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3quarksdaily: Violence, Infectious Disease and Climate Change Contributed to Indus Civilization Collapse - http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarks...

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"Archaeological research has demonstrated that Indus cities grew rapidly from 2200-1900 B.C., when they were largely abandoned. “The collapse of the Indus Civilization and the reorganization of its human population has been controversial for a long time,” lead author of the paper published last month in the journal PLOS ONE, Gwen Robbins Schug, explained. Robbins Schug is an associate professor of anthropology at Appalachian State University. Climate, economic, and social changes all played a role in the process of urbanization and collapse, but little was known about how these changes affected the human population." - maitani - -

"A new study on the human skeletal remains from the ancient Indus city of Harappa provides evidence that inter-personal violence and infectious diseases played a role in the demise of the Indus, or Harappan Civilization around 4,000 years ago. The Indus Civilization stretched over a million square kilometers of what is now Pakistan and India in the Third Millennium B.C. While contemporaneous civilizations in Egypt and Mesopotomia, are well-known, their Indus trading partners have remained more of a mystery." - maitani - -

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Simon Winder’s ‘Danubia’ - NYTimes.com - http://www.nytimes.com/2014...

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"In his hands, the river is not just a majestic force of nature but becomes the silent hero of the book. Like Laurence Sterne with Tristram Shandy, Magris discovered the unlikely circumstances of the Danube’s origins, at least in folklore. It was a stream of water gushing from a tap, which no one had managed to turn off. For a moment he mused on what might happen if someone did manage to turn the great river off at its source, and Bratislava, Belgrade and Budapest were left “completely waterless.”" - maitani - -

"The River Danube, like a siren, has seduced at least three authors over the centuries. The first was Count Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli from Bologna, in the 17th century. His work grew into six wonderfully illustrated volumes, published in Latin in 1726. The second was Claudio Magris, from Trieste, in the 20th century. A professor, scholar and novelist, he completed a journey to the Black Sea in 1986, just before the fall of the old Communist regimes in Eastern Europe. Like Marsigli, he had no very clear idea of what kind of book he wanted to write, yet in the end, Magris produced “Danube,” a masterpiece." - maitani - -

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Painting with Beads: A New Art Form Emerges in South Africa | At the Smithsonian | Smithsonian - http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithso...

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"At Little Farm, a former sugar plantation near Durban, women paint with beads. "Ubuhle Women: Beadwork and the Art of Independence," a new exhibition at the Anacostia Community Museum, showcases the dazzling creations of this community of artists, living and working together in rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Called Ubuhle, or "beauty" in the Xhosa language, the community was founded in 1999 by migrant worker Ntombephi "Induna" Ntobela and local resident Bev Gibson, who co-curated the exhibition. Together the Ubuhle women have developed a new take on a South African tradition: the ndwango, a fabric panel of colored glass beads. Unlike traditional beadwork, which is worn on the body, these artworks are displayed on the walls like paintings. "By stretching this textile like a canvas," writes Gibson, "the artists transform the flat cloth into a contemporary art form."" - maitani - -

"Ubuhle came together in response to post-apartheid poverty in South Africa. Five of the artists are from the Transkei, the birthplace of Nelson Mandela, but left home in search of opportunity and financial independence. They found it at Little Farm, working day in and day out to create commissioned ndwangos; a single panel can take more than ten months to complete. At the same time, the women are raising families and running households. They bead while they cook, while they chop wood and while they feed the children. Work is an inextricable part of their daily lives, and vice versa. "The patterns and colors take on what happens to these artists over those months," says James Green, a research scholar at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and co-curator of the exhibition. "They become true portraits of that time. These panels are their hope. They put everything into them."" - maitani - -

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Wide Urban World: Why are neighborhoods important? - http://wideurbanworld.blogspot.de/2014...

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"He continues, "The opportunity is there if we recognize that during recent generations, institutions have often taken over functions once performed by local communities, neighbors, and their collective groups and associations. Medicine has claimed our health. Police have claimed our safety. Schools have claimed the raising of our children. Social services have claimed the provision of care. And corporations have claimed that everything we need can be bought."" - maitani - -

"Why are neighborhoods important? There are many reasons, and many answers to this question. I recently read an interesting article by John McKnight, of the Asset-Based Community Development Institute. The article is called "Neighborhood Necessities: Seven Functions that Only Effectivley Organized Neighborhoods can Provide" (McKnight 2013). McKnight begins with the observation that today many institutions that are used by people in cities are cutting back--government, not-for-profit organizations, schools, medical systems, human servic organizations, businesses. He says that "The functional space they no longer occupy creates either a crisis or an opportunity."" - maitani - -

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polis: Data Collection in the Moscow Metro - http://www.thepolisblog.org/2014...

