NB! · Archive · Science · People · Nature
The seventeenth-century German polymath and Jesuit monk Athanasius Kircher is known for his description of China, his microscopic researches and his unsuccessful attempt to decipher Egyptian writing. But we understand that this man was a genuine genius when we see his musical notation of birdsong
Science · Society · Nature · Humour
Scientists are considering altering clouds to reflect sunlight as one way of preventing runaway climate change. The British government is prepared to spend £50 million of taxpayers' money on dimming the sun, while at the same time covering the best agricultural land with vast solar panels, which need sunlight.
NB! · Archive · Books · Observations · Nature
Futuristic beehives from an eighteenth-century book. Whenever I look at pictures like these, I have the feeling that some two hundred and fifty years ago humanity took a wrong turning somewhere, and I look at pictures like these constantly
Art · Observations · Nature · Humour
I came across an account by the artist Maria Katkova of how she once made several works using mushroom ink. What is that, you ask? The artist explains the recipe: if you pick an ink cap (a dung-loving one, to be precise), place it on a saucer and watch,
Books · Observations · Nature · Humour
More precisely, among the sceliphron wasps, that is, the digging kind, which make out of clay such charming capsules, as though excavated in the land of Lilliput, and stuff them with little spiders and small insects. The growing wasp larva feeds on the provisions stored in these mud-walled cells,
Faith · Art · Science · Nature
In the Middle Ages the rabbit was linked with virgin conception. It is no accident that the rabbit appears in the iconography of the Virgin, for instance beside Titian's Madonna. It was believed that a doe rabbit could produce young without mating with a male; this notion in
NB! · Observations · Nature · Humour
White-maned horses, it turns out. Cloooouds!
Art · Museums · Nature
Botticelli's "Primavera" depicts nine figures from classical mythology, following one another across a flowering meadow in an orange and laurel grove. This very masterpiece of the Renaissance has had 138 species of plants precisely identified in it. The composition of the painting remains a riddle, but
NB! · Archive · Monarchies · Nature · Humour
In 1577 Sir Humphrey Gilbert presented Elizabeth I with a narwhal tusk adorned with gold, and said it was the horn of a sea unicorn. In principle, one can hardly find fault.
Architecture · Cinema · London · Observations · Nature
Ever wondered where our crime films get all this taste for a grey, oppressive palette? No, Dostoevsky, with his gloomily coloured texts, is not the chief culprit here. It is chiefly the influence of the textbook templates of the English detective story, tied precisely to the Victorian era, which has
Archive · London · People · Nature · Humour
Churchill and the cat
NB! · The East · Art · Nature
A melancholy tiger. Unknown South Asian artist, 1815-1820s.