Saturday, August 19, 2023

How Carl Linnaeus Set Out to Label All of Life 

He sorted and systematized and coined names for more than twelve thousand species. What do you call someone like that?

by Kathryn Schultz August 14, 2023 The New Yorker


Sunday, August 13, 2023

https://themorningnews.org/p/how-to-fold-three-great-paper-airplanes 

John Collins, who set the Guinness World Record for farthest flight by a paper aircraft in 2012, demonstrates how to fold three planes: a Suzanne (named after his wife), a tube, and a stunt plane called the boomerang.

 Paper Airplane Designs 

A database of paper airplanes with easy to follow folding instructions, video tutorials and printable folding plans. Find the best paper airplanes that fly the furthest and stay aloft the longest. Learn how to make paper airplanes that will impress your friends.

, video tutorials and printable folding plans. Find the best paper airplanes that fly the furthest and stay aloft the longest. Learn how to make paper airplanes that will impress your friends.

 

A Living History of The Humble Paper Airplane

SARAH WELLS AND JENNIFER LEMAN

Wednesday, August 2, 2023

Reading Well by Simon Sarris (July 17 2023)

The Map is Mostly Water

https://map.simonsarris.com/p/reading-well

Reading is alluring. It has a nameless quality beyond satisfying desires for information and pleasure. Despite more colorful and interactive media, reading text somehow remains more refined, more seductive. There is a visceral feeling to good reading. Partly this is because reading is nearly solitary.


At the beginning you are alone with just the characters. By the end, you are alone with just the author. To hear him well demands no other distractions. When one reads, or at least when I read, it is always very slowly and in a voice. Perhaps you have already imagined a voice you are reading this in. Say hello for me.


Reading is letting someone else model the world for you. This is an act of intimacy. When the author is morose, you become morose. When he is mirthful, eventually you may share in it. And after finishing a very good book one is driven a little mad, forced to return from a world that no one nearby has witnessed.

Saturday, July 22, 2023

How secret languages thrive behind bars

On a now-private Facebook page, a prison guard in Texas casually joked last month about wanting to “gas” prisoners (throw urine or feces at them). Others in Georgia and Missouri posted about putting inmates in “the box” or “the hole” (slang for sending them to disciplinary confinement).

The incident, which was revealed by local journalists, led to prison officials promising disciplinary measures, up to termination, for the guards. But it also provided a rare window into the language that grows behind prisons walls, as well as the prison culture of casual violence — one reason that this vernacular exists.