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"As the world becomes more digitized, so have our traces, joining the massive aggregate known as big data. This information is updated daily by sensors tracking social media, traffic flows, retail transactions, mobile phones, GPS signals and many other sources. A virtually limitless trove of quantitative measures, it has the potential to add new dimensions to our understanding of human experience in urban environments. But the positive and negative aspects of this potential defy measurement." - maitani - -

"In the words of John Holland, "the city is a pattern in time." Yet actions within its boundaries leave traces. Whether crossing the street, making a phone call or entering the subway, our traces are retained in the city's memory." - maitani - -

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Pictorial mnemonics x sound contrasting = more effective English teaching - http://www.sciencedaily.com/release...

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Cool :) - maitani - -

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"New research findings by Emmanuel Manalo (Professor, Waseda University), Yuri Uesaka (Assistant Professor, The University of Tokyo), and Koki Sekitani (PhD candidate, The University of Tokyo) show that mnemonic images and explicit sound contrasting help Japanese children to more effectively learn the sounds of the letters of the English alphabet. The mnemonic images they used linked the shapes of the alphabet letters with images of Japanese words that begin with those letters. Examples are shown below for the letter b, linked with "bulashi" (brush in Japanese), and d, linked with "denwa" (phone in Japanese). Through such linking, the appearance of the alphabet letters (for example, the shape of the letter b) serves as a reminder for the image of object (the brush) which in turn serves as a reminder for the sound of the letter (the phoneme sound /b/)." - maitani - -

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Brassaï’s Cloak of Night by Luc Sante | NYRgallery | The New York Review of Books - http://www.nybooks.com/blogs...

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"Youths of my generation learned about Brassaï from his eye-opening Secret Paris of the 30s (1976). There were pictures of thugs, bums, prostitutes, brothels, drag balls, lesbian bars, interracial dances—who knew such things even existed forty years earlier? But then our fascinated naïvety was rewarded by further contemplation of the photographs, which were humane, sympathetic, endlessly inquisitive, beautifully composed, and drew every possible bit of poetry from the enveloping cloak of night—not more than half a dozen pictures were taken in daylight." - maitani - -

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BBC News - Dancing over the edge: Vienna in 1914 - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news...

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I just realized why WWI is all over the place now :") <a href="#2014</a>" target="_blank">http://friendfeed.com/sea... ; - maitani - -

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"One hundred years ago, Vienna was at the epicentre of a world on the brink of war. Bethany Bell reflects on a century of changes in the Austrian capital." - maitani - -

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Ostia - Harbour City of Ancient Rome - http://www.ostia-antica.org/

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"This website is dedicated to Ostia, the harbour city of ancient Rome. Here you will find information for professional archaeologists and historians, for students of Roman archaeology and history, and for interested lay-people." - maitani - -

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

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Poemas del río Wang: A nice New Year's Eve and a happy new year! ( (Khuzhir, Lake Baikal, Olkhon Island, 1972) http://riowang.blogspot.de/2013...

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A Calendar Page for January 2014 http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitis...

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"Over the past few years, we have highlighted a series of calendars from medieval manuscripts, including the Isabella Breviary (see this post for more details on calendars in medieval manuscripts), the Hours of Joanna of Castile (Joanna the Mad) and the Golf Book. This year we have chosen a spectacular Flemish Book of Hours, the Huth Hours (Add MS 38126). This manuscript, which takes its name from a later owner, Henry Huth, was produced in Ghent or Bruges c. 1480." - maitani - -

"It is not known for whom the Huth Hours was created, although the initials ‘MY’ and ‘YM’ can be found on one of the calendar pages for November (f. 12r), a possible clue to the identity of the original patron. Added to the end of the manuscript is a group of prayers in French in a late 15th century hand, which has led some scholars to suggest that the manuscript was created for a French patron, or one connected to the Flemish Hapsburg court at that time. Other scholars have argued for a German origin, citing the inclusion of a number of German saints in the calendar." - maitani - -

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I Am A Poor Wayfaring Stranger - Alfred Deller.wmv http://www.youtube.com/watch...

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Alfred Deller sings Handel - RARE http://www.youtube.com/watch...

