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The Wikipediafication of Fine Art | Symbiartic, Scientific American Blog Network - http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/symbiar...

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"A lot of Renaissance art is stuffed with symbols we hardly see now: oh, that orange on the table in Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Wedding? Means sex and money, like a boss. Or before The Fall because it’s not an apple. The single, lit candle? The Holy Spirit. Spheroid mirror with the shadowy figure looking at the scene? Both the artist and God at the same time." - maitani - -

"Another of my peers did a wonderful piece that involved coffee due to the consumption on campus: the art touched on the coffee trade, the history of the New World, sustainable and ethical farming and more. It was a rich and full-bodied piece of art (I wish I had it here to share), the very opposite of Shake’n'Bake stuff. I was struck by it, and a number of pieces in the class having been affected by the internet. Quick access to knowledge at artists’ fingertips begat livelier paintings with more mystery and depth. I think I produced some of the best art of my life (so far) after that realization. I had to, to keep up. Does this mean a return to the days of Van Eyck? I think not. Science-inspired fine art will be hopefully about more than symbols of sex and power and violence. I hope. But I think the concept of a rich visual vocabulary is making a return." - maitani - -

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Poemas del río Wang: The atlas of Crimea - http://riowang.blogspot.de/2013...

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"As about the Crimea, one of Europe’s most beautiful regions there are almost no sources outside of Ukraine and Russia, now as a preparation for our journey we start to put up here some helpful materials. We start with the detailed map of the Crimea. By clicking on the two overall maps, the sections open in another window, those of the whole peninsula (3-16) in a scale of 1:300,000, and those of the touristically most interesting southern coast (17-23) in 1:60,000. In the sections 3-16 small red stars indicate the most important historical monuments and natural attractions. Soon we will put up the individual sections – beginning with the most exciting 14-15-16, the main theater of our journey – so that by moving the mouse above the red stars, their thumbnail photo and short descriptions will appear in a floating window. This will be followed by the maps of the cities of the Crimea. Look back soon." - maitani - -

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The Negative Canon: Verbing Weirds Language? | Caxton - http://caxton1485.wordpress.com/2013...

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"There does, however, sometimes seem to be some reluctance to accept new conversions, particularly conversions from nouns to verbs, even though the verbs bottle, catalogue, oil, brake, referee and bicycle all started life as nouns. The verb impact (on) seems to provoke particular hostility, as Paul Brians observes:" - maitani - -

"Well, no, it doesn’t, whatever Calvin says. The conversion of a word from one word class to another is one of the ways in which English forms new words. Without that process we should not be able to go for a swim, describe an athlete as a natural, make reproduction furniture or speak of something as a must." - maitani - -

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n+1: Slave Capitalism: Walter Johnson. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Harvard, January 2013 - http://nplusonemag.com/slave-c...

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"In 1835, at the height of the Southern cotton boom, the master class of the Mississipi Delta region had an attack of its worst phobia: fear of slave rebellion. One slaveholder in the countryside saw some of her slaves acting unusually, seeming defiant, appearing to plot. She began to eavesdrop and overheard one slave fantasize about being “her own mistress.” In another conversation, she caught the word “kill.” Her son squeezed a slave for information and drew out details of a coming insurrection. The masters sounded the alarm: patrols were instituted, investigators fanned out, the countryside came alive with tipsters. Evidence invariably consisted of seeing slaves where they oughtn’t to have been—in the slaveholder phrase, “skulking around.” The suspects gave up under torture, confessing plans for securing arms, robbing banks, butchering masters. As the investigation wore on, the ruling class created an ad hoc executive committee, which generated, piece by piece, its own worst nightmare. Although “circumstantial” is too kind a word for the evidence, and the investigators enjoyed no formal legal status, they nonetheless executed twenty-three suspects without controversy." - maitani - -

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DCblog: On looking very UK - http://david-crystal.blogspot.co.uk/2013...

