Fascinating history of the trade relations formed between Elizabeth I's England and the Islamic powers of Morocco, Persia and the Ottoman Empire, often formed on the basis of military cooperation against the Catholic powers of Western Europe.
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Sometimes two wrongs DO make a right
"The day Ahmad Khan Rahami allegedly planted two bombs in Chelsea — one of which detonated on West 23rd Street — two thieves accidentally helped to disable his second pressure cooker bomb left inside a rolling suitcase on West 27th Street, sources said.
The young men, who sources described as being well-dressed, opened the bag and took the bomb out, sources said, before placing the explosive into a garbage bag and walking away with the rolling suitcase."
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Some great, practical policy ideas for reduce our collective dependence on cars
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"If an insurer had simply decreed Taylor’s back surgery to be unnecessary, and denied coverage, the Taylors would have been outraged. But the worst part is that he would not have got better. It isn’t enough to eliminate unnecessary care. It has to be replaced with necessary care. And that is the hidden harm: unnecessary care often crowds out necessary care, particularly when the necessary care is less remunerative." New Yorker
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This is great news. A way of controlling rat populations humanely - sterilising them instead of killing them!
"ContraPest, the finished product, is viscous and sweet. Electric pink and opaque, it tastes like nine packets of saccharine blended into two tablespoons of kitchen oil. “Rats love it,” Dyer said. “Love it.” Mayer, who taste-tested every version during the development process, could not say the same for herself."
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"Someone always says it, whenever it comes up:
“I guess I’m just not allowed to talk to anyone any more!”
Well.
Yes.
It is my duty to inform you that we took a vote
all us women
and determined that you are not allowed to talk to anyone
ever again.
This vote is legally binding."
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Wow, it turns out there's still more to be learnt about the Second World War and the Nazi regime.
"Was Blitzkreig, then, largely the result of the Wehrmacht’s reliance on crystal meth? How far is Ohler willing to go with this? He smiles. “Well, Mommsen always told me not to be mono-causal. But the invasion of France was made possible by the drugs. No drugs, no invasion. When Hitler heard about the plan to invade through Ardennes, he loved it [the allies were massed in northern Belgium]. But the high command said: it’s not possible, at night we have to rest, and they [the allies] will retreat and we will be stuck in the mountains. But then the stimulant decree was released, and that enabled them to stay awake for three days and three nights. Rommel [who then led one of the panzer divisions] and all those tank commanders were high – and without the tanks, they certainly wouldn’t have won.”"
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The colonial terror in the Belgian Congo - under the authority of Leopold II and the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company - was almost unimaginable in its scale and sheer cruelty. I couldn't help but cry looking at some of these images.
[EXTREMELY UPSETTING CONTENT, including murder and bodily mutilation]
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Sepsis is a major killer, but ordinary people are not trained to recognise it in the way they are for heart attacks. It's worth learning to spot it!
"The first step is to teach people to seek treatment quickly when a loved one begins to show symptoms of sepsis, which include chills or fever; extreme pain or discomfort; clammy or sweaty skin; confusion or disorientation; shortness of breath; and a high heart rate."
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"faculty will bend rules, knock down walls, and build bridges to hire those they really want (often white colleagues) but when it comes to hiring faculty of color, they have to ‘play by the rules’ and get angry when any exceptions are made. Let me tell you a secret – exceptions are made for white people constantly in the academy; exceptions are the rule in academe" Washington Post
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Had a proper lightbulb moment reading this
"The intention was that Solitaire would get a generation of computer users still most familiar with a command-line input to teach themselves how to drag and drop, without realizing that's what they were doing. The fact that we're still dragging and dropping today suggests that it worked rather well."
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This whole concept was totally new to me
"Unlike most computer code, which is written informally and evaluated based mainly on whether it works, formally verified software reads like a mathematical proof: Each statement follows logically from the preceding one. An entire program can be tested with the same certainty that mathematicians prove theorems."
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Whatever Corbyn's weaknesses as a politician (and I acknowledge that there are many), at least he does not stoop to the sort of dog-whistle garbage that his Labour opponents are willing to spout in the name of 'electability'.
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