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Françoise Sagan: 'She did what she wanted' | Books | The Guardian - http://www.theguardian.com/books...

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"She took the title from a poem by Paul Éluard and her nom de plume from Proust. Years later, Brigid Brophy would declare that she wrote with "a pen saturated in French literature". But 60 years ago , the publication of a first novel by an 18-year-old author had France's literary establishment in uproar. As a slender volume called Bonjour Tristesse flew off the shelves, Françoise Sagan became a scandalous success, the echoes of which would prove impossible to silence." - maitani - -

"This short novel of barely 30,000 words is a story told by Cécile, a 17-year-old girl holidaying on the Côte d'Azur with her widowed father, a roué who has brought along his young girlfriend. The daughter is exploring her own first sentimental adventure, a swiftly consummated romance with a handsome law student, when the unexpected arrival of an older woman, a friend of her late mother, disrupts the self-indulgent haze of high summer. First the newcomer takes charge, ordering Cécile to terminate her romance in order to stay indoors and do her homework. Then she and the father fall in love. To prevent their marriage the daughter devises an ill-fated plot in which the pretence of an affair between her boyfriend and the father's dumped girlfriend is intended to provoke jealousy and restore the status quo ante." - maitani - -

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BBC News - Can 10,000 hours of practice make you an expert? - http://www.bbc.com/news...

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"One man who decided to test it is Dan McLaughlin, 34, a former commercial photographer from Portland, Oregon." - maitani - -

"A much-touted theory suggests that practising any skill for 10,000 hours is sufficient to make you an expert. No innate talent? Not a problem. You just practice. But is it true?" - maitani - -

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

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"The agricultural labours of the year are shown beginning in earnest in these calendar pages for the month of March. On the first folio, two men and a woman are continuing the work of vine-trimming that was begun in February, while one man pauses for much-needed refreshment. On the following folio, the listing of March's saints' days and feasts continues. In the roundel below can be found a ram (inexplicably lacking his horns) for the zodiac sign Aries. Beneath him is another well-bundled labourer turning the earth in a field in preparation for planting." - maitani - -

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The Doctor and the Saint | The Caravan - A Journal of Politics and Culture - http://caravanmagazine.in/reporta...

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Arundhati Roy, the Not-So-Reluctant Renegade <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.nytimes.com/20... ; title="http://www.nytimes.com/20... ; - maitani - -

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The Rationalist and the Romantic - Namit Arora on Arundhati Roy’s introduction to Dr. BR Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste <a rel="nofollow" href="http://blog.shunya.net/sh... ; title="http://blog.shunya.net/sh... ; - maitani - -

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Opening Sentences From Great Novels, Diagrammed: Lolita, 1984 & More - Open Culture - http://www.openculture.com/2014...

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One of many foundational methods for building robust natural language processing systems. - maitani - -

"I admit it: I still don’t understand sentence diagramming. Though as a middle schooler I dutifully, if grudgingly, submitted to that classic English classroom exercise, the practice didn’t stick, nor did whatever habit of composition it meant to convey. Some of my teachers tried to make sentence diagramming interesting, but they could only do so much. They could only do so much, that is, without Pop Chart Lab’s “A Diagrammatical Dissertation on Opening Lines of Notable Novels,” a poster that “diagrams 25 famous opening lines from revered works of fiction according to the dictates of the classic Reed-Kellogg system,” with each and every graphic “parsing classical prose by parts of speech and offering a partitioned, color-coded picto-grammatical representation of some of the most famous first words in literary history.”" - maitani - -

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The Past in Pieces: Lego and Lost Civilisations | res gerendae - http://resgerendae.wordpress.com/2014...

