I always assumed they wore sandals. Fashionable 2,000-Year-Old Roman Shoe Found in a Well. “If you think the Italians have mastered the craft of making shoes, well, they don’t have much on their ancestors.” I didn’t realize that the Romans invented the foot-encasing shoe.
If you’re one of the people who claim to have problems going to sleep, this guy Moby is the one who did the “Extreme Ways” song on the Jason Bourne soundtrack (The Bourne Legacy, which I liked). Apparently he also has trouble sleeping.
H/T Open Culture.
Freakonomics: The Economics of Sleep, part 1 (part 2 here).
Plus (ahem) previously.
MIT Tech Review: Your brain limits you to just five BFF’s. Dunbar’s number isn’t just one number.
There’s a Zinc flash at the moment of conception.
Phys.org: New State of Water Molecule Discovered. Quantum tunneling!!!
NPR: 40 Years On, the Genius of 2112.
ExJon: Shun the Crowd, Embrace the Remnant
Acton: Bruce Wayne, Capitalist Superhero:
What we have in Bruce Wayne, CEO, then, is an embodiment of noblesse oblige, the idea that nobility (an elevated position in society) comes with certain responsibilities. The concept has been tainted in the minds of some by its association with hereditary aristocracy and paternalism, but the essential idea is praiseworthy.
Luna thought that Ron might suffer from a variety of this problem.
Awe-inspiring: a type II-P supernova caught in mid-burst. The explosion takes months, then hours, then no time at all. (Kind of like Hemingway’s character’s bankruptcy.)
An MIT course in how to make your own videos to publish on YouTube. (Ignore the headline.)
Finally, a beautiful video of undisturbed places. Trust me.
Don’t count on a lot of new state spending. Thoughts on 20-dollar oil.
I can barely understand the abstract:
The Arctic Ocean is undergoing rapid climatic changes including higher ocean temperatures, reduced sea ice, glacier and Greenland Ice Sheet melting, greater marine productivity, and altered carbon cycling. Until recently, the relationship between climate and Arctic biological systems was poorly known, but this has changed substantially as advances in paleoclimatology, micropaleontology, vertebrate paleontology, and molecular genetics show that Arctic ecosystem history reflects global and regional climatic changes over all timescales and climate states…. Climate-driven biological impacts included large changes in species diversity, primary productivity, species’ geographic range shifts into and out of the Arctic, community restructuring, and possible hybridization, but evidence is not sufficient to determine whether or when major episodes of extinction occurred.
An easy way to lie with data: use two Y-axes.
You and [his son, who’s a doctor] are very big into truth, truth, truth, yes, yes, yes. But denial – respect denial. It’s very important in the human architecture. It’s what we do when we can’t face what the world throws at us. It’s what helps us get up in the morning, until enough mornings pass that we begin to walk upright in the world.
—Ron Suskind, quoting his friend Max Pluskey
From a talk at Calvin College talking about the story behind his book, Life, Animated.
(Cross-posted from my other blog.)
Dave Winer says we should do more short-form blogging. Why should we give it all to Twitter?