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Since Nazi Occupation, a Fist Raised in Resistance http://www.nytimes.com/2014...

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"ATHENS — AS protests swirled in Athens during the Greek financial crisis, a silver-haired octogenarian could be seen on the front lines, raising a fist at the riot police as they shot tear gas into his face. Other times, even on the same day, the same man might be standing in front of Parliament, insisting that lawmakers repudiate an austerity package demanded by the country’s creditors, which he said would only throw Greece into greater hardship." - maitani - -

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"Today, he is an iconic figure in Greece, a leftist who transcends ideology and a national symbol of resistance — beginning in 1941, when he and a friend, Apostolos Santas, ripped down the Nazi flag from the Acropolis, risking death as Hitler’s forces conquered Athens." - maitani - -

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John Cage on the Necessity of Boredom - Study Hacks - Cal Newport - http://calnewport.com/blog...

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"You're not bored. You're boring." Wisdom from one of my ex-boyfriends. :) - maitani - -

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if only i could get my oldest to think this way about math. - maitani - -

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Coffee genome sheds light on the evolution of caffeine -- ScienceDaily - http://www.sciencedaily.com/release...

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Cool. :) - maitani - -

"An international research team has sequenced the genome of the coffee plant Coffea canephora. By comparing genes in the coffee, tea and chocolate plants, the scientists show that enzymes involved in making caffeine likely evolved independently in these three organisms. More than 8.7 million tons of coffee was produced in 2013; it is the principal agricultural product of many tropical nations." - maitani - -

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Thucydides’ moral chaos | TLS - http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls...

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Thank you! I have added Apologies to Thucydides to my reading list. - maitani - -

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We pretty much decapitated the Baathists in Iraq and now we have ISIS. Should we just have nuked all of Mesopotamia instead? - maitani - -

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Adolfo Farsari – The Man Who Shot Japan ~ Kuriositas - http://www.kuriositas.com/2011...

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"Farsari was very much a commercial photographer and his compositions were designed to be sold mostly to foreign visitors to Japan. His landscapes often picture what we might call a slightly enhanced version – even romanticized – of Japan but were very highly regarded at the time. Something of a libertarian, Farsari had joined the American Civil War as he was a fervent abolitionist and his photographs reflect his ideas of equality – women are portrayed as often as men and not in subservient positions. For many people who had never been to Japan his images would shape their ideas of the country – and to some degree they would also contribute to the ways in which the Japanese regarded themselves." - maitani - -

"In the 1880s at a time when most Europeans were denied access to the Japanese interior an Italian photographer managed to capture many images of Old Japan. These were then beautifully and realistically hand painted and serve as a remarkable record of a world long since disappeared." - maitani - -

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Everywhere you turn in this park, these visual alignments appear. I love that. :-)

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Rokokogarten Veitshöchheim

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Hofgarten in Veitshöchheim

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BBC News - India: Ancient university reopens after 800 years - http://www.bbc.com/news...

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"Nalanda University, in the eastern state of Bihar, was first established in the 5th Century during the Gupta dynasty. It was was said to have attracted thousands of scholars and thinkers from around the world but the site was destroyed in the 1193 AD by an invading Turkish army. The new campus is set to be spread over 443 acres (179 hecatares) about 15km (9 miles) from where the original university stood, the Times of India reports." - maitani - -

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A Calendar Page for September 2014 - Medieval manuscripts blog - http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitis...

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"September marks the beginning of the wine-making season in the northern hemisphere, and this is as true today as it was on the pages of our medieval calendar. In the opening folio, the process is beginning in earnest, as three women are busy picking grapes in a vineyard, loading them into the basket of a waiting man. Behind them are several grand buildings, while the oenophilic theme of the month is mirrored by the acanthus vines circling round the page. The labour continues on the facing folio. Below the saints’ days for September and a woman holding a balance (for the zodiac sign Libra), a man is bringing a full basket of grapes into a barn. He is greeted by a fellow worker, who stands in a tub full of grapes, crushing them beneath his feet." - maitani - -

The picture of the man crushing the grapes beneath his feet reminded me of this: <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.youtube.com/w... ; title="https://www.youtube.com/w... ; - maitani - -

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FAITH IN RUINS | Pandaemonium - http://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2014...

