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Friday, December 31st, 2021
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17:29
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The curious history of the clothespeg
"By the early 20th century the equivalent of 500,000 board-feet of lumber (perhaps 700 tonnes) a year, in the form of sawmill waste, were being pulled from the Green Mountains to make pegs at a rate of more than 20,000 a day. The Smith-Moore peg is a triumph of design, equally pleasing when mini (to clip a sprig of lavender to a martini glass, or a favour to a wedding menu) or when maxi, as in Claes Oldenburg’s 14-metre-high steel “Clothespin” in Philadelphia. In 150 years, this item has not been improved on. .. In 2009 the last domestic peg clittered off the production line, and the last owner of the National Clothespin Company was buried under a five-foot reclining version, in grey granite, that looked as dead as he was.
Odd then, but true, that at the same moment, in various places, sales of pegs began to soar. In 2007 Asda, a supermarket chain, reported that British sales had risen by 1,400% in the first four months of the year compared with the year before. Such a spike was mystifying, and a shock. Moreover, plastic pegs (which degraded in sunlight) were losing out to traditional wooden ones. The switch to wood was a by-product of nascent hipster culture, with its love of beards, craft beer, bicycles-with-baskets, milk-rounds and all things retro; the return to pegs, though, seemed part-caused by guilt at the amount of carbon dioxide, 1.5kg, emitted by each cycle of a tumble-drier. The two trends together resulted in a renaissance. Along the back-roads of both New and Old England, smaller companies sprang up again to make thousands of wooden artisan pegs of good hazel and ash."
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(ir ko piebilst)
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| Monday, December 27th, 2021
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18:00
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| Tuesday, December 21st, 2021
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15:32
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The Scholarly Pursuit of Shrek: 20 Years of Ogres and Irony
"Gibson is a strong advocate for the franchise for subverting the standard othering of the disabled, praising the stereotyped and feared ogre for not only surviving the judgement of the society he lives in, but finding love, personal satisfaction and being centered as the morally upright protagonist. She contrasts this with how disability has been represented in animation in the recent past, othered characters who are turned into ‘beasts’ as punishment, then either killed or ‘cured’ by the love of a ‘normal’ person. .. Holliday’s presentation, “Man, This Would Be So Much Easier If I Wasn’t Colorblind: Shrek and the ‘Digital Postracial,’” comes in hot by illustrating the ‘colorblindness’ of the Shrek voice cast as an extension of the post-racial ethos of the Obama administration in the U.S."
"The Sick Woman is an identity and body that can belong to anyone denied the privileged existence—or the cruelly optimistic promise of such an existence—of the white, straight, healthy, neurotypical, upper and middle-class, cis and able-bodied man .. The theory goes much further, connecting to how chronic illness, including mental illness, affects the politics of the body and ability to move through the world. “How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed?” she asks. How do you throw a plate of ogre slop at a donkey if you can’t leave your swamp? .. Zhonga proceeds to make the argument that while Shrek is a white-coded, cis and straight fictional ogre, he embodies many of the qualities of the sick woman—he is not wealthy, we are to assume he can’t just go to a dentist, the inciting incident of the first movie seeks to displace Shrek and his community from their homes (insecure housing), and he has little to no influence on the society he lives in whatsoever."
"[Lagunas] says that [Fiona's] femininity is empowering and disempowering, with the acceptance of her ogre body leading to little more than motherhood and being Shrek’s waifu in the same way that Shrek’s acceptance of himself still hits the same Big Lesson that the movies the franchise claims to be parodying does.
He asks questions that pop feminism of the 2000s did not—can a woman change the world while still held in the trappings of domesticity (yes), can motherhood be considered an adventure (yes), does Shrek 4 comment on the traditionally feminine plotlines that Fiona was subjected to after her liberation from the tower by letting her dissident body out into the world to experience “the revelation of desire?” Yes!"
