Best of the internet - October
Story recounting Isaac Newton's adventures saving England from economic crisis by becoming Warden of the Mint and virtually eradicating the scourge of counterfeiting. Very entertaining. Includes description of his "archnemesis," the most prolific counterfeiter of the time, and Newton's hunt to bring him to justice...
Historical photographs of Iran in the 19th century. Really cool to see so much traditional Iranian architecture, and really sad when you think how much of these buildings has been lost to time.
Rewilding gigantic sea eagles to a Scottish island - and the shepherds rebel.
"Because every time a glimpse of a magnificently soaring eagle makes [the sheep farmers] decide that maybe the birds aren’t so bad, they come around a corner on their quad bikes and find a pile of guts and wool and wonder if an eagle has just blithely killed yet another of their lambs."
In response to the raptors' carrying off lambs, which hurts the farmers of Mull, the government has instituted a program consisting of offering up fish for the raptors, which a farmer places on a nearby hill before moving out of sight. I'm not making this up.
Daisugi - the Japanese art of trees that grow out of trees. I like this art form. It makes me think of healing from trauma. In a way, we are all a form of daisugi - we are living our lives, just as planned, and then something drastic happens that makes it so we can't go on that way. And so we shift, and we keep going, in a different direction. The version of ourselves that we were is still there, still contributing to who we are today, but we have surpassed that person, we have become new with our experiences and our memories. We have grown and developed, and we are made out of the person we once were.
