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Bagheera is a past mistress at the art of cat fu, the ability to comfortably inhabit spaces too small for her to fit into.
Silicon Valley's culture didn't begin with Hewlett and Packard's garage or, for that matter, the "treacherous eight" from Fairchild Semiconductor. The stage was set in 1909, in the wake of the great quake—and at the birth of radio.
Gareth Rees calculates that the British archers at Agincourt might have rained 50,000 arrows a minute for a solid eight minutes onto the French. So if you were snorting derisively at the title's combination of "medieval" and "physics," consider this: Agincourt was, essentially, the first battle where conventional cavalry tactics met the equivalent of the machine gun.
The Beeb has an animated "front line" Western Front feature. Its only weakness is that it is antiseptic, which that war was definitely not.
Wilfred Owen had it right,
Dulce Et Decorum Est
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells…
I sat, quietly, in the dirty seat, empty bottles of beer and peanut shells at my feet. My throat was sore from shouting chants and pleas, my hands bruised from fruitless rooting. How could this have happened? As the stadium emptied out, leaving behind only rows of orange and blue paint, an painful truth sank in: This is how it ends.
Perhaps it was the Coldplay song that did it. How could they use this song?
Nobody said it was easy
It's such a shame for us to part
Nobody said it was easy
No one ever said it would be this hard
Oh, take me back to the start
…
In some of the standard histories, jazz went to hell in the 1970s—first losing its structure to the avant-garde, then losing its harmony and rhythm to rock-funk fusion—before recovering its senses and sensibility in the ‘80s, thanks mainly to Wynton Marsalis. As with most myths, there’s a little bit of truth to this chronicle; things did take a bumpy turn in the ‘70s (though some of the avant-garde and the fusion was a lot more interesting than the broad-brush detractors would have you believe). But the revival of melody, structure, beauty and wit was hardly the doings of Mr. Marsalis. A…
Or up—a timeline portraying various "future history" events depicted in SF novels and films.
Hat tip to Grow A Brain.
Or we'll force you to listen to Mick Jagger solo albums.
My favorite sentence (perhaps ever): "But then again, as Elton John once put it, no."
Tom Mitchelson spent a week, guided by a small bunch of female friends, attempting to experience "the thoughts, anxieties and simple daily tasks of a 21st-century woman."
"I'd only dipped a polished toenail into a woman's life. I experienced none of the real pressures and tribulations that a woman faces every day. Tammy Wynette was quite wrong when she sang 'Sometimes it's hard to be a woman.' It's not. It's always hard to be a woman. Especially if you're a man."