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(ir ko piebilst)
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| Wednesday, December 15th, 2021
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23:25
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| Monday, December 13th, 2021
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11:06 - 2021. gada tēju tops
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| Sunday, November 14th, 2021
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11:00
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The Danish language's irritable vowel syndrome
"A 15-month-old Croatian child understands approximately 150 words, while a Danish child of the same age understands just 84 on average.
“The number of vowels has big significance for how difficult it is to learn a language. Many vowels makes a difficult language. [..] The official number of vowels in Danish is nine: a, e, i, o, u, æ, ø, å and y. [..] But written Danish is not the issue. The problems start when Danes speak. In spoken speech, Danish actually has some 40 vowel sounds, depending upon where the vowels are placed in words and sentence strings."
"Compared to Norwegian children, who are learning a very similar language, Danish kids on average know 30% fewer words at 15 months and take nearly two years longer to learn the past tense." (x)
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(ir ko piebilst)
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| Thursday, November 11th, 2021
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14:26
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The Gradual Extinction of Softness by Chantha Nguon with Kim Green
"A good Asian woman is supposed to shine dimly, like a moon, and reflect her husband’s sunlight. Her skirts must not rustle when she walks. She cannot show anger. Even her laugh should be quiet and demure.
When I first met my future husband Chan, I tried to be his silvery moonlight woman. In our first years together — running from Saigon, then waiting for years in the refugee camps — I strove to follow the Chbab Srey ["Rules for Women"]. But I discovered that obedience could not be exchanged for rice and was therefore of little use. “You are not an Asian woman at all,” Chan told me once, smiling his half-joke smile.
My parents must have wanted a moonlight life for me. Why else would they name me Chantha, “the light of the moon”?
My family left the world before I could disappoint them.
We have a saying in Cambodia: “Men are like gold; women are like cloth.” It means men are a treasure, and women can be thrown away very easily. But more than that, it means that when a man falls into the dirt, he can be polished clean, but a woman will be soiled forever."
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(ir ko piebilst)
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| Wednesday, September 15th, 2021
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12:38
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Sweet-taste perception changes as children develop
"Compared with adults, children and adolescents are less sensitive to the sweet taste and need 40% more sucrose in a solution for them to detect the taste of sugar."
"Scientific literature suggests that children's liking for all that is sweet is not solely a product of modern-day technology and advertising but reflects their basic biology. .. heightened preference for sweet-tasting foods and beverages during childhood is universal and evident among infants and children around the world." (x)
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(ir ko piebilst)
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11:13
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Little kids burn so much energy, they’re like a different species, study finds
"Infants between the ages of 9 and 15 months expend a stunning 50% more energy in 1 day than adults do, adjusted for body size. .. infants are born with the same metabolic rates as their mothers .. but between 9 and 15 months, they rev up their cells to burn energy faster .. Children’s metabolic rates stay high until age 5, but the rate slowly begins to glide down until it plateaus around age 20. Interestingly, adult rates are stable until age 60, when they begin to decline. After age 90, humans use about 26% less energy daily .."
"The study also found that pregnant women don’t have higher metabolic rates than other adults; their energy use and calorie consumption scales up with body size. .. The metabolic rate didn’t zoom up in hungry teenagers either, which also makes the findings seem counterintuitive. 'When kids hit puberty, there seems to be a big spike in how many calories they’re consuming. In your 30s and 40s, people often feel like they slow down; when menopause hits, you slow down more.' But metabolic rate doesn’t change at those times. Hormonal changes, stress, disease, growth, and activity levels influence appetite, energy, and body weight."
