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Revolver Culture

Edward Greenfield | Guardian | 15th August 2016
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How The Guardian reviewed The Beatles’ “compulsive” new release, Revolver, in 1966. Fifty years on, the review, like the record, holds up well. It brackets The Beatles with Cole Porter, and Duke Ellington, and even Purcell, as songwriters for the ages. “Eleanor Rigby is a ballad about a lonely spinster who ‘wears the face that she keeps in a jar by the door’ and about Father McKenzie ‘writing the words of sermon that no one will hear’. There you have a quality rare in pop music — compassion” (670 words)

Indonesian Diary World

Rory Stewart | London Review Of Books | 20th July 2000
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Notes from the jungles of Irian Jaya. “The river was far from the village and bathing was rare. The moss forest was cramped, cold and difficult. There were no deer, monkey, tigers or bear. Caleb’s people, the Una, did not yet make iron, textiles or pottery. It was not a place of natural abundance but a mountain land, soaked in cold rain, where you could not see the sunset. We were on the central spine of New Guinea, a vast island, 2400 kilometres long, marooned between Australia and the Pacific” (4,200 words)

What Is It Like To Understand Advanced Mathematics? Science

Quora | 15th May 2015
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“You are confident that something is true long before you have an airtight proof (this happens especially often in geometry). You have a large catalogue of connections between concepts, and you can quickly intuit that if X were to be false, that would create tensions with other things you know to be true, so you are inclined to believe X is probably true. It’s not so much that you can imagine the situation perfectly, but you can quickly imagine many other things that are logically connected to it” (3,100 words)

Video of the Day: Spherical Harmonics

Fantasia, exploiting and satirising the pleasure that we take in being surprised by computer-generated images (5’07”)
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In analysing history, do not be too profound, for often the causes are superficial

Ralph Waldo Emerson
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