"And then to my side there appeared a convoy of wooden boats - a long procession meandering up the Ganges. All eyes turned to them and on board there were children dressed as gods, their smiling, proud faces frames in swirls of gold and red braid."
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"There in the fading evening light six priests standing on plinths on the riverbank were surrounded by thousands of people sitting on ancient stone steps that led down to the water. The priests - some with long hair tied back - were dressed in white robes from head to toe. They started by blowing into some conch shells, creating a low timeless sound and then came the bells and the incense swirling through the air. As the rhythmic chanting lulled the spectators into a state of spiritual relaxation, attendants produced lamps, each one with a thousand candles. On the Ganges itself some candles in small bowls were launched on the calm, wide waters - they floated into distance, diminishing specks of light."
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"BBC Radio 4 has just kicked off a 25-part radio series called ‘In Search of Ourselves: A History of Psychology and the Mind’. Because the BBC are not very good at the internet, there are no podcasts – streaming audio only, and each episode disappears after seven days. Good to see the BBC are still on the cutting edge of 20th Century media."
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hmmm, seems a little too simplistic, so I guess now therapists will start asking people to think of the weather instead of their turmoil? :-|
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"A simple and effective emotion-regulation strategy that has neurologically and behaviorally been proven to lessen the emotional impact of personal negative memories, researchers have shown. "Sometimes we dwell on how sad, embarrassed, or hurt we felt during an event, and that makes us feel worse and worse. But we found that instead of thinking about your emotions during a negative memory, looking away from the worst emotions and thinking about the context, like a friend who was there, what the weather was like, or anything else non-emotional that was part of the memory, will rather effortlessly take your mind away from the unwanted emotions associated with that memory," the researchers suggest."
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"The small village of Ciocanesti in Romania produces the most beautiful hand-painted Easter eggs I've ever seen. This video is a wonderful look at the process and tradition."
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"First, the (duck, goose, chicken, or even ostrich) egg is drained, through a tiny hole. Then, using a method akin to batik, it is dipped in dye and painted one color at a time, with the painter applying beeswax to those areas she wants to protect from the next round of dying. The painting implement, called a kishitze, is a stick with an iron tip. (Previously, egg-painters would have used thorns or pig bristles.)"
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"“This new taxonomy of cognitive styles offers a clear categorization of different types of styles from basic and applied fields and thus eliminates the confusing labeling of styles, making it possible to integrate the findings on individual differences in cognition across different disciplines,” says researcher Maria Kozhevnikov, Associate Professor in psychology at the National University of Singapore and Associate in Neuroscience at Massachusetts General Hospital and lead author of the new report."
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"Vienna’s Café Central was crowded with intellectuals at the turn of the 20th century, including Freud, Lenin, the Vienna Circle of logical positivists, and endless chessplayers. When Victor Adler made the argument that war would provoke a revolution in Russia, Leopold Berchtold replied, “And who will lead this revolution? Perhaps Mr. Bronstein sitting over there at the Café Central?” Mr. Bronstein was Leon Trotsky."
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"To read George Eliot attentively is to become aware how little one knows about her. It is also to become aware of the credulity, not very creditable to one’s insight, with which, half consciously and partly maliciously, one had accepted the late Victorian version of a deluded woman who held phantom sway over subjects even more deluded than herself. At what moment and by what means her spell was broken it is difficult to ascertain. Some people attribute it to the publication of her Life. Perhaps George Meredith, with his phrase about the “mercurial little showman” and the “errant woman” on the daïs, gave point and poison to the arrows of thousands incapable of aiming them so accurately, but delighted to let fly. She became one of the butts for youth to laugh at, the convenient symbol of a group of serious people who were all guilty of the same idolatry and could be dismissed with the same scorn. Lord Acton had said that she was greater than Dante; Herbert Spencer exempted her novels, as if they were not novels, when he banned all fiction from the London Library. She was the pride and paragon of her sex."