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(ir ko piebilst)
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| Monday, September 13th, 2021
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12:20
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10:35
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| Monday, September 6th, 2021
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09:38
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| Friday, September 3rd, 2021
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12:38
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12:04
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10:36
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| Monday, August 9th, 2021
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09:01
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Massive Bird Nests on Telephone Poles
"In the Kalahari Desert, South Africa, a native bird called the sociable weaver bird constructs massive nests that, from a distance, looks like a giant haystack that's fallen into a tree. The foundation of these nests are often trees or a utility pole such as the ones that carry telephone wires. Over these the birds create a frame with larger sticks and then build walls from dry grasses to form individual rooms, and line each chamber of the nest with softer grasses and fibers. Sharp spikes of straw protect the entrance tunnels from predators. These nests are the largest built by any bird, and are large enough to house over a hundred pairs of birds. Some sociable weaver nests have remained occupied for several generations spanning over 100 years."
"The birds acquired the name “sociable” not because they live in large colonies, but because they are known to share their nests with several other species including owls, vultures, eagles, red-headed finches, ashy tits, familiar chats, and many more. .. More residents mean more eyes keeping a watch for danger. And the weavers often learn from the other birds where new sources of food can be found."
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(1 comment | ir ko piebilst)
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08:57
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Squatting or Kneeling May Be Beneficial for Health
"To better understand the evolution of sedentary behaviors, the scientists studied inactivity in a group of Tanzanian hunter-gatherers, the Hadza, who have a lifestyle that is similar in some ways with how humans lived in the past.
.. the Hadza are sedentary for about as much time — around 9 to 10 hours per day — as humans in more developed countries. However, they appear to lack the markers of chronic diseases that are associated, in industrialized societies, with long periods of sitting. The reason for this disconnect may lie in how they rest.
'Even though there were long periods of inactivity, one of the key differences we noticed is that the Hadza are often resting in postures that require their muscles to maintain light levels of activity — either in a squat or kneeling.'"
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(ir ko piebilst)
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| Tuesday, August 3rd, 2021
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12:52
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The Bad Hair, Incorrect Feathering, and Missing Skin Flaps of Dinosaur Art
"Elephants, zebras, and rhinos would all look pretty different if they were interpreted the same way dinosaurs are."
"Most serious paleoart bases itself on the detailed findings of paleontologists, who can work for weeks or even years compiling the most accurate descriptions of ancient life they can, based on fossil remains. But Kosemen says that many dinosaur illustrations should take more cues from animals living today. Our world is full of unique animals that have squat fatty bodies, with all kinds of soft tissue features that are unlikely to have survived in fossils, such as pouches, wattles, or skin flaps. 'There could even be forms that no one has imagined,' says Kosemen. 'For example there could plant-eating dinosaurs that had pangolin or armadillo-like armor that wasn’t preserved in the fossil. There could also be dinosaurs with porcupine-type quills.'"
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(ir ko piebilst)
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12:33
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Smell You Later: The Weird Science of How Sweat Attracts
"A newborn baby, though helpless and immobile, will scooch preferentially toward their own birth mother’s odour when breast-milk pads from four different women are placed in the four corners of their cradle. Likewise, a mother can identify her own newborn baby by smell just a few hours after birth."
"Siblings and married couples are able to correctly identify the smell of people with whom they cohabitate. Even adult siblings who haven’t seen (or smelled) each other for more than two years can still correctly recognize their brother’s or sister’s unique odour print. .. People with anosmia—the inability to smell—often face relationship challenges: men without a sense of smell have fewer sexual partners while nonsmelling women are insecure in their relationships. Both are more prone to getting depressed."
"There would be several afternoon and evening smell-dating rounds in the city’s most bustling green space, Gorky Park, as part of a larger science-and-technology festival that takes place over a weekend in May. Random people wandering around the park, science nerds attending the festival, and those attracted to the event after seeing it advertised in local media would all participate. .. This being Russia, people who match up at the smell-dating event would be given exclusive entrance bracelets to a nearby VIP lounge tent so that couples could get to know each other over free, all-you-can-drink vodka cocktails."
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(1 comment | ir ko piebilst)
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| Tuesday, July 20th, 2021
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10:41
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