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"I’ve always concentrated my Legoine affections primarily on Space and Castle Lego, with occasional forays into Pirates. When I visited my mum last December, I dragged eight boxes of Lego from the shed and spent Christmas afternoon rebuilding a Space-themed Christmas present of 20 years earlier. By last week, the Castle itch was reasserting itself and I decided to indulge. For the first time in many years I bought some new Lego – my first new Castle sets since childhood. And I made a discovery." - maitani - -

"As I think I may have mentioned once or twice, I was a Lego-mad child. Of all the things under the tree on Christmas morning, Lego was always the most prized. Like many, I ‘grew out of’ Lego in my teens, only to come back to it as I’ve got older and had more disposable income. That distinctive rattle of a cardboard box full of little plastic bricks still has a Pavlovian effect on me, equal measures calming and relaxing. The cares of the world slip away and the inner ten-year-old is unleashed." - maitani - -

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The Stunning Symbiosis between Math and Knitting [Slide Show] - Scientific American - http://www.scientificamerican.com/slidesh...

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"Truncated Temari. Temari is a traditional Japanese art form that often uses geometrically inspired designs. Yackel's temari balls show spherical versions of geometric shapes based on the five Platonic solids...." - maitani - -

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International Dunhuang Project - http://idpuk.blogspot.de/

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"The first panel on display (March-April 2014) will be the illustrated frontispiece showing the Buddha with his elderly disciple, Subhūti. The text of the sutra concerns the philosophical discussion between the Buddha and Subhūti." - maitani - -

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"The whole text of the earliest dated printed book — the Diamond Sutra — will be on display at the British Library for the first time over a period of eighteen months from March 8, 2014." - maitani - -

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3quarksdaily: Not thinking - by Rishidev Chaudhuri - http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarks...

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"As a (mostly) former obsessive I'm still not very good at this, but I'm thankful for all the time spent practicing. Obsessions and compulsions take an ordinary pattern (that of a persistent thought or behavior) and, by carrying it to an extreme, reveal a pathology that was always there. Being confronted by a thought that won't leave is a dramatic education in the possibility that perhaps the thought wasn't yours to start with and that its trajectory and dynamics are unsettling and alien. These moments shake the uncritical notion of a unified self. I imagine we all have these experiences as we grow agoal lying at the end of many sublimations (for the Nietzscheans and psychoanalysts)." - maitani - -

"Perhaps a reasonable proxy for wisdom is the ability to stop thinking when you want, to interrupt the tortured spiraling progression of thoughts that serve no function and lead nowhere, the symbolic productions of a machine gone mad. Like much else, this can (and, I think, should) be approached as a skill that can be practiced, as part of a general package of cultivable techniques and approaches that help in being happy, especially for those not naturally gifted in that way and especially for the anxious neurotic, constantly harried by thoughts that something is not right and that it will all come crashing down[1]." - maitani - -

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Pompeii – a Geological Movie-Review : Introducing the Main Character | History of Geology, Scientific American Blog Network - http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/history...

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<a rel="nofollow" href="http://ff.im/1gmweI"... ; :) - maitani - -

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"The appearance of Mount Vesuvius and the surrounding area before the catastrophic eruption has been – and still is – a topic debated by geologists and archeologists alike. In case of Vesuvius we not only have some geological clues, but also written descriptions and maybe some contemporary drawings." - maitani - -

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The Smart Set: Vermeer and the Threshold - February 13, 2014 - http://www.thesmartset.com/article...

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"Vermeer used various painterly tricks to make these moments – these mundane tasks – look special. He expended a great deal of time and energy capturing the effects of light. He studied the way light comes in through a window, bathing a room. He seems to have painted most of his pictures in one or two rooms in his own home. He knew that light well. He analyzed that light, meditated on it. Using that light, he projected images through a camera obscura and probably through other kinds of lenses and mirrors available in 17th-century Holland. This allowed Vermeer to concentrate on every sparkle, shine and glimmer. He concocted different methods for reproducing those glimmers and shines. Sometimes he would render an object, like a knob or finial, simply as an effect of light. That’s to say, we only know the object is there because of how Vermeer painted the light shining upon it." - maitani - -

"They are among the most mysterious paintings. But it is very hard to say why. Nothing much happens in the paintings. People engage in simple tasks. A man and a woman sit at a table and speak. A woman smiles. A woman reads a letter. A girl looks at us over her left shoulder. A woman sews. A woman pours some milk out of a jug. That’s it. One task, one episode, one moment in each painting." - maitani - -

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What’s Left of My Books by Charles Simic http://www.nybooks.com/blogs...

