, the notions I want to tackle are first how did ancient currency systems work in terms of value (what...
Classical Wisdom
Cicero and Leadership Philosophy in Action?
8 months ago
Flashbak
Lightning Strikes: William Jennings’ Early Photographs of Elusive Electricity Anglo-American photographer William Jennings (1860–1946) is best known for his aerial pictures of...
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Anglo-American photographer William Jennings (1860–1946) is best known for his aerial pictures of his adopted city of Philadelphia and the aeronautical industry, and photographs of lightning. Setting out to prove “lightning bolts were not of the zig-zag form pictured by artists”,...
Open Culture
Laurie Anderson’s Mind-Blowing Performance of C. P. Cavafy’s Poems “Waiting for the Barbarians” &... In the video above, Laurie Anderson describes C. P. Cavafy’s poem “Waiting for the Barbarians” as...
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In the video above, Laurie Anderson describes C. P. Cavafy’s poem “Waiting for the Barbarians” as being “set in ancient Rome.” That’s a reasonable interpretation, given that it contains an emperor, senators, and orators, though Cavafy himself said that none of them are...
Wrong Side of...
Truth in the old myths On Troy, King Arthur and the Flood of Noah
8 months ago
Flashbak
Street Shots of New York City in 1978 “Every day was like being in a scene from a movie set in the city” – George Wright     In ‘New York...
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“Every day was like being in a scene from a movie set in the city” – George Wright     In ‘New York 1978’, British photographer George Wright shows us the city. Having trained as a graphic design at London’s Wimbledon School of Art in the early 1970s, Wright took a class taught...
Open Culture
The Scene That Reveals the Beauty of Classic Hollywood Cinema 1939 is widely considered the greatest year in Hollywood history. Back then, writes 1939: The Year...
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1939 is widely considered the greatest year in Hollywood history. Back then, writes 1939: The Year in Movies author Tom Flannery, the so-called “Big Eight” major American studios “had a combined 590 actors, 114 directors and 340 writers under contract, each of whom worked an...
The Scholar's Stage
Science Proceeds One Question at a Time MIDWAY through his 900 page history of biology, zoologist Ernst Mayr considers the problem posed by...
8 months ago
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MIDWAY through his 900 page history of biology, zoologist Ernst Mayr considers the problem posed by Alfred Wallace. Wallace was a contemporary of Charles Darwin who independently developed a theory of speciation by means of natural selection. By the time Wallace came on the scene...
Dreams of Space -...
Space Ship to the Moon (1952) Happy New Year! A "Space Ship to the Moon" is your present for a new year. I really like the...
8 months ago
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Happy New Year! A "Space Ship to the Moon" is your present for a new year. I really like the illustrations in this book. The story is OK but the visions of spacecraft, a space station and mining on the Moon are worth seeing. This is a relatively low cost book used so if you like...
Flashbak
Historical Figures in Ridiculous Frippery: Ruff Love For Old Masters “If you spent your life concentrating on what everyone else thought of you, would you forget who you...
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“If you spent your life concentrating on what everyone else thought of you, would you forget who you really were? What if the face you showed the world turned out to be a mask… with nothing beneath it?” — Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes     Volker Hermes lampoons traditional...
Open Culture
What’s Entering the Public Domain in 2025: Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Faulkner’s The Sound and... Each Public Domain Day seems to bring us a richer crop of copyright-liberated books, plays, films,...
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Each Public Domain Day seems to bring us a richer crop of copyright-liberated books, plays, films, musical compositions, sound recordings, works of art, and other pieces of intellectual property. This year happens to be an especially notable one for connoisseurs of Belgian...
Hundred Rabbits
Summary of changes for December 2024 Hey everyone! This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects during the month of...
8 months ago
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Hey everyone! This is the list of all the changes we've done to our projects during the month of December. Summary Of Changes 100r.co, updated the documentation for our various projects. Left, added support for unicode input(Mastodon). Rabbit Waves, added a page on Air to Ground...
CrimethInc.
2024: Out of the Frying Pan, into the Fire : The Year in Review It’s time to take stock of the year have just lived through and get oriented for the year ahead....
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It’s time to take stock of the year have just lived through and get oriented for the year ahead. Here, we review the events of 2024 and our own contributions to the fight for a better world. A year that began amid genocide in Palestine and war in Ukraine and Sudan is concluding...
Overcoming Bias
What Culture Can You Trust? Star Wars came out when I was 17, and made a big impression on me; I loved it.
8 months ago
Hidden History
The Story of the Cow The history of the domestic cattle goes back at least 10,000 years. There are well over 1000...
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The history of the domestic cattle goes back at least 10,000 years. There are well over 1000 distinct breeds of Cattle in the world today, and somewhere between 1 and 1.5 billion individual animals, making them, by some counts, the fourth most numerous mammal in existence behind...
Flashbak
Views of Polar Regions: Watercolours By Queen Victoria’s Spy Illustrator Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Hamilton Smith (26 December 1776  – 21 September 1859) was an...
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Illustrator Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Hamilton Smith (26 December 1776  – 21 September 1859) was an English artist, naturalist, antiquary, illustrator, natural historian, soldier, explorer, writer and spy. That’s quite the package for a man who produced these drawings and...
Wrong Side of...
Technology indistinguishable from magic Our age of miracles: the medical breakthroughs of 2024
8 months ago
Open Culture
The Complete History of the Music Video: From the 1890s to Today If you want to understand the history of music videos, you must consider a lot of things that are...
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If you want to understand the history of music videos, you must consider a lot of things that are not obviously music videos. The Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star,” the first selection of MTV’s inaugural broadcast, must surely count as a music video — but then, it was...
Flashbak
The Metamorphoses du Jour by JJ Grandville – 1829 Told in 73 coloured lithographs, Les Metamorphoses du Jour (1829) by French artist J.J. Gandville...