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"The critics are living in the past. One of the most interesting contemporary trends in English syntax is the way the present progressive has been increasing in frequency in recent decades. The point has been well studied by corpus linguists. The steady rise of this form can be traced from the 17th century. There was a sharp rise in the 19th which continued into the 20th, with British English moving a tad faster than American. A famous example, which I've mentioned before, is the McDonald's slogan 'I'm lovin' it', which not so long ago would have appeared as 'I love it'." - maitani - -

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"The change is spreading through the lexicon, but with different rates for different verbs. The 'most stative' verbs, such as know and need, are taking up the usage more slowly - at least, in British English (compared, say, with Indian English, where cognitive verbs have been taking the progressive for a long time) - but verbs lower down any scale of stativity (such as love, want, enjoy) have been illustrating the usage for some time now. So I'm not at all surprised to see 'You are looking very UK' emerge alongside 'You look very UK', adding the kind of aspectual distinction that the progressive provides." - maitani - -

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TYWKIWDBI ("Tai-Wiki-Widbee"): A U.S. map of English as a second language - http://tywkiwdbi.blogspot.de/2013...

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""More than a quarter of counties in the United States have at least one in 10 households where English is not the language spoken at home. Spanish is, by far, the most common language other than English spoken in the home, especially on the West Coast, in the Southwest, the Eastern urban corridor and other big cities. Native American languages are also common in the West, as is French around New Orleans and in some counties in the Northeast. German is a common language in some Midwestern and Western areas."" - maitani - -

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Poemas del río Wang: Come with us to the Crimea! - http://riowang.blogspot.de/2013...

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"Between 27 October and 3 November (Sunday to Sunday) we invite our readers to the Crimean peninsula, one of the most beautiful region and most elegant recreation area of the former Russian empire. We arrive by plane from Budapest through Kiev to Simferopol, the capital of the autonomous Crimea, and from our two headquarters, a traditional Tatar family pension in Bakhchisaray and then a Russian one in Yalta we travel by bus around the ethnically diverse peninsula, which is rich both in ancient monuments and in fascinating natural beauties. We walk around the Tatar Bakhchisaray, visit the Khan’s Palace, go to see the historical cave cities, Chufut Kale, the capital of the Karaite Jews and their medieval cemetery, Eski Kerman, the former mountain center of the Tatar Khanate, and Mangup, the capitalof the medieval Crimean Gothic kingdom. We go to see the Russian naval port in Sevastopol, enter the once secret submarine base, the sites of the Crimean war, the Genoese fortress in Balaklava, the votive chapel of the imperial family on the mountain above the beach of Foros, and the ruins of the ancient Greek Khersonesos, the birthplace of Russian Christianity. We make pilgrimage to the cave monasteries, mainly founded in Byzantine times, and renewed in the 19th century, of Inkerman, Mangup, the Ascension monastery, the St. Cosmas and Damian mountain pilgrimage church, the Armenian Holy Cross Monastery. We visit the summer palaces of the imperial family and of the Russian aristocracy, from the Vorontsov Palace in Miskhor to the Livadia Palace in Yalta, where the famous conference of 1945 was organized. And we make many trips to the mountains, from the bizarre basalt monadnocks of Demerdzhi through the peak of Ai-Petri rising 1200 meters high right on the beach to the seashore rock formations of the Karadag Nature Reserve." - maitani - -

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Think you might pay attention to register? - baltimoresun.com - by John E. McIntyre - http://www.baltimoresun.com/news...

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"Ms. MacFarlane dislikes the figurative sense of literally, and she is well within her rights. It's her language, too, and she is entitled to her tastes and preferences. But her remarks display a number of misapprehensions that are commonplace in discussions about language and usage, so it may be useful to identify them." - maitani - -

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"When she says that the figurative sense of literally is a problem because "dictionaries changed the definition," she falls into the vulgar error of thinking that dictionaries dictate meaning and usage rather than following where the language goes. (I am sure that she will appreciate that I am using vulgar in its original "of the people" sense rather than suggesting that she is coarse or rude.) There's no excuse for this in an educated person. dictionaries explain quite explicitly in their prefaces what the lexicographers are up to." - maitani - -

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Poemas del río Wang: Béla Bartók: Romanian folk dances - http://riowang.blogspot.de/2013...

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You should listen to Bartók's original version for piano. The other versions are beautiful, too, but this one is so energetic and transparent. I love it. - maitani - -

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"In 1909 Béla Bartók began to collect Romanian folk music around Belényes/Beiuș, encouraged by his local Romanian teacher friend János Bușiția. He also continued collecting in the following year and in 1912-1913, making several tours in various Romanian regions of Eastern Hungary (now Romania). Based on the material collected, in 1915 he composed the piano piece Romanian folk dances, which he recommended to his friend in Belényes. In 1917 he also arranged it for orchestra, and in 1925 Zoltán Székely made of it a highly successful transcription for violin and piano." - maitani - -

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AWOL - The Ancient World Online: A Visual Explorer for the Language of Greek Tragedy - http://ancientworldonline.blogspot.de/2013...