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"I recall, for example, Flaubert saying that it is splendid to be a writer, to put men into the frying pan of your imagination and make them pop like chestnuts; St. Augustine confessing that even he could not comprehend God’s purpose in creating flies; Beckett telling about a character in his early novel Murphy whom the cops took in for begging without singing, and who was jailed for ten days by the judge; Victor Shklovsky, recounting how he once heard the great Russian poet Mayakovski claim that black cats produce electricity while being stroked; Emily Dickinson saying in a letter, It is lonely without birds today, for it rains badly, and the little poets have no umbrellas; Flannery O’Connor describing a young woman as having a face as broad and as innocent as a cabbage and tied around with a green handkerchief that had two points on the top like rabbit ears; and many other such small and overlooked delights." - maitani - -

"There is nothing more mysterious and wonderful than the way in which some bit of language—a clever quip, a pithy observation, a vivid figure of speech found in a book or heard in a conversation—remains fresh in our memory when so many other things we were at one time interested in are forgotten. These days, I look in disbelief at many of the books on my shelves, from thick novels and memoirs to works of great philosophers, wondering whether it’s really possible that I devoted weeks or even months reading them. I know that I did, but only because opening them, I find passages and phrases I’ve underlined, which upon rereading I recall better than the plots, characters, and ideas I encountered in these books; sometimes it looks to me that what has made the lasting impression on my literary taste buds, to use culinary terms, are crumbs strewn on the table rather than the whole meal." - maitani - -

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The last post: letters home to India during the first world war | Books | The Guardian - http://www.theguardian.com/books...

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"More than a million Indian soldiers fought in the first world war. As the British Library's collection of their correspondence is put online, Daljit Nagra reflects on their horror, heroes and hopes" - maitani - -

"'Our people have many lice in their clothes, and they bite terribly. They are worse than a rifle bullet. But there are no mosquitoes or other creatures which bite mankind, and no snakes or scorpions at all." This extract is from a letter by an Indian soldier in 1915. He is in France and writing home to a friend. The letter comes from a collection of correspondence copied by British military censors, revealing the experiences of the many Indian soldiers who fought in the first world war, that has just been digitised by the British Library. The collection also contains the censors' summaries of the letters, revealing their concerns." - maitani - -

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Wide Urban World: Cities of Tipis? - http://wideurbanworld.blogspot.de/2014...

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"Is there anything "urban" about these big circular camps? Archaeologist Alice Kehoe thinks so. In her textbook, North American Indians, she says:" - maitani - -

"The Native Americans of the North American Plains were some of the better known nomads of recent centuries. Groups like the Crow, Cheyenne, and Sioux took advantage of the horses brought to the New World by Europeans to forge a successful way of life hunting bison on the plains. They moved their settlements of tipis throughout the year, following the requirements of bison hunting. Life alternated between small camps of five or ten tipis and larger camps of up to 100 tipis. Some of the larger camps ("cluster camps" in the language of Banks and Snortland 1995) had an unorganized arrangement of tipis, and some ("circular camps") were ceremonial in orientation and the tipis were arranged in a huge circle." - maitani - -

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Carson McCullers Understood Human Nature | New Republic - http://www.newrepublic.com/article...

