That's Interesting
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BBC Sound Effects
27th October, 2024The BBC Sound Effects Archive is available for personal, educational or research purposes. There are over 33,000 clips from across the world from the past 100 years. These include clips made by the BBC Radiophonic workshop, recordings from the Blitz in London, special effects made for BBC TV and Radio productions, as well as 15,000 recordings from the Natural History Unit archive. You can explore sounds from every continent – from the college bells ringing in Oxford to a Patagonian waterfall – or listen to a submarine klaxon or the sound of a 1969 Ford Cortina door slamming shut.
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How Henri Matisse Scandalized the Art Establishment with His Daring Use of Color
22nd October, 2024Even those of us not particularly well-versed in art history have heard of a painting style called fauvism — and probably have never considered what it has to do with fauve, the French word for a wild beast. In fact, the two have everything to do with one another, at least in the sense of how certain critics regarded certain artists in the early twentieth century. One of the most notable of those artists was Henri Matisse, whose unconventional use of color, emotionally powerful but not strictly realistic, eventually got him labeled a wild beast.
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Artificial Intelligence & Drones Uncover 303 New Nazca Lines in Peru
20th October, 2024A team from the Japanese University of Yamagata’s Nazca Institute, in collaboration with IBM Research, discovers 303 previously unknown geoglyphs of humans and animals, all smaller in size than the vast geometric patterns that date from AD 200–700 and stretch across more than 400 sq km of the Nazca plateau
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David Lynch Releases on YouTube Interview Project: 121 Stories of Real America Recorded on a 20,000-Mile Road Trip
16th October, 2024Conceived by Austin Lynch, who along with filmmaker Jason S. (known for the documentary David Lynch: The Art Life), drove 20,000 miles through the U.S. in search of what it’s tempting to call the real America, a nation populated by colorful, sometimes desperate, often unconventionally eloquent characters, 121 of whom Interview Project finds passing the day in bars, working at stores, or just sitting on the roadside.
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Hear Moby Dick Read in Its Entirety by Benedict Cumberbatch, Tilda Swinton, John Waters, Stephen Fry & More
13th October, 2024Includes an impressive roster of celebrity readers: Tilda Swinton, Nigel Williams, Musa Okwonga, Stephen Fry, Neil Tennant, Fiona Shaw, Will Self, Benedict Cumberbatch, China Miéville, Tony Kushner, John Waters, Simon Callow, Sir David Attenborough, even former Prime Minister David Cameron, with Pulitzer Prize winning poet Mary Oliver finishing off the whole project, reading the Epilogue.
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Buffett’s Alpha
20th September, 2024Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway has realized a Sharpe ratio of 0.79 with significant alpha to traditional risk factors. The alpha became insignificant, however, when we controlled for exposure to the factors “betting against beta” and “quality minus junk.” Furthermore, we estimate that Buffett’s leverage is about 1.7 to 1, on average. Therefore, Buffett’s returns appear to be neither luck nor magic but, rather, a reward for leveraging cheap, safe, high-quality stocks.
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The Midlife Crisis
16th September, 2024This paper documents a longitudinal crisis of midlife among the inhabitants of rich nations. Yet middle-aged citizens in their data sets are close to their peak earnings, have typically experienced little or no illness, reside in some of the safest countries in the world, and live in the most prosperous era in human history. This is paradoxical and troubling. The paper shows that there are approximately quadratic hill-shaped patterns in data on midlife suicide, sleeping problems, alcohol dependence, concentration difficulties, memory problems, intense job strain, disabling headaches, suicidal feelings, and extreme depression.
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Generative AI Can Harm Learning
30th August, 2024Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to revolutionize how humans work, and has already demonstrated promise in significantly improving human productivity. However, a key remaining question is how generative AI affects learning, namely, how humans acquire new skills as they perform tasks. This kind of skill learning is critical to long-term productivity gains, especially in domains where generative AI is fallible and human experts must check its outputs.
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Intertemporal Empathy Decline: Feeling Less Distress for Future Others’ Suffering
26th August, 2024The present actions of individuals and society at large can cause outsized consequences on future generations’ quality of life. This article demonstrates evidence of an intertemporal empathy decline such that people feel less empathy toward another person’s suffering in the future compared to the present despite predicting that the same amount of pain would be felt.
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Millions of butterflies stop in these Mexico sanctuaries. Here’s how to see them.
09th August, 2024In one of the planet’s most extraordinary natural spectacles, millions of monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) gather every winter amid the fir forests of Central Mexico. They carpet the trees and paint the sky black and orange. In Mesoamerican culture, they personify the souls of departed loved ones.
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