Something to crow about
Black and fond of carrion, crows never attracted much attention until scientists started testing their intelligence. Now we know how smart crows are, people have started to look a lot less special.
Category: Thing of the Day
A round-up of the bizarre and brilliant of the web corralled by the University of Portsmouth Library.
Postcard from the past
Lost property comes in all forms. While charging cables and umbrellas are the common fare of today, we occasionally turn up some real curiosities from yesteryear, including a postcard post stamped 1968 from someone enjoying their luxury hotel in Cork.
Register to vote now!
Are you registered to vote? If you are a UK citizen, this may be your very first opportunity to reshape the country where you live, but unless you register and ensure you have a suitable photographic ID or an alternative to take with you to the polling booth on election day, you will have no voice in national politics for another five years.
Learn about the Holocaust
The Union of Jewish Students is offering a massively subsidised educational experience including a day trip to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum. Funded by the Lessons from Auschwitz University Project, the course comprises an online seminar about the Holocaust, an in-person seminar on campus focusing on Jewish life and anti-Semitism on campus, a day trip to the Auschwitz-Birkenau, and a concluding online seminar for just £59.
Cataloguing gender: a very library design problem
From the questionable design choice to include an author’s presumed gender in their global library name authority record to the gendered nature of names in general, society seems to have made some questionable design choices in how we choose to label people that have far-reaching consequences.
In support of the blind leading the blindfolded
Until today, I had blithely assumed that diversity awareness training was an unquestionably good thing that could not possibly ever go wrong.
Then I read a seminal article from way back in 2015 and everything suddenly seemed a lot less certain.
Fun with physics: the spinning disc paradox
Anyone who has ever ventured into the realms of science, religion, mysticism or philosophy will have encountered their fair share of paradoxes: apparent contradictions that highlight where our understanding is insufficient to grasp a deeper truth. That’s the case here, …
Happy International Women’s Day!
Happy International Women’s Day2023! This year’s theme is #EmbraceEquality because everyone starts from a different starting point, and so offering the same opportunities to everyone benefits only those lucky enough to find themselves able to take advantage of them.
Moral panics and media terrorism
There seems to be a lot of moral panics at the moment. Unhappily, they are largely engineered by fearful people determined to indulge their prejudices by undermining the safety and security of society.
A pearl to you!
Like diamonds, few pearls today are found by chance. Unlike diamonds, which can be manufactured on demand in a laboratory, pearls are still grown organically. Literally, they are grown inside of shellfish in response to a deliberately introduced irritant. I would sign off here saying ‘the rest is history’ but as this video shows, the process is actually surprisingly involved and painstaking care has to be taken to ensure a smooth, even, entire pearl is produced every time. It’s truly an expert process.