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St Dunstan-in-the-West on Fleet Street, though also bombed in WW II, is still active and worth a visit. It's about as ecumenical as a Christian church can get, being home to both an Anglican and Romanian Orthodox congregations: "St Dunstan-in-the-West is home to the Anglican and Eastern Churches Association, and is a centre of prayer for Christian Unity. It is therefore appropriate that the side chapels contain altars dedicated to various traditions, including the Lutheran Church in Berlin (EKD). There is also an altar of the Oriental Churches (Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopian, Syrian, Syro-Indian) and a shrine of the Lutheran and Reformed Churches. St Dunstan’s continues in its special role of promoting good relations with Churches outside the Anglican Communion, including through its role as the Diocese of London’s Church for Europe." - maitani - -

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What a contrast! <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.stdunstaninthe... ; title="http://www.stdunstaninthe... ; Now I dream of visiting both churches, if I ever get around to take a trip to London. - maitani - -

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Download for Free 2.6 Million Images from Books Published Over Last 500 Years on Flickr | Open Culture - http://www.openculture.com/2014...

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"Thanks to Kalev Leetaru, a Yahoo! Fellow in Residence at Georgetown University, you can now head over to a new collection at Flickr and search through an archive of 2.6 million public domain images, all extracted from books, magazines and newspapers published over a 500 year period. Eventually this archive will grow to 14.6 million images." - maitani - -

"This new Flickr archive accomplishes something quite important. While other projects (e.g., Google Books) have digitized books and focused on text — on printed words – this project concentrates on images. Leetaru told the BBC, “For all these years all the libraries have been digitizing their books, but they have been putting them up as PDFs or text searchable works.” “They have been focusing on the books as a collection of words. This inverts that.”" - maitani - -

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Brugmansia

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When I bought the tiny pot plant at Aldi in May I never expected it would grow that high in such little time. I also wasn't aware how exotic this plant would be in my Lower Franconian backyard roofgarden. People grow them in the front yards of their village gardens, but I think I haven't seen many as big and vigorous as this one. - maitani - -

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Ancient metal workers were not slaves but highly regarded craftsmen -- ScienceDaily - http://www.sciencedaily.com/release...

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"In 1934, American archaeologist Nelson Glueck named one of the largest known copper production sites of the Levant "Slaves' Hill." This hilltop station, located deep in Israel's Arava Valley, seemed to bear all the marks of an Iron Age slave camp -- fiery furnaces, harsh desert conditions, and a massive barrier preventing escape. New evidence uncovered by Tel Aviv University archaeologists, however, overturns this entire narrative." - maitani - -

"In the course of ongoing excavations at Timna Valley, archaeologists analyzed remnants of food eaten by copper smelters 3,000 years ago. This analysis indicates that the laborers operating the furnaces were in fact skilled craftsmen who enjoyed high social status and adulation. They believe their discovery may have ramifications for similar sites across the region." - maitani - -

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The British Thermopylae | George Monbiot - http://www.monbiot.com/2014...

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"The Anglo-Saxon conquest appears to have crushed the preceding cultures much more decisively than the Anglo-Saxons were later suppressed by the Normans. One indication is the remarkable paucity of Brittonic words in English. Even if you accept the most generous derivations, there appear to be no more than a couple of dozen, of which only four are used in daily conversation: dad, gob, beak and basket. (If you thought gob was recent slang, you couldn’t have been more wrong). It was an obliteration almost as complete as that of the Native American cultures in the United States." - maitani - -

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Lookit, Jenny! History and ecology united! - maitani - -

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BBC News - Malta: Private migrant rescue boat saves fisherman - http://www.bbc.com/news...

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"Maltese philanthropists Regina and Christopher Catrambone, who are funding the operation, say they are the first civilians trying to assist migrants at sea, Malta Today reports. Moas was set up in response to the October 2013 Lampedusa shipwreck tragedy, when around 360 African migrants died after their boat sank off the coast of the Italian island. Deaths are often reported in the area, and just last weekend nearly 4,000 people were rescued. The Phoenix I and its drone helicopters will watch for craft leaving north Africa for Europe, and offer water, food, life-jackets and first aid if necessary." - maitani - -

Oh no, someone's being humane. That's like inviting all the Africans to Europe! - maitani - -

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3quarksdaily: Leaving (and almost leaving) by Rishidev Chaudhuri - http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarks...

