Bill Cheng's Blog, page 50
January 4, 2014
from APOD:
A crescent Venus shines along the western horizon at...
from APOD:
A crescent Venus shines along the western horizon at dusk in this clearing sky…the twin contrails in this scene belong to an aircraft above Appenzell, Switzerland.
January 3, 2014
"It was on this day in 1882 that the Irish playwright Oscar Wilde docked in New York. Customs asked..."
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The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor
Wilde had come to the United States for a lecture tour. He was part of a movement of literature and art known as Aestheticism, which valued beauty in art over moral or sentimental ideas. The lecture tour was set up for an unusual reason. The comic opera duo Gilbert and Sullivan wrote an operetta called Patience (1881), which poked fun at the Aesthetic movement. It was a big success in England and New York, but Gilbert and Sullivan’s manager, Richard D’Oyly Carte, was concerned that the rest of the United States wouldn’t know what Aestheticism was, and they wouldn’t think Patience was funny. So in order to educate the general public about Aestheticism before trying to satirize it, he decided to arrange for a lecture tour from England’s most prominent Aesthete personality, Oscar Wilde.
Wilde’s lectures got a lot of criticism. Many people thought he was ridiculous. But he got to meet American personalities like Walt Whitman and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. And his lecture tour did well in surprising places, like the rough mining town of Leadville, Colorado, where he was a hit. It was there in Leadville that he saw a sign at the local salon that said: “Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.” Oscar Wilde later said that it was “the only rational method of art criticism I have ever come across.”
(via thelifeguardlibrarian)
theparisreview:
Behold, art and literature’s greatest monsters!...
Behold, art and literature’s greatest monsters! Plenty of welcome departures from the norm, here—Frankenstein and Dracula didn’t make the list. Neither did Chuck Palahniuk.
For more of this morning’s roundup, click here.
January 2, 2014
December 30, 2013
explore-blog:
Famous writers’ sleep habits vs. literary...
Famous writers’ sleep habits vs. literary productivity, visualized – see the full graphic, a labor of love months in the making, here.
sagansense:
This GIF shows an example of conductive...
This GIF shows an example of conductive ink.
Circuit Scribe is a rollerball pen that uses a silver conductive ink to let you create fully functioning circuits as fast as you can can draw, making it cheaper, faster, and easier to test out electronics and prototype concepts.
via cosmo-nautic