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"About eight years ago I began translating Book 2 of the Homeric Iliad as part of a translation project I was working on together with Mary Ebbott, Doug Frame, Lenny Muellner, and Greg Nagy at the Center for Hellenic Studies. These were the operating principles we set for ourselves: 1. Same word translated the same way each time [except in the case of glossary words, which are included in brackets]. 2. For glossary words in brackets, one form of the Greek word for all derivatives 3. Include plus verses. 4. We try to follow Greek word order. 5. We substitute names for pronouns when the reference is not obvious. 6. We respect the integrity of the line even at the expense of the distinction between active and passive voice."
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"Who does the Crimea belong to? First of all, to the sea that made it. Seven thousand years ago, the Black Sea was much lower than it is today. Then a waterfall tumbled over the Bosporus, and the waters began to rise. The flood cut the Crimea off from the mainland – all the way except for a narrow isthmus called the Perekop. Ever since, it has been a rocky island on the shores of a sea of grass."
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"The steppes belonged to the nomads. Grass meant horses, and freedom. The steppes stretched north, from the mouth of the Danube to the Siberian Altai. Across the centuries they were home to various nomadic confederations and tribes: Scythians, Sarmatians, Huns, Pechenegs, Cumans, Mongols, and Kipchak Turks. The legendary Cimmerians predate them all; the Cossacks are still there today.
At times, the nomadic tribes made their home in Crimea too. But the mountainous peninsula was also a refuge. = It drew in emigrants from the South: exiles fleeing persecution and castaways from larger migrations. In the seventh century B.C., Greeks from Miletus and the rest of Ionia settled there in search of land, founding cities all along the coasts. Thracians and Scythians followed, driving the Taurians, the native inhabitants of the peninsula, into the high places."
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"Dr Bailey and her colleagues were looking to test the learning ability of birds; their test aimed to work out if the birds could learn to differentiate between materials based on their properties.
To test this, they gave one group of finches a flexible, floppy string to build with, and another group stiffer, more "structurally sound" string.
Both groups of birds were subsequently offered a choice between the flexible and stiff string. And the birds that had been made to build their nests with the floppy string immediately opted for the more rigid building material."
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"Birds can learn to choose the best building materials for their nests, according to scientists."
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"Four- to 13-year-olds in upstate New York and Newfoundland, Canada, probed their memories when researchers asked: "You know, some kids can remember things that happened to them when they were very little. What is the first thing you can remember? How old were you at that time?" The researchers then returned a year or two later to ask again about earliest memories -- and at what age the children were when the events occurred."
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""The age estimates of earliest childhood memories are not as accurate as what has been generally assumed," report Qi Wang of Cornell University and Carole Peterson of Memorial University of Newfoundland in the March 2014 online issue of Developmental Psychology. "Using children's own age estimates as the reference, we found that memory dating shifted to later ages as time elapsed.""
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"Food and literature have a long and arduous relationship, from the Artists’ and Writers’ Cookbook to Jane Austen reimagined in recipes to Alice B. Toklas’s literary memoir disguised as a cookbook to those delicious dishes inspired by Alice in Wonderland. But nowhere does that relationship come alive more vividly and enchantingly than in Fictitious Dishes: An Album of Literature’s Most Memorable Meals (public library) — an ingenious project by designer and writer Dinah Fried, who cooks, art-directs, and photographs meals from nearly two centuries of famous fiction. Each photograph is accompanied by the particular passage in which the recipe appeared, as well as a few quick and curious factlets about the respective author, novel, or food."
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"During my last voyage to Mongolia, I flew over to Ulgii (or ölgii), the capital of the far west. I went there in order to document the Kazakh eagle hunters' lives in west Mongolia. These eagle hunters, who preserve an old tradition that’s passed from generation to generation, tame eagles and use them for hunting smaller animals, such as foxes and marmots. The eagle hunter’s families live on this side of Mongolia after having migrated between Kazakhstan, Russia and Mongolia until the fall of communism and closing of all borders. The tradition’s preservation was what drew me to them. They preserve it without any touristic nature, unlike in Kazakhstan. These Kazakh eagle hunters, who live in Mongolia today, are the last ones on earth who still deserve the title “Eagle Hunter”. It is not merely a title to them, but a way of life."
