Nearly at the end; three more days of trivia to go!

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Cotton on the Levee: 1903
via Shorpy Historical Photo Archive – Vintage Fine Art Prints by Dave

New Orleans circa 1903
“Mule teams and the levee”
8x10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company
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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
The history of boredom turns out to be anything but. What Seneca described as a kind of nausea is necessary, useful, even interesting... more

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Are You a Psychopath? Take the Test.
via Big Think by Jonathan Fowler and Elizabeth Rodd
The famous “trolley problem” was a psychological experiment developed by Philippa Foot that involved a railway trolley headed toward five people who can’t get out of the way. These people will die unless you, the subject of this experiment, decide to divert the trolley onto another track.
Continue reading (and don’t miss out on the comments!)

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The Book of Kells
via 3quarksdaily by Morgan Meis
One of the endearing features of this version of the Gospels is that it is not particularly accurate. “While the scripts of the Book of Kells have a unique verve and beauty,” Meehan writes, “its text is erratic, with many errors resulting from eyeskip (where the scribe’s eye has jumped from a word to its next appearance, omitting the intervening text or letter).
This calls down a rare but stern professorial rebuke: “There is considerable carelessness in transcription.”
Reading this, one’s deplorably feckless imagination wanders back through the smoke of the centuries to that frail little isle afloat in the wild Atlantic, where in a stone beehive hut a lonely scribe, hunched with quill in hand over his sheet of vellum, halts suddenly as he spots a mistranscription, claps a hand to his brow and utters whatever might have been the monastic equivalent of “Oh, shit!”
more from John Banville at the FT here.

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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Minerality, tar, tobacco, gas, cat urine – wine talk is weird. As for the taste of wine, it’s located on that thin line between pleasurable and gross... more

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Titian
via 3quarksdaily by Morgan Meis
This is a long book about a long life, a large volume about a large talent.
Titian, its titular subject, was the most celebrated painter of his time.
He died in his beloved Venice, Italy, on Aug. 27, 1576.
The death certificate listed the cause of his demise as fever and age as 103.
Like so much else about the artist, however, the date of his birth remains uncertain; it’s more likely he died in his late 80s.
Even his name is subject to variation. He signed documents and paintings with “various spellings of his Christian name: Titian, Ticiano, or the Latinized Ticianus or Titianus.” The name by which many scholars know him, Tiziano Vecellio, signals the village close to Venice where he was born (most likely between 1488 and 1490).
As his biographer reports, “Venice in 1500 was the wealthiest, most glamorous, most sophisticated, most cosmopolitan, most admired – and most hated – metropolis in Europe, centre of the only empire since ancient Rome to be named after a city rather than a dynasty.”
more from Nicholas Delbanco at the LA Times here.
Love it. A visit to the Titian exhibition at the Prado in Madrid was my Big 60 birthday present from my elder daughter. Wonderful.
PS: It will be Rome for the next big one as she found out that I’d never seen the Sistine Chapel!

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Periodic table as 3D paper sculpture
via Boing Boing by Xeni Jardin

Theodore Gray sends news of this beautiful three-dimensional papercraft Periodic Table of Elements. The Alexander Arrangement is a three-dimensional paper sculpture of the periodic table designed by Roy Alexander, with whom I collaborated on this version. For the first time this clever form of the table has been combined with my photographs of real element samples, resulting in a quite lovely object. (...) [$50’s worth of lovely]The Alexander Arrangement deals with the fundamental problem of gaps in the traditional arrangement of the periodic table by wrapping the transition metals and the lanthanides/actinides into loops, so all the elements that are supposed to be next to each other actually are next to each other. You can read it as a complete spiral loop through all the elements without any gaps.
The table is printed on top-grade, heavy paper printed on both sides, and includes detailed instructions for assembly. The result is a sturdy object you can carry around, put on a table, hang as a mobile, or, if you’re like me, use as a tree-topper for a festive seasonal science tree.

“It takes about 10 minutes to put together if you don’t read the instructions,” Theodore tells us. “No idea how long if you do read them, that’s not the kind of thing I would stoop to.”

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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Rise of the carto-geeks. Digitally enhanced mapping alters our understanding of the past. “History resides in the landscape”... more

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Breaking a 18th C cipher reveals hidden history of Freemasonry and freethought
via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow

Noah Shachtman’s long Wired feature “They Cracked This 250-Year-Old Code, and Found a Secret Society Inside”, tells the intriguing story of the cracking of the “Copiale” cipher, a strange text left behind by a mid-18th-century secret society called the Oculists.
The Oculists had formerly been remembered as being concerned with performing and perfecting eye surgeries, but the Copiale cipher revealed them to have been either spies within Freemasonry, or Freemasons who’d formed another secret society to record and safeguard Mason rituals in the face of persecution from the Catholic church.
I was particularly intrigued by the parallels Shachtman draws between members of secret societies and contemporary online secret groups, both using cryptography to guard their freethought from intolerant state snooping.
Continue reading and allow plenty of time. I read the whole article from start to finish absolutely fascinated!

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Mine Kafon; a bamboo tumbleweed that clears landmines
via Boing Boing by Cory Doctorow
The “Mine Kafon” is Massoud Hassani’s artificial tumbleweed, made from lightweight materials like bamboo. It is designed to be blown across uncleared minefields, detonating forgotten mines. It was Hassani’s grad design project for Design Academy Eindhoven. It continuously broadcasts its location, captured via GPS, plotting out safe, mine-free paths through the fields.
Mine Kafon [includes video presentation] (via Make)

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