Marc Salazaar picks the top Science, Popular Science, Art & Books:
This Month’s Inspiration:
Is one of my oldest favourite internet sites- Omniglot.com
The site describes itself as “the online encyclopaedia of writing systems and languages”, which is pretty self-explanatory, even if it doesn’t fully do justice to the sheer amount of information and scholarship there.
Book/Documentary/Photo-gallery of the Month:
Usually, I like to find a neat online gallery for this section, but this time I am going to cheat with a link to a Selection of weird and wonderful creatures on Pinterest that was compiled a little while back by our own “Dear Leader” on this site (editor). Anyway, the list is a compilation of images by other people and it still gets amended and expanded from time to time. Naturally, it is just one of a great many highly colourful boards on Pinterest, but some of the images there and the links that follow from them are well worth a look–
This Month’s recommended articles:
…are all rather arty/literary, rather than scientific, for a change, but great brain-food, nonetheless-
1)First-up is a fascinating piece on racism/anti-Semitism and Shakespeare in The New Yorker by regular New Yorker Contributor Stephen Greenblatt. Published in the July 10 & 17, 2017 issue, the article is called “Shakespeare’s cure for Xenophobia” and stands firmly at odds with the current much-debated “safe-space” ideology of some current university teaching-
2)Next is an article that could perhaps be called “The Quantitative Linguistics of Jane Austen” but, in fact, goes under the more poetic title of “The Word Choices That Explain Why Jane Austen Endures”, Written by Kathleen A. Flynn and Josh Katz, it was published in the “Upshot” section of the New York Times on 6th July 2017. You can find it online here-
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/06/upshot/the-word-choices-that-explain-why-jane-austen-endures.html
3)Finally, As well as being inherently interesting, This piece by Erin Van Rheenen on Colorado’s Yampa River [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yampa_River ] is a thought-provoking example of the way science, conservation, politics and writing can and often do merge and interplay, particularly in the case of environmental issues. –
See you next time.
- M. Salazaar.