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POPSFish Gave Us The Finger The last bit. The reason other researchers previously missed them, they think, is because in their samples the fingers were hidden behind marks left by the fish’s scales. So fish, too, seem to have incipient fingers. A finding we give two thumbs up.
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POPS'Dinosaur eel' could inspire future armour i thought I'd include a picture of a euryptarid, also known as a sea scorpion, which was one of their predators, and one of the largest known arthropods that has existed at 6ft 7in. Makes you glad they're extinct...as far as we know.
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POPSElfwood what do you see when you look into the eye of a unicorn? you see the wildness and gentleness of a creature that has known pain at the hands of humans, but forgives utterly. you see the entire universe reflected back at you from the soul of the wild. this is the eye of one of my dark unicorns. my dark unicorns are not evil...<<
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POPSThe 10 Weirdest Facts about American Presidents 7. Calvin Coolidge, the 30th president, was reported to be a very interesting character. When not having his head massaged with Vaseline during breakfasts in bed or riding his own mechanical bull, he was ringing the White House doorbell and then running off to hide. 8. So far, all American presidents have claimed ancestry limited to one or more of just seven nationalities: Dutch, English, German, Irish, Scottish, Swiss, and Welsh. 9. Grover Cleveland was the only president to openly admit that he had fathered an illegitimate child. 10. There were four presidents who were not actual presidents of the United States: Sam Houston, Mirabeau Lamar, and Anson Jones were all presidents of the Republic of Texas. Jefferson Davis was President of the Confederate States of America.
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POPSSappho's poetry Her style was sensual and melodic; primarily songs of love, yearning, and reflection. Most commonly the target of her affections was female, often one of the many women sent to her for education in the arts. She nurtured these women, wrote poems of love and adoration to them, and when they eventually left the island to be married, she composed their wedding songs. That Sappho's poetry was not condemned in her time for its homoerotic content (though it was disparaged by scholars in later centuries) suggests that perhaps love between women was not persecuted then as it has been in more recent times. Especially in the last century, Sappho has become so synonymous with woman-love that two of the most popular words to describe female homosexuality--lesbian and sapphic have derived from her. Plato elevated her from the status of great lyric poet to one of the muses.
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POPSCoptic
Ever wonder about hieroglyphic, the inscription on Egyptian monuments as well as a variety of written texts on papyrus. n 313 BC. Alexander the Great invaded Egypt. His legacy was carried on by his general Ptolemeus and his successors in Egypt. That legacy, simply stated, was to have a universal culture. Such culture would of course be the Greek or Hellenistic one. With the culture comes the language, so it became the proper way for the educated classes to learn Greek and encourage their children to learn it for the economical as well as the social advantages. In script, the Greek was far superior to the Demotic, the last surviving Egyptian script at the time. It offered 24 characters all pronounceable as opposed to over 400 symbols that only a small percentage represented sounds and the rest were ideograms. The Greeks learned their writing system from the Egyptians through the frequent travelers of the ancient world, the Phoenicians. In the course of their commercial dealings with
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POPSUndeciphered Scripts - Good Resource This was one of my "archaic" clips that went private a long while ago for exceeding the character limit. I'm re-clipping it now because so many new clippers joined since then and I believe this is a great source on ancient scripts and writing systems.
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POPSAncient Blueprints of Calculus Uncovered in Archimedes Text Details have been released from the nine-year-long reconstruction project to recover the Greek mathematician's writings from this one-of-a-kind find and the results are fascinating. Buried beneath the surface of this gilded palimpsest, researchers discovered more extensive demonstrations of concepts such as infinite series, approximations, limits, and integral calculus than had been known to exist in ancient times. Archimedes wrote The Method almost two thousand years before Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz developed calculus in the 1700s. Reviel Netz, an historian of mathematics at Stanford University who transcribed the text, says that the examination of Archimedes' work has revealed "a new twist on the entire trajectory of Western mathematics."
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POPS"Under Ben Bulben" WB Yeats, 1923 Nobel Prize Literature
I SWEAR by what the sages spoke Round the Mareotic Lake That the Witch of Atlas knew, Spoke and set the cocks a-crow. Swear by those horsemen, by those women Complexion and form prove superhuman, That pale, long-visaged company That air in immortality Completeness of their passions won; Now they ride the wintry dawn Where Ben Bulben sets the scene. Here s the gist of what they mean. II Many times man lives and dies Between his two eternities, That of race and that of soul, And ancient Ireland knew it all. Whether man die in his bed Or the rifle knocks him dead, A brief parting from those dear Is the worst man has to fear. Though grave-diggers' toil is long, Sharp their spades, their muscles strong. They but thrust their buried men Back in the human mind again. III You that Mitchel's prayer have heard, 'Send war in our time, O Lord!' Know that when all words are said And a man is fighting mad, Something drops from eyes long blind, He completes his par