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"Available Plays: Aeschylus Agamemnon Aeschylus Libation Bearers Aeschylus Eumenides Aeschylus Prometheus Bound Aeschylus Seven Against Thebes Aeschylus Suppliants" - maitani - -

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"A visualization tool to allow for the exploration of linguistic data in Greek Tragedy using social networks overlaid with linguistic data." - maitani - -

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BBC News - Rutland ospreys: Back from the verge of extinction - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news...

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"Established in the 1990s, the Rutland Water Osprey Project was the first of its kind in Europe and it is hoped the birds of prey will now colonise neighbouring counties. This year's young fledglings will soon make their first long distant flight - migrating thousands of miles to the west coast of Africa. Here, Tim Mackrill explains the work done at the reservoir and tells the extraordinary tale of how they tracked one Rutland bird to a remote mountain in the Sahara desert using GPS technology." - maitani - -

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Watch John Cleese as Sherlock Holmes in The Strange Case of the End of Civilization as We Know It | Open Culture - http://www.openculture.com/2013...

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"As the title suggests, it’s a very silly film. Cleese plays Arthur Sherlock Holmes, grandson of the famous detective. His sidekick, Dr. Watson, is similarly descended from a familiar character in the Arthur Conan Doyle stories. Together they set out to foil a diabolical plot by their nemesis, a descendent of Professor Moriarty. The modern-day Holmes has some of the same mannerisms as his famous grandfather, but is decidedly less clever and likes to keep his calabash pipe filled with exotic varieties of cannabis." - maitani - -

"Here’s something to lighten your day a little: Monty Python’s John Cleese as Sherlock Holmes in the 1977 British television film The Strange Case of the End of Civilization as We Know It." - maitani - -

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“The Lost Paris Tapes” Preserves Jim Morrison’s Final Poetry Recordings from 1971 | Open Culture - http://www.openculture.com/2013...

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"Billed and sold as the ninth and final studio album by The Doors, An American Prayer tends to divide Jim Morrison fans. On the one hand, it’s a captivating document of the late singer reading his free-associative poetry: dark, weirdly beautiful psychedelic lyrical fugues. On the other hand, it’s only a “Doors album” in that the three remaining members convened in 1978 to record original music over the deceased Morrison’s solo readings. While the resulting product is both a haunting tribute and an immersive late-night listen, many have felt that the band’s rendering did violence to the departed singer’s original intentions. (Listen to and download it here for free.)" - maitani - -

"An American Prayer‘s readings were recorded unaccompanied in March 1969 and December 1970. In 1971, Morrison joined his long-time lover Pamela Courson in Paris. That same year, Jim Morrison died, under some rather mysterious circumstances, at the age of 27. Before his death, however, he made what is said to be his final studio recording, a poetry reading/performance with a couple of unknown Parisian street musicians. Although Doors keyboardist Ray Manzarek allegedly dismissed this recording as “drunken gibberish,” Doors fans have circulated it since 1994—combined with a 37-minute poetry reading from 1968—as a bootleg called The Lost Paris Tapes." - maitani - -

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Engraved Ostrich Egg Globe is Oldest to Depict the New World - D-brief | DiscoverMagazine.com - http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief...

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"The first known globe to include the New World was recently found at a London map fair—an impressive 500 year survival for it being engraved into ostrich eggs. According to analysis by an independent Belgian scholar, Stefaan Missinne, PhD., the globe not only predates the previous record holder—a globe made of copper alloy between 1504 and 1506, now on display at the New York Public Library—but the evidence suggests it was actually the model used to cast that previous record holder. The two globes are identical down to their smallest details, from the wave patterns on the ocean to the disproportionate size of continents. The handwriting is the same, and even the typos match up: “HISPANIS” instead of HISPANIA and “LIBIA INTEROIR” in place of LIBIA INTERIOR." - maitani - -

"A Rare Find The grapefruit-sized globe was spotted at the London map fair in 2012 by an anonymous globe and map collector. By that point it had already passed through two dealers’ hands since being purchased from a unnamed but apparently important European collection. Due to these layers of mystery, globe expert Stefaan Missinne was called in to figure out if the globe was legitimate, and if so, when and where it originated." - maitani - -

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Stephan Eicher Des Hauts Des Bas https://www.youtube.com/watch...