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Told in 73 coloured lithographs, Les Metamorphoses du Jour (1829) by French artist J.J. Gandville (born Jean-Ignace-Isidore Gérard; 1803-1847) is a satire on the bourgeois middle class of Parisian society in the Romantic period. Grandville’s characters have a human body and an...
Wrong Side of...
The Indian-American century On the Anglo-Indo-sphere
8 months ago
Classical Wisdom
Three New Year’s Resolutions from Epicurus An Epic Start to the New Year
8 months ago
Open Culture
The Longest Construction Projects in History: Why Sagrada Família, the Milan Duomo, Greek Temples &... Public-transit projects are the religious building endeavors of twenty-first century America, less...
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Public-transit projects are the religious building endeavors of twenty-first century America, less because they’re motivated by the belief in any particular deity than by how much time and money they now require to complete. Take New York’s Second Avenue subway, whose less than...
Patterns in Humanity
Age and infertility Facts and misconceptions about maternal age-related infertility
8 months ago
Classical Wisdom
Weekend Roundup The Essential Greeks
8 months ago
African History...
The Meroitic script and the documents of ancient Kush (ca. 300BC-450CE) The Meroitic writing system of the kingdom of Kush is one of the best-known, yet most enigmatic...
8 months ago
Trying to Understand...
Le Missile passera toujours ... mais qui est prêt à l’admettre ? Another of my essays in French.
8 months ago
Overcoming Bias
Decision Selection Bias As futarchy interest and activity are way up lately, this seems a good time to elaborate on one of...
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As futarchy interest and activity are way up lately, this seems a good time to elaborate on one of its most technical issues, one that @metaproph3t also discussed recently: decision selection bias.
Global Inequality...
To be young, perchance to dream A review of Miloš Vojinović's “The political ideas of the Young Bosnia”
8 months ago
Flashbak
Leeds Kids the 1970s Self-styled ‘Luddite photographer” Eric Milese (“relatively recently gone digital – 2011”) named the...
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Self-styled ‘Luddite photographer” Eric Milese (“relatively recently gone digital – 2011”) named the picture below of kids ‘tobogganing’ down a dry, rocky slope in the northern English city of Leeds in the 1970s “The Cresta Run”. It is not the original Cresta Run, which is a...
The Universe of...
Does someone really have to do the dirty jobs? Doing the laundry used to be backbreaking toil. Haul the water, chop the wood, light the fire, heat...
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Doing the laundry used to be backbreaking toil. Haul the water, chop the wood, light the fire, heat the water, and now you are ready to begin the really tough part of the work. The old saying goes "Wash on Monday", because Monday is the day after your day of rest, and otherwise...
A Collection of...
Gap Week: December 27, 2024 (Year in Review) Hey folks! Year is coming to a close, so once again I’m going to offer a bit of an end-of-year...
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Hey folks! Year is coming to a close, so once again I’m going to offer a bit of an end-of-year reflection on the state of the project, along with a brief ‘what’s on the stove’ coverage of what may be coming up. Also, here’s a cat picture: In terms of the project itself, 2024 was,...
Open Culture
Benedict Cumberbatch Reads Kurt Vonnegut’s Letter of Advice to People Living in the Year 2088 There was a time when a company like Volkswagen could commission various luminaries to write letters...
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There was a time when a company like Volkswagen could commission various luminaries to write letters to the future, then publish them in Time magazine as part of an ad campaign. In fact, that time wasn’t so very long ago: it was the year 1988, to be precise, when no less an...
Flashbak
Bullshit Jobs: The Emptiness of Life In A Corporate Office “If one wanted to crush and destroy a man entirely, to mete out to him the most terrible punishment,...
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“If one wanted to crush and destroy a man entirely, to mete out to him the most terrible punishment, all one would have to do would be to make him do work that was completely and utterly devoid of usefulness and meaning.” – Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The House of the Dead   From faces...
Classical Wisdom
The Pompeii Mosaics Frozen by Fire
8 months ago
Flashbak
Mazes and Labyrinths: An Illustrated History (1922) “There is no route out of the maze. The maze shifts as you move through it, because it is alive.” –...
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“There is no route out of the maze. The maze shifts as you move through it, because it is alive.” – Philip K. Dick, VALIS     William H. Matthews leads us through his 1922 book Mazes and Labyrinths from his home in Ruislip in the English county of Middlesex. Compiled shortly...
Classical Wisdom
The Essential Greeks ***Now Enrolling: Starting January 15th, 2025
8 months ago
Open Culture
The New York Times Presents the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, Selected by 503 Novelists, Poets... For longtime readers of American book journalism, scrolling through the New York Times Book Review’s...
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For longtime readers of American book journalism, scrolling through the New York Times Book Review’s just-published list of the 100 best books of the twenty-first century will summon dim memories of many a once-unignorable critical fuss. At one time or another over the past 25...
The Universe of...
The mathematical past is a foreign country A modern presentation of the Peano axioms looks like this: is a natural number If is a natural...
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A modern presentation of the Peano axioms looks like this: is a natural number If is a natural number, then so is the result of appending an to the beginning of Nothing else is a natural number This baldly states that zero is a natural number. I think this is a 20th-century...
Classical Wisdom
Happy Holidays! Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah from Anya, Joel and Frida at the End of the World!
8 months ago
Dreams of Space -...
Santa and The Space Men It has been a while but here is a strange Christmas post for you.  Something about Santa and Flying...
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It has been a while but here is a strange Christmas post for you.  Something about Santa and Flying Saucers seems to go together like White wine and Cracker Jack. Sort of sweet and tangy and gets your attention. Santa and the Space Men is a play for children about how Santa is...