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<a href="#musiki" target="_blank">http://friendfeed.com/sea... şinasship</a> - maitani - -

1. "Alma del gran Pompeo" from Handel's Giulio Cesare (1953) 2. "O thou that tellest" from Handel's Messiah (1953) - maitani - -

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▶ Alfred Deller, portrait of a voice - YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/watch...

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"Throughout the 19th century, it was only in the tradition of all-male cathedral choirs that the countertenor voice had survived.[2] Deller's voice sounded remarkably high. Misconceptions about the countertenor voice were common at the time Deller was first gaining significant notice as a singer, which was only a matter of decades after the last castrati had died; Michael Chance tells the story that once, a French woman, upon hearing Deller sing, exclaimed "Monsieur, vous êtes eunuque"—to which Deller replied, "I think you mean 'unique,' madam."" <a rel="nofollow" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w... ; title="http://en.wikipedia.org/w... ; - maitani - -

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"Back in 1976 Benoît Jacquot -- then a very young director -- met up with Alfred Deller to make this documentary-interview, which is unique of its kind in that it offers one of the very few filmed documents of the most famous countertenor of the modern era. Several excerpts from concert performances (notably with his son) enable this deeply moving portrait to reproduce the same feeling the composer Michael Tippett experienced when he heard Alfred Deller's voice in Canterbury Cathedral Choir: the sensation that 'the centuries rolled back'. Found in the archives of the INA (the French National Audiovisual Institute) and subsequently restored, this film constitutes one of the few testimonies of Alfred Deller ever recorded on film." - maitani - -

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3quarksdaily: I REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT MY WEDDING TO CAPTAIN VON TRAPP HAS BEEN CANCELED - http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarks...

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Read more here <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.mcsweeneys.net... ; title="http://www.mcsweeneys.net... ; - maitani - -

"Dear friends, family, and Austrian nobility, Captain Von Trapp and I are very sorry to inform you that we no longer plan to wed. We offer our deepest apologies to those of you who have already made plans to travel to Salzburg this summer. Those of you on the Captain’s side of the guest list are probably aware of the reason for the change of plans. I’m sure by now you have received that charming “Save the date!” card in the shape of a mountain goat from the Captain and his new fiancée, Maria. I must confess to being rather blindsided by the end of our relationship. It seems Captain Von Trapp and I misunderstood each other. I assumed he was looking for a wife of taste and sophistication, who was a dead ringer for Tippi Hedren; instead he wanted to marry a curtain-wearing religious fanatic who shouts every word she says." - maitani - -

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Christmas Tree 2013

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Pete, merry Christmas to you, too! - maitani - -

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Dasselbe wünsche ich dir, Jenny! :-) - maitani - -

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Turmeric and Saffron: Shab-e Yalda 2013 - An Ancient Persian Celebration - http://turmericsaffron.blogspot.de/

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"On the eve of the longest night (winter solstice), family and friends gather to celebrate the triumph of light over darkness with delicious food, lively music, good conversation, and the traditional poetry reading of Hafez, the great Persian poet." - maitani - -

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Poemas del río Wang: Another city - http://riowang.blogspot.de/2013...

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"The City You said, “To another land I will go, to another sea. There, another city, better than this, will be found. My every effort is condemned by fate; It buries my heart like a corpse. How long will I abide in this wasteland? Wherever I turn my eyes, wherever I look, the black ashes of my life are there. So many years spent, all ruined and wasted.” You will find no new lands, you will not find other seas. The city will follow you. You will roam the same streets, and grow old in the same neighborhoods. In these same houses, you will grow gray. You will always arrive in the same city. Do not hope. No ship nor road will take you to another land. If you have ruined your life here, in this small corner, so, too, have you ruined it everywhere." - maitani - -

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What is the Oldest Book in the World? | medievalfragments - http://medievalfragments.wordpress.com/2013...

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"What you do when you are kept up at night with such an existentialistic query is to consult Google. However, what Google returns does not make me a happy camper. In fact, I am provided with a very broad range of possible answers. First of all, let’s remove the weed, answers that are the result of flawed reasoning. A lot of websites, for example, confuse “book” with “text”. Wiki Answers reports: “the oldest book in the world is the Bible” (here). And Ask.com: “The oldest book in the world is entitled ‘The Instructions of Shurupak’”, which dates from 3000 BCE (here). A book and a text are, of course, very different things: like a hamburger in a bun or your legs in a pair of pants, a book contains a text, but it is not its equivalent. Equally incorrect are websites whose claims are based on the premise that a book is a printed object. Thus the oldest book in the world must surely be the Gutenberg Bible (oldest printed book in the West, from c. 1455) or Buddhism’s Diamond Sutra (oldest printed book in the East, from c. 868), as in this Huffington Post article. No, it’s not." - maitani - -

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What was the first bedtime story read to a child under a full moon? - maitani - -

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The Reason Stick: The Venn Diagram of Christmas Traditions - http://crispian-jago.blogspot.de/2013...

