The NYT has a nice slideshow up detailing the variety of cover art for one of the best and most-often illustrated novels of all, Moby Dick. Below is the strangest cover of them all.
Eric Cantor to give speech on "how we make sure the people at the top stay there." Not from The Onion.
The arm and torch of the Statue of Liberty in Madison Square Park, New York. These portions of the Statue were exhibited to raise funds for the completion of the statue and its pedestal. The arm and torch remained in the park from 1876 until 1882. Members of the public could pay fifty cents to climb to the balcony of the torch.
You know there's something wrong here when "the fish" are referred to in the singular, as if the moment they entered the boat the went from being animals to being food. Surreal.
Via Gizmodo.
"We are opening a window into the movies in our minds."UC Berkley scientists are pioneering a system "to capture visual activity in human brains and reconstruct it as digital video clips," technology that may someday allow us to TiVo our dreams. Yikes.
Invasion of Canada. Bombing raids on British industrial interests. Naval blockade. Chemical weapons. Six million troops fighting on the Eastern seaboard. This wasn't a crazy Nazi plan. It was the United States' strategy to destroy Britain as a world superpower.How the US Planned to Destroy Britain Just a Few Years Before World War II. It actually sounds like this was a lot more than just an elaborate contingency plan, since the US had already built three disguised airfields in Canada for War Plan Red.
Wired has an amazing piece up about the "holy grail" of Nintendo game collecting, previously discussed on this very blog. Of course, some trail-blazing video game collector bought 7 of the 26 known copies of the most desired video game on the planet sometime in the mid-90s. He paid as little as $50 for what now goes for as much as $17,000.
Wyndham Lewis' brain, preserved in a jar. Science's revenge on one of its major early 20th century critics, or self-parodic evidence of a scientific ideological vapidness? Amazing.
How Doc Brown and Marty McFly became friends.
What I'm really looking for, though, is an explanation of where Marty #2, from alternate-1985, gets sent at the end of Back to the Future part 1. My money's on a prehistoric wasteland.
“One developmental milestone is when infants begin to relate adult sound patterns to specific meanings,” wrote Berg’s team, who described their findings July 13 Proceedings of The Royal Society B. “Among these sounds, an individual’s own name is one of the earliest adult words for which infants show evidence of acoustic pattern recognition. Our study suggests that at least a moderately convergent process may occur in parrots.”Whales might not be the only wild animals to have individualized names. Wired reports.
Via Mitch, a stunning Sotheby's auction for the savvy buyer: James Joyce's war-time passport. Here are the details:
JOYCE'S WARTIME FAMILY PASSPORT, AS ISSUED BY THE BRITISH CONSUL-GENERAL AT ZURICH, SWITZERLAND TO ALLOW "MR JAMES JOYCE, AND WIFE MRS NORA JOYCE TO PASS FREELY WITHOUT LET OR HINDRANCE...", PASSPORT NO.557, ISSUED AND STAMPED 10 AUGUST 1915
