Sunday Sundries

Miscellaneous items I found of interest during the week.

War's Fatal Attraction
In the final BBC Radio 4 Reith Lecture for 2018 Margaret MacMillan, speaking at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa, examines how we remember and represent war in art.

YouTube: Thinking About War
Margaret MacMillan addresses Congress 2018 of the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, 27 May in Regina; a condensed version of her Reith Lectures. Sadly, the audio is poor, nothing like BBC Radio 4 standards.

Georgian Papers Programme
An initiative of King's College London and the Royal Archives to enrich public historical understanding of Britain, George III, British monarchy and a crucial period in British and world history.

YouTube: What ancient DNA can teach us about migration in prehistory | Professor Ian Barnes |

The Past on Glass: Digitising the Knights-Whittome Glass Plate Negative Collection in Sutton Archives
Thanks to Jane MacNamara for the tip.

The Robots are Coming? Libraries and Artificial Intelligence

How to Say “No” Gracefully and Uncommit
From the Tim Ferris podcast (show), a reading of two chapters from Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown.
The first, chapter 11 in the book, explains how to say “no” gracefully (and why most of us have trouble doing this in the first place), and the second gives ways to cut our losses and uncommit in the aftermath of a premature “yes.”
The first 4 minutes and 30 seconds is ads and ado.

From Velcro to Viagra: 10 products that were invented by accident

Black sarcophagus of DOOM opened
The miasmic nameless horror will spread over the world and swallow us all until we hear naught but the grinding of gizzard stones and taste naught but the burning bitterness of stomach acid for all eternity.