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"White Wine in the Sun" made it into the Venn diagram :) - maitani - -

"I love Christmas. I love everything about it, apart perhaps from the predictable fundamental Christians bleating on about the so called War on Christmas and their irksome ill-informed insistence that Jesus is the reason for the season." - maitani - -

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English Historical Fiction Authors: English vs. French: The Hundred Years' War and Its Effect on Language - http://englishhistoryauthors.blogspot.de/2013...

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"Before the war began in 1337, French—not English—was the language of literature and the language of the aristocracy in England. It does not take much digging around to unearth why. The Norman Conquest in 1066 established a monarchy and a ruling class who spoke French, and the later Plantagenet kings—Richard the Lionheart comes to mind—continued to spend as much (or more) time in their continental holdings as they did in England." - maitani - -

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"“…we few, we happy few, we band of brothers.” The St. Crispin’s Day speech, written by Shakespeare and placed in the mouth of King Henry V, contains some of the most stirring phrases in the English language. Yet, interestingly enough, that very language might not have been what spilled from Shakespeare’s pen had the Hundred Years’ War not been fought." - maitani - -

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Edifying View of Volcanoes and Cloud Patterns from Space - ImaGeo | DiscoverMagazine.com - http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/imageo...

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"The magic hour light was, in fact, what NASA’s Earth Observatory emphasized when it published the photo yesterday. But then I noticed what was going on in the cloud deck — and for me, at least, that elevated the image from the extraordinary to the sublime." - maitani - -

"It was the lovely morning light that first drew me to this image of four volcanic islands in the Aleutian chain, photographed in November by an astronaut aboard the International Space Station." - maitani - -

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Marinaleda: Spain's communist model village | World news | The Observer - http://www.theguardian.com/world...

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A Spanish Village Utopia <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.social-ecology... ; title="http://www.social-ecology... ; - maitani - -

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Marinaleda and Somonte in one end, Corporación Mondragon in the other. North and south. Agriculture and high tech industry. Look to Spain! - maitani - -

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An Interactive Map of Odysseus’ 10-Year Journey in Homer’s Odyssey | Open Culture - http://www.openculture.com/2013...

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I had to settle for the English translation, or I'd still be at it :) - maitani - -

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I keep thinking this would make a great vacation. - maitani - -

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Polynesian people used binary numbers 600 years ago : Nature News & Comment - http://www.nature.com/news...

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"Binary arithmetic, the basis of all virtually digital computation today, is usually said to have been invented at the start of the eighteenth century by the German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz. But a study now shows that a kind of binary system was already in use 300 years earlier among the people of the tiny Pacific island of Mangareva in French Polynesia." - maitani - -

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"The discovery, made by analysing historical records of the now almost wholly assimilated Mangarevan culture and language and reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that some of the advantages of the binary system adduced by Leibniz might create a cognitive motivation for this system to arise spontaneously, even in a society without advanced science and technology." - maitani - -

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The British Library Puts 1,000,000 Images into the Public Domain, Making Them Free to Reuse & Remix | Open Culture - http://www.openculture.com/2013...

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"You can jump into the entire collection here, or view a set of highlights here. The latter happens to include a curious image. (See below.) It’s from an 1894 book called The United States of America. A study of the American Commonwealth, its natural resources, people, industries, manufactures, commerce, and its work in literature, science, education and self-government. And the picture features, according to the text, a “Typical figure, showing tendency of student life–stooping head, flat chest, and emaciated limbs.” It’s hard to know what to say about that." - maitani - -

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"We have released over a million images onto Flickr Commons for anyone to use, remix and repurpose. These images were taken from the pages of 17th, 18th and 19th century books digitised by Microsoft who then generously gifted the scanned images to us, allowing us to release them back into the Public Domain. The images themselves cover a startling mix of subjects: There are maps, geological diagrams, beautiful illustrations, comical satire, illuminated and decorative letters, colourful illustrations, landscapes, wall-paintings and so much more that even we are not aware of." - maitani - -

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