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"Perhaps it's that leaving is quite obviously a rehearsal for death, disrupting even the faint illusions of permanence that spatial and environmental contiguity offer us. So is everything, if we have learned to listen to the philosophers and to live well, but of course we have not learned to listen and who has the time to rehearse for death these days?" - maitani - -

"It's impossible for me to leave a place well. I used to think that I was merely bad at logistics and planning (and I am), but I manage to conspire against myself with such sinister competence that this explanation no longer seems viable. As the time to leave approaches my consciousness starts to fragment, and I become exhausted and flee into sleep. I wait too long to do things, unable to act unless I have killed my inertia with drink or other confusion, or distracted myself sufficiently that anything I do is useless. I spend hours on minutiae, reorganizing my book collection and cataloguing my kitchen equipment; they're happy hours, once I forget why I'm doing it" - maitani - -

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BBC Radio 4: In Our Time: Ancient Greece http://ancientworldonline.blogspot.de/2014...

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Archive by Era: Ancient Greece <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/radi... ; title="http://www.bbc.co.uk/radi... ; - maitani - -

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International Dunhuang Project: The Married Monks of Kroraina - http://idpuk.blogspot.de/2014...

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"Over 700 of these documents were excavated by Aurel Stein in the early 20th century and are now in the collections of the British Library and the National Museum of India. Most of them are letters, written in the Gandhārī language and the Kharoṣṭhi script, on wooden tablets. A document was usually made of two wooden tablets placed together, with the content of the letter inside. The two parts were bound with string and sealed with clay, and the cover tabled was inscribed with the name of the addressee." - maitani - -

"The kingdom of Kroraina florished in the middle of the Taklamakan desert in the first centuries of this millennium, and is now known to us through the buildings and artefacts preserved by the desert until their discovery and excavation by explorers and archaeologists. Among the most important of the discoveries from the kingdom were documents providing a detailed (if incomplete) picture of the daily life of Buddhist monks in the region in the 3rd to 4th centuries." - maitani - -

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Oldest metal object found to date in Middle East -- ScienceDaily - http://www.sciencedaily.com/release...

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"Tel Tsaf, a Middle Chalcolithic village dated to about 5200-4600 BCE, is located near the Jordan River and the international border with Jordan. The site was first documented in the 1950s and excavations there began at the end of the 1970s. From the earliest digs nearly 40 years ago, this area, the most important archeological site in the region dated to this period, has been supplying researchers with a great deal of valuable data, and continues to do so during this latest research project led by Dr. Danny Rosenberg of the University of Haifa in conjunction with Dr. Florian Klimscha of the Eurasia Department of the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin. For example, the researchers learned of the community's great wealth and the long-distance commercial ties it maintained from the large buildings made of mud-bricks and the large number of silos in which wheat and barley were stored on an unprecedented scale. There were many roasting ovens in the courtyards, all filled with burnt animal bones testifying to the holding of large events and many other findings, among them items made of obsidian (a volcanic glass with origins in Anatolia or Armenia), shells from the Nile River in Egypt and other areas around the Mediterranean, figurines of people and animals, and pottery unlike that found in almost any other location in the region." - maitani - -

"A copper awl, the oldest metal object found to date in the Middle East, was discovered during the excavations at Tel Tsaf, according to a recent study published by researchers from the Zinman Institute of Archaeology and the Department of archaeology at the University of Haifa , in conjunction with researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the German Archaeological Institute of Berlin. According to the study, which appeared in the journal PLoS ONE, the awl dates back to the late 6th millennium or the early 5th millennium BCE, moving back by several hundred years the date it was previously thought that the peoples of the region began to use metals." - maitani - -

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Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names Released as Linked Open Data | The Getty Iris - http://blogs.getty.edu/iris...