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"Out of the tradition of Gertrude Stein’s experiments in style and the clipped, stout prose of Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway comes Carson McCullers' "The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter." With the depression as a murky backdrop, this first novel depicts the bleak landscape of the American consciousness below the Mason-Dixon line. Miss McCullers' picture of loneliness, death, accident, insanity, fear, mob violence and terror is perhaps the most desolate that has so far come from the South. Her quality of despair is unique and individual; and it seems to me more natural and authentic than that of Faulkner. Her groping characters live in a world more completely lost than any Sherwood Anderson ever dreamed of. And she recounts incidents of death and attitudes of stoicism in sentences whose neutrality makes Hemingway's terse prose seem warm and partisan by comparison. Hovering mockingly over her story of loneliness in a small town are primitive religion, adolescent hope, the silence of deaf mutes—and all of these give the violent colors of the life she depicts a sheen of weird tenderness." - maitani - -

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I read several of her books, and each one was beautiful and movingly sad. Though it was a long time ago, I still remember the characters and their stories. I am in awe that Carson McCullers wrote most of her stories at a very young age. Now I have learned that throughout her life she suffered from strokes and other severe illnesses that began in her youth. <a rel="nofollow" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w... ; title="http://en.wikipedia.org/w... ; - maitani - -

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NeuroLogica Blog » Reality Testing and Metacognitive Failure - http://theness.com/neurolo...

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"Imagine coming home to your spouse and finding someone who looks and acts exactly like your spouse, but you have the strong feeling that they are an imposter. They don’t “feel” like your spouse. Something is clearly wrong. In this situation most people conclude that their spouse is, in fact, an imposter. In some cases this has even lead to the murder of the “imposter” spouse." - maitani - -

"This is a neurological syndrome known as Capgras delusion – a sense of hypofamiliarity, that someone well known to you is unfamiliar. There is also the opposite of this – hyperfamiliarity, the sense that a stranger is familiar to you, known as Fregoli delusion. Suffers often feel that they are being stalked by someone known to them but in disguise." - maitani - -

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Natural News is a Facebook hit: Never click on its stories about cancer, vaccines, conspiracies. - http://www.slate.com/article...

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I'm not on Facebook, but I've still not managed to avoid that site. I'm not surprised it's hugely popular. - maitani - -

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"Have you heard that eating whole lemons prevents cancer? Or that bathing in Himalayan salt rids the body of harmful toxins? That eating hijiki seaweed can delay hair graying? If you have a few Facebook friends, you’ve probably encountered some of these claims. The website Natural News —which seems like a parody but is unfortunately quite serious—published these preposterous stories, and many others just as silly, last week alone." - maitani - -

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The Latest Scheme for the Parthenon by Mary Beard | The New York Review of Books - http://www.nybooks.com/article...

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"In March 1816 a Select Committee of the British House of Commons met to decide the fate of “The Earl of Elgin’s Collection of Sculptured Marbles; etc.” Whatever high hopes or greedy intentions had driven Elgin to take these sculptures from the Athenian Acropolis in the first place, the whole enterprise—with the huge cost of the excavation, the removal of some precious slabs from the Parthenon itself, and the transport back from Greece to England—had ruined him. He was close to bankruptcy and his only option was to sell his marbles to the government. The asking price was £74,000." - maitani - -

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Muddying the Waters | George Monbiot - http://www.monbiot.com/2014...

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"We pay £3.6bn a year for the privilege of having our wildlife exterminated, our hills grazed bare, our rivers polluted and our sitting rooms flooded." - maitani - -

"How the government’s farming policies have produced a perfectly designed system for flooding your home." - maitani - -

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BBC News - The beauty of the UK's loneliest bus stops - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news...

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"The Magazine recently visited an isolated, slate-roofed shelter in rural Cumbria and asked whether it was the UK's loneliest bus stop. A number of readers suggested even more solitary alternatives." - maitani - -

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Thinking about the mind: an anti-linguistic turn | OUPblog - http://blog.oup.com/2014...