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Le Sourire <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.youtube.com/w... ; title="https://www.youtube.com/w... ; - maitani - -

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Stephan Eicher Déjeuner en paix http://www.youtube.com/watch...

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Dienekes’ Anthropology Blog: Oldest gaming tokens from Başur Höyük - http://dienekes.blogspot.de/2013...

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"Small carved stones unearthed in a nearly 5,000-year-old burial could represent the earliest gaming tokens ever found, according to Turkish archaeologists who are excavating early Bronze Age graves. Found in a burial at Basur Höyük, a 820- by 492-foot mound near Siirt in southeast Turkey, the elaborate pieces consist of 49 small stones sculpted in different shapes and painted in green, red, blue, black and white. "Some depict pigs, dogs and pyramids, others feature round and bullet shapes. We also found dice as well as three circular tokens made of white shell and topped with a black round stone," Haluk Saglamtimur of Ege University in Izmir, Turkey, told Discovery News." - maitani - -

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PLOS ONE: Environmental Roots of the Late Bronze Age Crisis - http://www.plosone.org/article...

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Thank you, I will certainly look at it. :-) - maitani - -

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via Dienekes <a rel="nofollow" href="http://dienekes.blogspot.... ; title="http://dienekes.blogspot.... ; - maitani - -

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Reading the Small Print | The Caravan - A Journal of Politics and Culture - http://caravanmagazine.in/reporta...

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"IT SAYS SOMETHING ABOUT THE TIMES that it took a dreary battle in one of India’s interminable ‘culture wars’ to make AK Ramanujan’s name familiar to readers of the broadsheet newspapers. Someone decided that it was a bad idea for a scholarly essay of Ramanujan’s from 1991 about the many tellings of the Ramayana story in South and Southeast Asia to be on the undergraduate syllabus for history students at Delhi University. The essay was removed from the syllabus in October 2011, and sure enough, the usual round of angry protests and smug op-eds followed. Now, it is easy enough to see why the essay, with its narratives of Ramayana traditions that show a striking irreverence for the figure of Rama, could prove a source of controversy. But it is a shame how little was made of the teachable moment even by Ramanujan’s academic defenders. Shortly after the university decided to exclude the essay from its syllabus, the political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta wrote in the Indian Express:" - maitani - -

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Thank you; I wasn't aware of this anniversary. - maitani - -

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The Books We’ve Lost by Charles Simic | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books - http://www.nybooks.com/blogs...

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"What made these stores, stocked with unwanted libraries of dead people, attractive to someone like me is that they were more indiscriminate and chaotic than public libraries and thus made browsing more of an adventure. Among the crowded shelves, one’s interest was aroused by the title or the appearance of a book. Then came the suspense of opening it, checking out the table of contents, and if it proved interesting, thumbing the pages, reading a bit here and there and looking for underlined passages and notes in the margins. How delightful to find some unknown reader commenting in pencil on a Victorian love poem: “Shit,” or coming across this inscription in a beautiful edition of one of the French classics:" - maitani - -

"Used-book stores are disappearing in our day at an even greater rate than regular book stores. Until ten years ago or so, there used to be a good number of them in every city and even in some smaller towns, catering to a clientele of book lovers who paid them a visit in search of some rare or out-of-print book, or merely to pass the time poking around. Even in their heyday, how their owners made a living was always a puzzle to me, since typically their infrequent customers bought nothing, or very little, and when they did, their purchase didn’t amount to more than a few dollars. Years ago, in a store in New York that specialized in Alchemy, Eastern Religions, Theosophy, Mysticism, Magic, and Witchcraft, I remember coming across a book called How to Become Invisible that I realized would make a perfect birthday present for a friend who was on the run from a collection agency trying to repossess his car. It cost fifteen cents, which struck me as a pretty steep price considering the quality of the contents." - maitani - -

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Changes in language and word use reflect our shifting values - http://www.sciencedaily.com/release...

