Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Ficino on Honey

It is pleasant to remind you again how Democritus, when he was at the point of death, to gratify the wishes of his friends retained his spirit for four days by the smell of hot loaves; he would have kept his spirit even longer if only it had pleased him to do so. There are also those who say that he did this by the smell of honey. I think that if he used honey at all, he poured it, liquefied with white wine, into the hot loaves. For the odor of honey is not to be scorned; for it is the flower of flowers; it nourishes considerably by its very sweetness; moreover, by its quality things are kept for a long time whole from putrefecation. And so if anyone knows how to eat honey, even as a food, so as not to fill up his passages with too much sweetness nor to augment choler with its heat, he will possess a sure support for a longer life.
-Marsilio Ficino
De Vita Libri Tres
Three Books on Life
Book II.XVIII
as translated by Kaske & Clark

Bad Camo

After $5M and who knows how many lives wasted, the Army is dumping a useless pixellated camouflage it adopted to copy the Marines. What they should have done, and what the Marines did, is go to Home Depot:

The Army’s camouflage researchers say the story of the universal pattern’s origins begins when they helped develop a similarly pixilated camouflage now worn by the Marine Corps. That pattern, known as MARPAT, first appeared in 2002 after being selected from among dozens of candidates and receiving plenty of input from Marines on the ground at the sniper school in Quantico, Va. The Marines even found one of the baseline colors themselves, an earth tone now called Coyote Brown.

“They went to Home Depot, looked at paint swatches, and said, ‘We want that color,’ ” said Anabelle Dugas, a textile technologist at Natick who helped develop the pattern. That particular hue, she added, was part of a paint series then sold by Ralph Lauren.

Friday, June 22, 2012

Links for Later 6-22-12

  1. WB Yeats' magical obsession
  2. Covers and digital books
  3. Mark Morford's perpetual summer reading list
  4. Roy Christopher's friends' summer reading list
  5. 10 lesser known natural wonders (a bit linkbaitish, but I'd still like to see all of these)
  6. 21 pictures that will restore your faith in humanity (love the birthday cake)
  7. Most startup accelerators will never launch anyone
  8. Gideon Lewis-Kraus on Berlin, pilgrimages
  9. Fawning article about rich teenaged brothers with good vocabulary, wardrobes
  10. The Zone
  11. Ai WeiWei: "To live in fear is worse than losing your freedom"
  12. Patrick Rothfuss Lolcats
  13. Alex Dimitrov online chapbook

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Greg Laswell - Come Back Down

What I'm listening to right now, on continuous loop:

Texting as Hypergraphia

The Neurocritic has a nice little post up about a recent case of a woman whose texting went up by 1,333% during a manic period, to about 200 a day.

I often feel like I could use a little hypergraphia. I've got a pair of books I'm working on, but my ability to not write is without limit.

Monday, June 11, 2012

Links for Later 6-11-12

  1. First objects in the universe spotted, not identified
  2. Prometheus from an archeological perspective (funny)
  3. Advice for foreign tourists in America (be on time, tip 20%, use utensils sometimes but not always)
  4. The final final
  5. Laura Jane Grace rocking harder than ever
  6. Courage: LGBT Pride events in Iran
  7. Peter Thiel's startup class: startup founders are extreme people (the U-shaped distribution)
  8. Bowe Bergdahl is still a POW
  9. Busted via Twitter
  10. Heinz Kohut's final days
  11. Death among the Buddhist yogis
  12. Death among the snake-handling Christians
  13. More snake-handlers
  14. Military-grade face transplants
  15. There is no best place to advertise; try things and track results

Tuesday, June 05, 2012

Transit of Venus

Image credit: NASA/SDO


See you at the next one in 105 years. Some of you, anyway. Lots more images here.