- Knights vs. Snails in Medieval Marginalia. But what does it mean??? (Side note: “marginalia” is one of my favorite words ever.)
- Cloud City – artist Tomás Saraceno has created a world defined by inflatable structures.
- Putting the Illustration Before the Text – developing illustrations For Neil Shubin’s books.
- The Faces of Facebook.
- Making an Interesting Story. Ben Lillie visits a time when people worried about making mythology interesting.
- Mad Art Lab’s favorite former ISS denizen, Chris Hadfield, has a book coming out!
- My favorite current ISS denizen, Karen Nyberg, has made a toy dinosaur! In space! Sorry, all other parents. Your Pinterest craft boards were just forever surpassed in awesomeness. Via nowoo.
- The Society for Neuroscience is looking for brain-inspired artists.
- I love these oil paintings of the solar system, but am I the only one who’s reminded of a certain scene in Battlestar Galactica when I see them?
- Can watching cartoons make you healthier?
- Adrienne LaFrance analyzes her reporting for gender bias and doesn’t like what she sees. She goes on to untangle the many threads that lead to lack of representation of women in journalism.
…………..
Are Elvish*, Klingon, Dothraki and Na’vi real languages?
John McWhorter and TED-Ed explain. Via Critical Dragon1177 and Lauren Davis at io9.
*Pedantic note: It’s not “Elvish”. There are two separate languages spoken by Tolkien’s elves: Quenya and Sindarin, and one script: Tengwar. And yes, at one point I may have taught myself to read one or both.
Yay! Knights vs. Snails are awesome!
Seelix,
I’m glad you like that video on constructed languages I sent you. I was worried you wouldn’t see it, because you’re contact form didn’t work, and I had to send to through the main skepchick website. Oddly enough through it skips the first twelve seconds of the video and unfortunately doesn’t start at the beginning like it should unless you manually rewind it.
The video on conlang was cool. Thanks for sending it criticaldragon!
(Aside to Seelix: I too may have tried to teach myself Sindarin when I was a teenager.)
Ooo, I need to dig up my pics from the Newberry Library. There are NAMES for the more common types of marginalia; for instance, a pointing hand is a “manicula.”
Brian G,
You’re Welcome. I’m glad you enjoyed the video.