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"A new UCLA analysis of words used in more than 1.5 million American and British books published between 1800 and 2000 shows how our cultural values have changed." - maitani - -

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"For instance, the words "choose" and "get" rose significantly in frequency between 1800 and 2000, while "obliged" and "give" decreased significantly over these two centuries. "Choose" and "get" indicate "the individualism and materialistic values that are adaptive in wealthier urban settings," while "obliged" and "give" "reflect the social responsibilities that are adaptive in rural settings," Greenfield said. Usage of "get" declined between 1940 and the 1960s before rising again in the 1970s, perhaps reflecting a decline in self-interest during World War II and the civil rights movement, she noted." - maitani - -

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Master of Light: A Close Look at the Paintings of Johannes Vermeer Narrated by Meryl Streep | Open Culture - http://www.openculture.com/2013...

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Thank you for sharing, I haven't seen this movie before! I've written a small posting about Vermeer's mirrors (nothing as elegant as the Meryl Streep's narration, but you could be interested to have a look <a rel="nofollow" href="http://artmirrorsart.word... ; title="http://artmirrorsart.word... ;). I write about the Music Lesson too, although I didn't know all the details about this painting, as presented by the Master of Light movie; need to update my posting now :) But there is another interesting interpretation of this artwork, also in a movie, mentioned in my posting, too. - maitani - -

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vermeer <3 - maitani - -

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Indo-Aryans, Dravidians, and waves of admixture (migration?) - Gene Expression | DiscoverMagazine.com - http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp...

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Abstract: "Most Indian groups descend from a mixture of two genetically divergent populations: Ancestral North Indians (ANI) related to Central Asians, Middle Easterners, Caucasians, and Europeans; and Ancestral South Indians (ASI) not closely related to groups outside the subcontinent. The date of mixture is unknown but has implications for understanding Indian history. We report genome-wide data from 73 groups from the Indian subcontinent and analyze linkage disequilibrium to estimate ANI-ASI mixture dates ranging from about 1,900 to 4,200 years ago. In a subset of groups, 100% of the mixture is consistent with having occurred during this period. These results show that India experienced a demographic transformation several thousand years ago, from a region in which major population mixture was common to one in which mixture even between closely related groups became rare because of a shift to endogamy." - maitani - -

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Related: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://ff.im/LhSSk"&... ; - maitani - -

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Cyrus' Paradise - The World's First Online Collaborative Commentary to an Ancient Text - http://www.cyropaedia.org/book-1...

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

"Cyrus’ Paradise is the world’s first comprehensive, online, collaborative commentary for a Classical text: Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus (Cyropaedia). Cyrus’ Paradise incorporates contributions from all generations and communities, from high school and college students to advanced professors to amateur enthusiasts. Contributions take the form of multimedia (pictures, audio, video), grammatical and syntactical instruction, and discussion in the form of questions, comments, and blog posts. Because it is always growing, the collaborative commentary is designed to produce new readings of the text with every new participant. It may be used as a tool for scholarly research at any stage, from a prospectus to a polished article. It may also be used as an intermediate or upper-level Greek text. Sample syllabuses are provided here. Our approach has been to provide students with every conceivable resource for understanding and interpreting the text (e.g., grammatical/syntactical aid, parsing, tree-banking, vocabulary, video instruction, audio recordings), while at the same time developing every conceivable way to assess student mastery." - maitani - -

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Archaeology: The milk revolution : Nature News & Comment - http://www.nature.com/news...

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"The mystery potsherds sat in storage until 2011, when Mélanie Roffet-Salque pulled them out and analysed fatty residues preserved in the clay. Roffet-Salque, a geochemist at the University of Bristol, UK, found signatures of abundant milk fats — evidence that the early farmers had used the pottery as sieves to separate fatty milk solids from liquid whey. That makes the Polish relics the oldest known evidence of cheese-making in the world." - maitani - -

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"When a single genetic mutation first let ancient Europeans drink milk, it set the stage for a continental upheaval. In the 1970s, archaeologist Peter Bogucki was excavating a Stone Age site in the fertile plains of central Poland when he came across an assortment of odd artefacts. The people who had lived there around 7,000 years ago were among central Europe's first farmers, and they had left behind fragments of pottery dotted with tiny holes. It looked as though the coarse red clay had been baked while pierced with pieces of straw." - maitani - -

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▶ Tom Waits - Strange Weather - YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/watch...

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As one of the commenters observed, no one ever mentions this wonderful song. Esther, I <3 it, too. There were times I listened to it over and over. - maitani - -

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