People think they don’t understand math, but it’s all about how you explain it to them. If you ask a drunkard what number is larger, 2/3 or 3/5, he won’t be able to tell you. But if you rephrase the question: what is better, 2 bottles of vodka for 3 people or 3 bottles of vodka for 5 people, he will tell you right away: 2 bottles for 3 people, of course.
Israel Gelfand, quoted here
The Room Three is exactly what fans have been hoping for, and more. Though several classical elements have changed, they’ve changed for the better. There’s a glut of new content, but it’s familiar and tweaked just enough for everyone to find something here they enjoy. There aren’t enough puzzlers out there like The Room, so it’s refreshing to see that Fireproof Games has knocked it out of the park once more. If you’ve not delved into this complex and enigmatic series, you need to do yourself a favor and get locked in The Room as soon as possible.

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It has been the fate of many poets to find that the world is at once too much and not enough, to be driven to suicide and madness, or to the creation of hermetic works or mythologies, secondary worlds that overlay or displace the unaccommodating original. We might say that Murray’s Catholic faith serves as a mythology whose scope he sees as requiring no adjustment. What we definitely can say is that the world Murray renders is close at hand even for the remotest reader. It is completely lived in. It is handled, worked, scented, mapped, celebrated, lamented, and its people honoured in both presence and memory. Murray’s way is not the only way, but it is a wonderful achievement.

— Sean O'Brien. My review of Murray’s New Selected Poems is here.

Aunt Polly blushed crimson with humiliation, and frowned and shook her head at Tom.  

“Experience,” said Holmes, laughing.“ Miss Prism.  

“My opinion is in no way altered.”  

I must arise and examine. I eagerly hope that you will confirm this intelligence soon in your own handwriting. He and his companion entered the cottage, in which they remained for a few minutes, and then departed. Mrs. Samsa to her contractor and Grete to her principal. 

“And here, shipmates, is true and faithful repentance; not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment.” 

Elizabeth had caught the scarlet fever; her illness was severe, and she was in the greatest danger.  

“I have my revolver,” said I.  

“What a delightful boy!” said Scrooge.

The top ten PhD-granting institutions account for more than half (56 percent) of all articles published. Authors with PhDs from Harvard, Yale, University of California–Berkeley, Columbia, Chicago, Cornell, Stanford, Oxford, Princeton, and Cambridge wrote 1,843 of 3,318 articles. Authors with PhDs from just two universities, Harvard and Yale, accounted for more than one-fifth (21 percent) of all articles. As indicated in the second graph (left), all three journals also have a history of publishing articles primarily from male contributors. Only one volume of one journal, Representations in 1990, had an issue in which at least half of all primary contributors were women. All three journals, however, did show a steadily increasing percentage of women being published annually.

Studies such as ours suggest that the hegemony of a few elite institutions continues well beyond who gets the prized tenure track jobs right out of graduate school. The influence and power of a few institutions also extends to publishing—and so to the production and transmission of knowledge more directly. This raises a basic question: If graduates from only a few elite institutions account for an outsized proportion of high-profile published work, then aren’t their ideas bound to have an outsized impact and influence? Do Harvard and Yale, which have not only unparalleled financial means to shape American higher education, also have the institutional prestige to determine what counts as knowledge?

britishmuseum:

The ancient Greeks saw the Celts as warlike peoples whose strange customs set them apart from the civilised Mediterranean world. Writing around 60–30 BC, Greek historian Diodorus Siculus described Celtic peoples wearing horned helmets into battle.
This helmet was cast into the River Thames over 2,000 years ago, perhaps as an offering to the gods. It was dredged from the River Thames at Waterloo Bridge in the early 1860s. It is the only Iron Age helmet to have ever been found in southern England, and it is the only Iron Age helmet with horns ever to have been found anywhere in Europe. Horns were often a symbol of the gods in different parts of the ancient world. This might suggest the person who wore this was a special person, or that the helmet was made for a god to wear. The helmet is made from sheet bronze pieces held together with many carefully placed bronze rivets. Its swirling decoration may have carried hidden meanings.
Ancient Greek warriors wore less elaborate headgear, like this helmet. Greek writing can still be understood, unlike the enigmatic Celtic designs on the horned helmet.

Horned helmet. River Thames near Waterloo, London, England, 200–100 BC.

Greek helmet. Olympia, south-western Greece, around 460 BC.

See these amazing objects in our exhibition Celts: art and identity, until 31 January 2016.

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houghtonlib: From the Houghton Instagram, a 1944 fine-press edition of Euclid designed by the great Bruce Rogers.

So beautiful.