Curious Loop

“Booksellers are constantly giving their patrons extraordinary bargains. In London recently a copy of an early edition of Keats’ Poems, originally bought from a dealer for 2s was sold for £140, and…

Prose style and structure in The Tipping Point

The primary product sold by all management consultants – both software developers and strategic organisers – is the...

The cleverness that proliferates in public life today is a nuisance.

***

Over a decade has passed since scientists realized many of their studies were failing to replicate. How well have their attempts to fix the problem actually worked?

This piece of pseudo-profanity is what's known as a taboo deformation—a word we say when we don't want to say the word.

THE RECENT NEWS about Big Tech is ominous: lower revenues and profits at several; large layoffs at some. If you add Fintech to the mix (appropriate because a lot of Fintech is based on technology-heavy blockchains and cryptocurrencies), then the collapse of crypto-exchanges is another dramatic event. There are two questions of interest: Are there … Continue reading "Will the churn in Big Tech lead to a new period of innovation?"

By literally stretching materials science to the limit, Gore invented GORE-TEX, a lightweight, waterproof fabric made from the expanded form of the polymer PTFE.

In 1934, much of the world was in the grip of the Great Depression. Unemployment was an epidemic, and many businesses struggled desperately to survive.

Olivia Potts | Longreads | November 2022 | 16 minutes (4,649 words) It’s six in the morning, and Robert Booth has already been on the road for three hours. Sitting alongside him in the cab of his lorry (the British term for a truck) is Louis, Robert’s small dog, a Jack Russell-chihuahua mix, and a washing-up bowl […]

Daisugi is an ancient Japanese forestry technique in which planted cedars are pruned in a special way to produce "shoots" that eventually become perfect, straight, knot-free lumber.This is an ancient method, developed in the 14th century, which was originally used by people living in the Kitayama region of Japan becaus

Samples of the Winchcombe meteorite quickly revealed its origins trace back beyond Mars to the asteroid belt, shedding light on the birth of the solar system.

Since uploading his first video 15 years ago, Fredericton-based Matthias Wandel has amassed more than 588 million total views.

Wine commands wealth, prestige, and attention from aficionados. How much of what they admire is in their heads?

The chimpanzee and the human have similar sensory capacities, but why can some humans do science or poetry and chimps apparently can’t?

https://ift.tt/eK2PovM

We love projects that make you do a double-take when you first see them. It’s always fun to think you see one thing, but then slowly realize everything is not quite what you expected. And thi…

The Spring House was hidden for decades under shifting sands.

Tired of the obscurity around black box algorithms that dictate their lives, India’s gig workers are coming up with cheap hacks to game the system.

In July 1888, the girls employed at a match factory in the East End of London came out on strike against long hours, low pay and hazardous working conditions which left many girls disfigured...

With hand-washing top of mind, soap is an integral part of keeping clean. But people through the ages relied on earlier forms of soap more for cleaning objects than for personal hygiene.

These old color photos, part of Albert Kahn’s collection, were captured by photographer Stefan Passe in 1913 and depict everyday life scenes in Mongolia.

Google and Facebook's privacy violations are common knowledge. But the decisions of a less-known company, Relx, are also impacting people's everyday lives.

The history of a book isn’t captured merely by the background of the author or its publishing date or its written content. Most books were purchased and read by someone; they are from a specific time and place. That too is part of each book’s history. Sometimes in digitizing books we find pressed flowers or a single leaf […]

“Maybe that’s enlightenment enough: to know that there is no final resting place of the mind; no moment of smug clarity. Perhaps wisdom…is…

“Good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the world needs most, and good nature is the result of ease and security, not of a life of arduous struggle.”

There’s a settlement in Antarctica with a school, a post office and a huddle of homes. It’s like other sub-zero villages, except for one thing: families must have surgery to move in.