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"The Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names is a resource of over 2,000,000 names of current and historical places, including cities, archaeological sites, nations, and physical features. It focuses mainly on places relevant to art, architecture, archaeology, art conservation, and related fields." - maitani - -

Patrick Durusau on the Getty Thesaurus: "A resource where you could loose some serious time! Try this entry for London. Or Paris. Bear in mind the data that underlies this rich display is now available for free downloading." <a rel="nofollow" href="http://tm.durusau.net/?p=... ; - maitani - -

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A Photographic Tour of Haruki Murakami's Tokyo, Where Dream, Memory, and Reality Meet | Open Culture - http://www.openculture.com/2014...

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"Last week saw me in line at one of Los Angeles’ most beloved bookstores, waiting for a signed copy of Haruki Murakami’s new novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage upon its midnight release. The considerable hubbub around the book’s entry into English — to say nothing of its original appearance last year in Japanese, when it sold a much-discussed million copies in a single month — demonstrates, 35 years into the author’s career, the world’s unflagging appetite for Murakamiana. Just recently, we featured the artifacts of Murakami’s passion for jazz and a collection of his free short stories online, just as many others have got into the spirit by seeking out various illuminating inspirations of, locations in, and quotations from his work. The author of the blog Randomwire, known only as David, has done all three, and taken photographs to boot, in his grand three-part project of documenting Murakami’s Tokyo: the Tokyo of his beginnings, the Tokyo where he ran the jazz bars in which he began writing, and the Tokyo which has given his stories their otherworldly touch." - maitani - -

Murakami’s Tokyo: Part 1 — Beginnings <a rel="nofollow" href="http://randomwire.com/mur... ; title="http://randomwire.com/mur... ; - maitani - -

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SITES - The Visual Heritage Project - http://visualheritageproject.weebly.com/sites...

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"The Visual Heritage Project is an initiative to increase documentation on at-risk archaeological sites through crowd sourcing image collection. The Project takes an innovative approach to delivering this media by harnessing public data from social media and archival records. Through pairing these images, the Project provides a visual tour of history. Scroll through years of development as the images associated with the sites evolve over time, and begin exploring." - maitani - -

via AncientWorldOnline <a rel="nofollow" href="http://ancientworldonline... ; title="http://ancientworldonline... ; - maitani - -

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Graham Priest on Buddhism and logic by Massimo Pigliucci - http://scientiasalon.wordpress.com/2014...

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"Graham Priest is a colleague of mine at City University of New York’s Graduate Center, a world renowned expert in logic, a Buddhist connoisseur, and an all-around nice guy [1]. So I always pay attention to what he says or writes. Recently he published a piece in Aeon magazine [2] entitled “Beyond true and false: Buddhist philosophy is full of contradictions. Now modern logic is learning why that might be a good thing.” I approached it with trepidation, for a variety of reasons. To begin with, I am weary of attempts at reading things into Buddhism or other Asian traditions of thought that are clearly not there (the most egregious example being the “documentary” What The Bleep Do We Know?, and the most frustrating one the infamous The Tao of Physics, by Fritjof Capra). But I quickly reassured myself because I knew Graham would do better than that." - maitani - -

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3quarksdaily: The colourful life of the man who translated Proust’s opus - http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarks...

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"The subtitle of this entertaining biography describes CK Scott Moncrieff as a “Soldier, Spy and Translator”. But Jean Findlay, his great-great-niece, makes clear in Chasing Lost Time that the list of his accomplishments and activities did not end there. Scott Moncrieff was also a generous family man, a promiscuous homosexual and a converted Catholic. His colourful, 40-year life somehow seems to embody almost every literary cliché of his time, from poet of the trenches to jazz age expat. And yet his name never appeared on the front cover of any of the 20-odd books he published." - maitani - -

bi de bize bak amk - maitani - -

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Memories of errors foster faster learning -- ScienceDaily - http://www.sciencedaily.com/release...

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"Using a deceptively simple set of experiments, researchers have learned why people learn an identical or similar task faster the second, third and subsequent time around. The reason: They are aided not only by memories of how to perform the task, but also by memories of the errors made the first time." - maitani - -

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"The surprise finding in the current study, described in Science Express on Aug. 14, is that not only do such errors train the brain to better perform a specific task, but they also teach it how to learn faster from errors, even when those errors are encountered in a completely different task. In this way, the brain can generalize from one task to another by keeping a memory of the errors." - maitani - -

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