That's Interesting

  • Listening to Music May Speed Up Recovery from Surgery

    Review of studies shows powerful effects of music in reducing perceived pain and heart rate immediately after surgery

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  • Death | Open Yale Courses

    This course examines a number of issues that arise once we begin to reflect on our mortality. The possibility that death may not actually be the end is considered. Also a clearer notion of what it is to die is examined. And, finally, different attitudes to death are evaluated.

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  • Moby Dick Big Read

    The Moby Dick Big Read grew out of the University of Plymouth’s, The Arts Institute’s Whale Festival (2011) and was conceived and curated by Philip Hoare (winner of the 2009 Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction for Leviathan or, the Whale) and the acclaimed artist, Angela Cockayne, whose exhibition, Dominion, also held at The Arts Institute’s Levinsky Gallery in 2011, provided vital inspiration.

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  • BBC Sound Effects

    The 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

    Even 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

    A 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

    Conceived 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

    Includes 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

    Warren 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

    This 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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