How Kittie Knox changed bicycling forever in the 1800s
From Joe Biel: "Kittie Knox is the reason that bicycling is more than just another leisure sport for the wealthy. As a Black teenager, she created the world that she wanted to see from the seat of her bike. Today, you can see the results of Kittie’s success in the hundreds of cities around the globe where a bicycle is used to have a happier commute, as a social galvanizer among disparate individuals, as a political leveraging tool, or for tall bike jousting. Much has been written of the bicycle as the great liberator of wealthy women from restrictive clothing. But as you will see here, it was working class women like Kittie who changed the paradigm and made the bicycle into an actual liberator of women. While the upper classes clung to long, awkward skirts and tried to prevent women from embracing social bicycling at all, Kittie was out there showing them how it was done; what the future would hold."
The 16th century "Florentine Codex" has been digitized and is available online
From Maya Pontone for Hyperallergic: "After centuries of remaining largely inaccessible to the public, a rare manuscript featuring 2,500 pages of detailed illustrations and text documenting the history and culture of 16th-century Mexico is now available online. The Digital Florentine Codex, a seven-year project by Los Angeles’s Getty Research Institute, features new transcriptions and translations, updated summaries, searchable texts and images, and more. Modeled after medieval European encyclopedias, the Florentine Codex is a three-volume, 12-book collection written in Spanish and Nahuatl documenting the daily life and customs of the Mexica (Aztec) people, as well as other information including astronomy, flora, and fauna, during the time of Spanish conquest. It was originally created by Bernardino de Sahagún, a Spanish Franciscan friar."
Why left-handed people are better at playing badminton than right-handers
From Chen Ly for New Scientist: "Professional badminton players use feather shuttlecocks, which are usually made from about 16 overlapping goose or duck feathers inserted into a cork base. This overlapping introduces an asymmetry that means a …shuttlecock naturally spins anticlockwise as it flies through the air, unlike a tennis ball, which will spin in either direction.To study if this anticlockwise spin affects left and right-handed players differently, Eric Collet at the University of Rennes in France recorded and analysed videos of three left-handed and three right-handed people playing badminton. He found a key difference in the players’ forehand slice shots, a common move where the racket brushes the shuttlecock to change its angle of travel."
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