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"In the wake of Cyclone Aila in 2009, swollen seas washed over the delta of the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers. The storm surge breached the embankments surrounding a small island that was home to 10,000 families, turning the land into a muddy hell. The deluge of salty water washed out fields, homes, roads and markets just as people had begun to recover from the damage caused 18 months before by Cyclone Sidr. Many migrated to nearby cities. And thousands more took shelter on what remained of the embankments, where lack of sanitation and privacy would soon spur disease and crime."
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"Last fall, Ayun Halliday revisited Honoré de Balzac’s Humorous Essay, “The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee,” and His Epic Coffee Addiction. Last night, one of our friends on Twitter — @thegliterati — sent this our way: A snapshot of Balzac’s coffee pot. It bears his initials and currently resides at the Maison de Balzac museum in Paris. If you ever find yourself in the 16 arrondissement, pay it a visit and pay it some thanks."
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non ho capito quale sarebbe la next terrible phase of Greece's crisiz
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"Greece is about to issue 5 year bonds again. Berlin, Brussels, Frankfurt and Athens are celebrating Greece’s recovery. For my part, I think (and tell the BBC World Service) that this is a sad day for Greece and it is a sad day for Europe. Why do I refuse to be impressed and join in the celebrations? It is because the Greek state and the Greek banks remain deeply insolvent. And, their return to the money markets is a harbinger of the next terrible phase of Greece’s crisis, rather than a cause for celebration."
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"What is mathematics about? We know what biology is about; it’s about living things. Or more exactly, the living aspects of living things – the motion of a cat thrown out of a window is a matter for physics, but its physiology is a topic for biology. Oceanography is about oceans; sociology is about human behaviour in the mass long-term; and so on. When all the sciences and their subject matters are laid out, is there any aspect of reality left over for mathematics to be about? That is the basic question in the philosophy of mathematics."
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"This wooden panel dating from ca. seventh century from Dandan Uilik was discovered by Aurel Stein on his first expedition to Khotan in 1900-1901. The scene is thought to depict a story related by the seventh century Chinese traveller Xuanzang of how silkworms were smuggled out of China westwards into Khotan – present day Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. A Chinese princess (second from the left), about to be married to the king of Khotan, has smuggled silkworm eggs and mulberry seeds in her headdress. She carries a basket of cocoons. On the far right, a figure holding a comb stands in front of a loom with a reel of thread behind. The four-armed deity (second right) has been identified as the patron of weaving."
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"To celebrate 20 years of the International Dunhuang Project, IDP has arranged an extensive programme of events including a half-day of lectures on 11 April ‘Silk on the Silk Road’. In this post I thought I would highlight two sources on silk in the Stein collection, one well-known and the second, a bit more obscure, but equally important for its reference to the silk trade in the fourth century AD."
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"This page aims at making information on Byzantine Nubia and Nubian monasteries in particular available to wider audience. It will present projects regarding Nubian monasticism but also Nubian culture in general from the times between Napata and Funj kingdoms."
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"Two years ago I've started a program aimed at synthesis on Nubian monasteries. Thanks to the hospitality of the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago and generosity of the Foundation for Polish Science and de Brzezie Lanckoronski Foundation I lead a project carried out by a team of early career European scholars publishing the Qasr el-Wizz monastery. The monastery has been fully excavated by George Scanlon on behalf of the Oriental institute in 1965, yet only two preliminary reports in Journal of Egyptian Archaeology has been published. Our aim is to publish the entire material recovered at the site and made this exceptional collection available for the public."
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"Most have heard of the Battle of Waterloo, but who has heard of the volcano called Tambora? No school textbook I’ve seen mentions that only two months before Napoleon’s final defeat in 1815, the faraway Indonesian island of Sumbawa was the site of the most devastating volcanic eruption on Earth in thousands of years."
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"The death toll was around 100,000 people from the thick pyroclastic flows of lava; the tsunami that struck nearby coasts; and the thick ash that blanketed Southeast Asia’s farmlands, destroyed crops, and plunged it into darkness for a week. Both events—Napoleon’s defeat and the eruption—had monumental impacts on human history. But while a library of scholarship has been devoted to Napoleon’s undoing at Waterloo, the scattered writings on Tambora would scarcely fill your in-tray."
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