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nice... - maitani - -

"It would be extremely surprising if the way the mind is shaped had anything to do with language as language is such a late addition to our mental life. A much more natural suggestion is that it has a lot to do with the actions the organism performs. We are evolved creatures and what matters in evolution is really whether one performs actions successfully (and not what one thinks). The mind is shaped in a way that would help us to perform actions. What we should expect then is that the structure of the mind is geared towards facilitating actions and not towards representing propositions. Of course, some select minds can also do that – and, may even use propositional thoughts to perfect one’s performance of actions. But it would be a methodological mistake to start with propositions. We should start with actions." - maitani - -

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The oldest star in the Milky Way: A pure, second-generation star. - http://www.slate.com/article...

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"Astronomer Anna Frebel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is part of a team that reported the discovery this week of a star that is almost as old as the universe. She specializes in the early universe, the beginning of the chemical evolution, and the formation of the first stars and galaxies." - maitani - -

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3quarksdaily: Socialism is about converting hysterical misery into ordinary unhappiness - http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarks...

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did you catch the discussion around startrek economics, <a rel="nofollow" href="https://medium.com/editor... ; title="https://medium.com/editor... ; - maitani - -

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<a rel="nofollow" href="http://blogs.reuters.com/... ; title="http://blogs.reuters.com/... ; - maitani - -

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Etymological Dictionary of Akkadian - http://www.uni-leipzig.de/altorie...

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"The Akkadian lexicon is actually accessible through two large dictionaries, W. von Sodens Akkadisches Handwörterbuch (1958–1981, 3 volumes) and The Assyrian Dictionary of the University of Chicago (1956–2010, 20 volumes). Both dictionaries present Akkadian words with their meaning in context and a large number of references. As a huge reservoir for the history of Near Eastern languages and cultures, however, the Akkadian lexicon is still almost unexploited. The Etymological Dictionary of Akkadian, a joint project of the Seminar für Sprachen und Kulturen des Vorderen Orients (university of Jena) and the Altorientalisches Institut (Universität Leipzig), aims to analyse the Akkadian lexicon in the context of the Semitic language family and as the source, receptor and transmitter of loanwords and foreign words of Semitic and non-Semitic origin, part of which still survive in modern languages." - maitani - -

"Akkadian (Babylonian-Assyrian), a Semitic language written in the cuneiform script, was the native language of Babylonia and Assyria, the two main areas of Ancient Mesopotamia. It spread all over the Ancient Near East and was used, at least in written form and during certain periods, also from Elam in southwest Iran to Anatolia Syria, Palestine and even Egypt in the west. Written from ca. 2600 BC to the 1st century AD, Akkadian is one of the best attested languages of antiquity: the size of the Akkadian text corpus approximately corresponds to the size of the corpus of ancient Latin." - maitani - -

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polis: Happy Fifty Years, Gentrification! - http://www.thepolisblog.org/2014...

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"Working on research about London, Glass wrote: "One by one, many of the working class quarters have been invaded by the middle class — upper and lower." She then adds, "Once this process of 'gentrification' starts in a district it goes on rapidly until all or most of the working class occupiers are displaced and the whole social character of the district is changed."" - maitani - -

"According to recent literature, the word "gentrification" appeared fifty years ago in 1964. It describes a historical shift after World War II — the unmaking and remaking of cities along new class lines, although it has previous historical precedents, of course. Scholars attribute its coinage to British sociologist Ruth Glass. Its everyday use could predate her writing and Glass herself may have used it in an unpublished draft before the 1960s." - maitani - -

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Beringians vindicated! - The Unz Review - http://www.unz.com/gnxp...

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"Sometimes science turns out as you’d expect. It’s not revolutionary, but it solidifies what should already be a solid foundation basis for extending knowledge into new territories. The latest ancient genome paper, The genome of a Late Pleistocene human from a Clovis burial site in western Montana, does just that. As the media has correctly pointed out this is probably the end of the Solutrean hypothesis, and a host of other exotic explanations for the ethnogenesis of Native Americans. Rather, the truth is what we’d always assumed. On the order of ~15,000 years ago a small group of Siberians crossed over Berengia into the New World. Their descendants are the various indigenous populations of the Americas which span the expanse from the Canadian Arctic down to Patagonia." - maitani - -

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