🍎 the evolution will be painted.
on the agenda this week: colour film, microphones & a visual timeline of produce domestication.
📖 reading time: 3m 19s.
hey, hi, hello there. happy monday!
i’ve started running! i ran my first 5k on wednesday, another on friday and my first 10k on saturday. this. is. addictive.
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👂 earworm: listen to valentine’s track on spotify or apple music.
🧠 brain candy:
🎞 colour film was built for white people. the chemicals coating the film simply weren't adequate for capturing a diversity of darker skin tones. photo labs established in the 1940s and ’50s even used an image of a white woman, called a shirley card, to calibrate print colours.
🚨citizen touts itself as “the most powerful safety app ever created”. the hyperlocal news-reporting app now faces growing pains: from its need to make money to its ever-changing relationship with law enforcement.
📰 journalists at index — the last major independent news site in hungary — resigned en masse yesterday after the firing of their editor in chief. more than 70 of around 90 editorial staff have tendered their resignation.
🗿did you know that the easter island heads have bodies? due to shifting soils, the bodies of many of the sculptures have been buried underground, giving the illusion that they are only heads.
🎤 microphones that were listening to cities around the world have captured human-made environments suddenly stripped of human-made sounds. here you can listen to what is left.
🤪 mildly humorous:
💡 longer reads:
🕟 the four quadrants of conformism
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one of the most revealing ways to classify people is by the degree and aggressiveness of their conformism. imagine a cartesian coordinate system whose horizontal axis runs from conventional-minded on the left to independent-minded on the right, and whose vertical axis runs from passive at the bottom to aggressive at the top. the resulting four quadrants define four types of people. starting in the upper left and going counter-clockwise:
1. aggressively conventional-minded
2. passively conventional-minded
3. passively independent-minded
4. aggressively independent-minded
i think that you'll find all four types in most societies, and that which quadrant people fall into depends more on their own personality than the beliefs prevalent in their society.
young children offer some of the best evidence for both points. anyone who's been to primary school has seen the four types, and the fact that school rules are so arbitrary is strong evidence that the quadrant people fall into depends more on them than the rules.
👉 read more via paul graham.
🍎
the evolution will be painted
.
in fruit stall, a baroque masterpiece by artist frans snyders, an impressive array of produce appears strewn across baskets and platters on a large wooden table. some of the items on offer are instantly recognizable: take, for instance, the green grapes overflowing from a large basket at the center of the table.
but other goods, including a split-open green fruit dotted with black seeds, are less familiar to the modern eye.plant geneticist ive de smet and art historian david vergauwen studied fruit stall firsthand during a visit to the state hermitage museum in st. petersburg several years ago. while viewing the work, the pair realized that neither could identify some of the fruits depicted in the scene. initially, the scientist theorized that snyders, who specialized in still-life paintings featuring fruit, vegetables and animals, lacked talent.
“but vergauwen told me this was actually one of the best painters from the 17th century,” says de smet in a statement. “so, if that’s how the fruit was depicted, that’s how it should look.”
this discussion inspired the friends to embark on an unconventional research venture newly cataloged in the journal trends in plant science. by combining modern plant genetics with centuries of still-life paintings, the researchers realized that they could create a visual timeline of produce domestication. now, they hope to crowdsource a library of relevant artworks in order to analyze a wider breadth of sources.
👉 read more via smithsonian magazine.
📚 word of the week:
“taciturn”.
inclined to silence; reserved in speech; reluctant to join in conversation.
but there at the depot was her husband, the taciturn man who kept his emotions to himself …
- the warmth of other suns, 2010
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☕️ bitter brew.
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