It’s time for our annual pledge drive—just kidding! But it is my birthday (seriously), so if you want to give me a gift—and you’re still subscribed on purpose—I’d be grateful if you’d share Katexic Clippings with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, email, blogs, snail mail and CB radio. Or buy me a Nakaya Decapod Writer Aka-tamenuri with two-tone flexible medium nib…but sharing a link is way easier.
“As the physicist Paul Davies puts it, ‘If everything needs everything else, how did the communities of molecules ever arise in the first place?’ It is rather as if all the ingredients in your kitchen somehow got together and baked themselves into a cake—but a cake that could moreover divide when necessary to produce more cakes. It is little wonder that we call it the miracle of life. It is also little wonder that we have barely begun to understand it.”
—Bill Bryson
—from A Short History of Nearly Everything
retund. verb. To weaken or diminish. To repress, repel or refute. To drive back. From classical Latin retundere (to dull, blunt, repress, quell), from post-classical Latin (to refute).
“How then might shield, or breast-plate, or close mail Retund its edge?” (Robert Southey)
“…the air being variously impregnated, sometimes more and sometimes less, with vapours and exhalations fitted to retund and intercept the rays of light…” (George Berkeley)
“[The skull] is covered with skin and hair, which serve … to quench and dissipate the force of any stroke that shall be dealt it, and retund the edge of any weapon.” (John Ray)
“This is one day’s observations from Himawari–8, a Japanese weather satellite, animated in a loop. It shows the western Pacific, Australia, and parts of Asia, Antarctica, and Alaska as they looked on one day in mid–2015. It covers 24 hours in 12 seconds—a time lapse factor of 7,200×.” → Glittering Blue + A New and Stunning Way to See the Whole Earth
Oh, Merdle! → What the Deuce: The Curse Words of Charles Dickens.
Squick!, which leads me to the Wisdom of Repugnance, coined in 1977 in an article on cloning by Robert Klass, which is broken down clearly and logically by Don Berkich.
A powerful, lavishly illustrated story → Photographer Documenting the Homeless Discovers Her Own Father Among Them
On Not Reading shows that even a Dean at Yale like Amy Hungerford can be, as Shakespeare coined it, a lack-brain. Tom LeClair gives her proudly ignorant manifesto the thrashing it deserves.
The Fascinating Story Behind Why So Many Nail Technicians Are Vietnamese (hint: it involves Tippi Hedren and it was no accident).
Literary award offers $100,000 for books which have yet to be written
The Guide to Digitized Natural History Collections should keep your browser busy for a while.
A “radical burger joint” in Watts makes for an intriguing story of culture, food and conflict. → The People’s Cheeseburger
Today from 6:02 a.m. to 6:02 p.m. it is Mole Day, commemorating ► Avogadro’s Number (6.02 x 1023 – get it?), a basic unit of measurement in chemistry. If your chemistry skills are rusty, it’s basically this: one mole of any substance contains Avogadro’s Number of molecules or atoms of that substance. I can’t tell you how many times this tidbit has come in handy in my life. Also, today is the birthday of myself and, more importantly (literally and figuratively), my Grandma Lori…happy birthday, us!
Stutterer, an Oscar-winning short film by Benjamin Cleary, is well worth 13 minutes of your time. The film is described in the New Yorker:
“…a thirteen-minute movie about a young London typographer named Greenwood. Greenwood stutters, to the extent that verbal conversation is difficult. When he tries to resolve an issue with a service representative over the phone, he can’t get the words out; the operator, gruff and impatient, hangs up. When a woman approaches Greenwood on the street, he uses sign language to avoid talking. But in his thoughts, which we hear, he does not stutter. And when he chats online with a woman named Ellie he can express himself freely, and is casual, charming, and content. When Ellie writes that she’s coming to London, he panics. How he navigates her visit provides the film’s narrative and emotional suspense.”
This sign is just one of many found browsing the delightful Ask MetaFilter thread: “Looking for emphatic warnings against really bad ideas”.
Reader V.: “Thanks for the link to the article on driverless cars and the trolley problem. I’d never considered that conundrum in this context. Suddenly that philosophical chestnut is invigorating and not a little terrifying.”
Reader C. adds: “Sandel’s ‘Justice’ video series is very well done. But I can’t be the only reader who shivered a bit at some of the questions and comments by the students, our best and brightest!?”
Reader B. writes of the last issue: “Such a rich cargo in this one.” — Why thank you, kind sir!
And then Reader B. has thoughts and questions: "1: do people use fustian to suggest ‘fusty’? ¶ 2: I am heading back to Malta in January, and will check on “M’hawnx min ibul ma saqajk!”. The language is definitely curious to listen to, tonally a mix of Italian and Arabic. ¶ 3: that Awl piece is splendidly barbed, ‘spending hours of your spare time plowing through some dense and symbol-laden carnival of affectation and ambiguity only makes you resentful of the publishing industry that pushed the book on you in the first place…’ — Re: fusty and fustian: the roots don’t appear to be connected, though usage might conflate them. I take fusty as meaning stale, old or obsolete rather than the bombastic fustian.
Reader P. also enjoyed The Awl link: “It’s funny because it’s true.”
I welcome comments, suggestions, thoughts, feedback and all manner of what-have-you. Just press ‘Reply’ or email to: clippings@katexic.com.
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