Each Friday we compile a list of interesting links and articles our editors find from across the web. Here’s what’s catching our eye this week.
All dogs can actually go to heaven:
But you can forget digging a hole for for Nibbles, Chester or Fido in that ever-expanding back yard pet cemetery, there’s a far grander idea that will get the neighbors talking: Launch your beloved pet into outer space. Celestis is a private spaceflight company with a difference. Since 1995 it has been sending payloads on suborbital and orbital trips into space with the cremated remains of humans using a variety of launch providers. No, it’s not some obscure experiment, relatives of the deceased can choose any one of several send-off options involving a rocket-powered memorial.
A look into Yves Behar, a Silicon Valley icon for his gadget designs:
Since moving to California in 1990, Behar has become one of the leading industrial designers of his generation, creating iconic objects for Jawbone, Herman Miller, General Electric, and Puma, among many others. The objects often have a socially progressive bent: light fixtures that promote energy conservation, say, or cheap but durable laptops that offer poor children improved access to education. Behar’s designs tend to be practical rather than flashy, and they have a history of predicting — or dictating — mass-market trends. His design for the Jambox, first released in 2010, launched a multibillion-dollar wireless-speaker market.
How soccer made its way into World War I:
The history of soccer in the First World War — which began in earnest 100 years ago this month — is a history of two worlds in unresolvable tension. It’s the story of a failed metaphor. Soccer was everywhere during the war, played by soldiers and sailors, played by women working in munitions factories and by men in prison camps. The poet Siegfried Sassoon, who served as an officer on the Western Front, read football news aloud to his men to keep them calm before an attack. During the famous Christmas Truce of 1914, when English and German soldiers came out of their trenches and mingled in no-man’s-land, a German introduced himself to a British corporal with a word about Tottenham and Arsenal.1 Elsewhere, using caps in place of goal posts, the 133rd Saxons played an impromptu game against British troops, which the Germans won 3-2.
Contributor to The Other Journal, Collin Pae Cornell, wrote this post, “To my deconverted friend,” for the blog Die Evangelischen Theologen:
The story of your faith – and non-faith – is, of course, uniquely your own. Yet some parts of your experience are widely shared. You were raised in the American South. Christianity, in all of its predictable Southern dimensions – hokey roadside signage, Sunday finery, hollering preachers, a buttery layer of civil religion – was, to you as to many, as familiar as family. You along with thousands of other evangelical children across the country – like me – opted to attend a Christian undergraduate. And as with many of us, much of your life after graduation has consisted, in one way or another, of making sense out of that decision and its legacy.
You know him as Burt Reynolds. Others refer to him as Professor Burt:
Once the biggest movie star on the planet, these days Reynolds can usually be found here, in the Mirror Ballroom on the second floor of Lake Park Town Hall, teaching South Florida actors everything he’s picked up in an almost 60-year career.
Truvada is a drug that prevents HIV, and The Verge discusses why women haven’t been apart of the conversation:
A few months ago, the CDC recommended Truvada, the HIV prevention pill, to anyone at risk of infection. The Verge and other media outlets — including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Slate — covered the news in a big way, because it meant that government officials were not only urging doctors to prescribe the drug to queer men or individuals whose partners have HIV, but to anyone at risk — including sex workers, heterosexuals, and transfolk. Yet many reporters, myself included, failed to discuss how revolutionary this drug is for one particular, and substantial, segment of the US population: women.
Herlinde Koelbl’s book Targets covers an interesting topic: shooting targets used by world armies.
Over the course of six years, Koelbl traveled to 30 countries and took thousands of photographs of shooting targets used during military training. Seen as a series, the images are a fascinating and somewhat unsettling window into how militaries around the world use visuals to groom their soldiers for battle.
Roller hockey was actually an event in the Olympics, back in 1992:
In 1992, roller hockey made its Olympic debut as one of three demonstration sports at the Barcelona Games. For those in the roller hockey community — more accurately, for those involved with a version of the sport called rink hockey — the 1992 Olympics represent the biggest showcase the game’s ever known. But the years that followed were difficult, especially in the United States, where the sport struggled to catch on as funding began to dry up.
Yet another story how the you may be the object of Internet experiments:
The internet is one big experiment, and you’re part of it. Every day, millions of trials are manipulating what you see when you browse online, to find out how to keep your attention, make you click more links – and spend more money. And these experiments are often secret. You’ll probably never know you were part of them.
The Guardian gives some guidelines on how to write the perfect out-of-office email:
Summer is upon us, and with it a deluge of rain, kids on public transport, and out of office (OOO) replies. An out-of-office email is something you assume would be easy to write – you know precisely its purpose and what it needs to say. But, as with colleagues’ leaving cards and appraisal feedback forms, it’s often difficult to find the exact words.
Want to see a shark bite up close? Now you can: