Welcome to Thursday Things! And happy St. Patrick’s Day! If you enjoy this edition, please click the heart icon in the heading or at the end of the post to let me know. You can also post a comment by clicking the dialog bubble next to the heart.
It’s your lucky day! Photo by Yan Ming on Unsplash
💪The 3-second workout. It’s all some people have time for. Fortunately, according to recent research, that may be enough. For some limited purposes.
Stronger Muscles in 3 Seconds a Day
Could three seconds a day of resistance exercise really increase muscular strength?
That question was at the heart of a small-scale new study of almost comically brief weight training. In the study, men and women who contracted their arm muscles as hard as possible for a total of three seconds a day increased their biceps strength by as much as 12 percent after a month.
Get all the details of your new minimalist workout routine in ‘Effect of daily 3-s maximum voluntary isometric, concentric, or eccentric contraction on elbow flexor strength’
🦨Mmm, roadkill. Road to table: Wyoming’s got a new app for claiming roadkill.
The deep red backstrap pieces, similar to filet mignon of beef, are organic and could hardly be more local. They’re from a mule deer hit by a car just down the road from Bales’ rustic home in a cottonwood grove beneath the craggy Wind River Range.
Bales was able to claim the deer thanks to a new state of Wyoming mobile app that’s helping get the meat from animals killed in fender benders from road to table and in the process making roads safer for critters.
State wildlife and highway officials rolled out the app — possibly the first of its kind in the U.S. — this winter when Wyoming joined the 30 or so states that allow people to collect roadkill for food.
Actually, with the price of groceries these days, roadkill is looking better and better.
😇I love maps, and books. And maps based on books. So I enjoy these interpretations of the universe as described in Milton’s Paradise Lost.
The Universe as Pictured in Milton’s Paradise Lost (1915)
Structured on techniques and themes borrowed from Virgil’s Aeneid, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and countless other texts and genres, Milton remixed classical and Renaissance forms to fashion the biblical universe into a setting for English literature’s (perhaps) greatest poem, one which Philip Pullman believes will [“n]ever be surpassed”.
And if Milton stoked fandom in turn, he had no keener admirer than William Fairfield Warren, an eclectic scholar and the first president of Boston University….
Warren was not the first to map Milton’s “facile gates of Hell too slightly barred”. In an appendix to his study, the professor includes diagrams by David Masson, John Andrew Himes, Thomas N. Orchard, and other predecessors. Taken together, they offer whimsical schemata for how to best imagine the realms of chaos, night, and empyrean heaven. A frequent subject for visual artists (notably John Martin, “a Geordie ingénue with a chip on his shoulder”, who transposed Adam and Eve into the sublime settings of romanticism and swapped Milton’s republicanism for the revolutionary politics of his own time), Paradise Lost demands to be seen.
Click through to The Public Domain Review to see more elegant diagrams.
🐐Maybe not the future we wanted. But possibly the future we deserve. Kawasaki made a rideable robotic goat
Move over, Spot, there’s a new quadruped robot in town. Meet Kawasaki’s Bex. Unveiled at last week’s International Robot Exhibition in Tokyo, Bex is a four-legged robot that’s inexplicably modeled after an Ibex, a species of wild goat that’s native to parts of Eurasia and Africa.
Bex can carry approximately 220 pounds of cargo. In addition to transporting construction materials and the like, Kawasaki envisions it carrying out remote industrial site inspections, much like Spot is already doing at Hyundai factories in Korea. To that end, the top half of Bex is fully modular, so it doesn’t have to look like a goat. But if you ask us, what kind of monster wouldn't want a goat protecting their factories?
No one expected this, but here it is.
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