Trivia (should have been 28 December)

Neideffer Camp: 1937
via Shorpy Historical Photo Archive – Vintage Fine Art Prints by Dave

Spring 1937
“This family without food and work about to be returned to Oklahoma by the Relief Administration. They have lost a baby as a result of exposure during the winter. Had to sell their tent and car to buy food. Neideffer Camp, Holtville, Imperial Valley, California.”
Photo by Dorothea Lange for the Resettlement Administration
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Organised Hypocrisy on a Monumental Scale
via 3 Quarks Daily by Robert Wade on the economic occupation of the West Bank in the LRB

Please read it for yourself if you have any interest in equality, regardless of the politics

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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Big history
Big Science, Big Data, and now Big History. Is taking the broadest possible view really a panacea, or just another impractical way of relating the past?… more

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Carnal knowledge
via Prospero by L.L.B.
A news exhibition of work by Egon Schiele at the Courtauld Gallery in London offers several rare opportunities. It is just under a century since this Austrian artist died, and yet his creations are not found in any public collection in Britain, and have never been given a dedicated exhibition in any of the country's museums. Most of the 38 drawings and watercolours that comprise this show have been gathered from abroad and from private sources, and many are being exhibited publicly for the first time. It is unlikely that any of London’s hallowed art institutions have ever had so many depictions of labia on such proud display.

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We Are Not the Only Political Animals
via 3 Quarks Daily by Justin E. H. Smith in the New York Times

A political caricature of the United States Senate from 1894 (Library of Congress)
Homo sapiens has long sought to set itself apart from animals — that is, apart from every other living species. One of the most enduring attempts to define humanity in a way that distances us from the rest of animal life was Aristotle’s description of the human being as a “political animal.” By this he meant that human beings are the only species that live in the “polis” or city-state, though the term has often been understood to include villages, communes, and other organized social units. Implicit in this definition is the idea that all other animals are not political, that they live altogether outside of internally governed social units.
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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
“Wild West” of academic publishing
Scholarly journals first appeared in 1665, and from the beginning they didn’t pay authors, peer reviewers, or editors. Is the economic model coming undone?… more

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There’s more to Matisse’s dancers than meets the eye
via 3 Quarks Daily by Morgan Meis in The Smart Set

In the year 1905, Henri Matisse painted a portrait of his wife wearing a rather extraordinary hat. The painting was displayed at the Salon d’Automne in Paris that same year. Much shock and controversy followed. To many, the hat looked like a giant lump of randomly chosen colours sitting atop the poor woman’s head. What, also, was the point of all the green on the woman’s face? People and hats don’t look like that. The world doesn’t look like that.
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A History of Keyboard Layouts, Is QWERTY Lagging Behind?
via MakeUseOf by Joel Lee
Did you know that modern QWERTY keyboards are inefficient and encourage the onset of repetitive stress injuries like carpal tunnel syndrome? QWERTY is over 100 years old. It’s outdated and outclassed by several alternatives, yet it’s still the most popular keyboard layout in the world.
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Arts & Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate
Curvology
“This is a book about the female body and why it has turned out to be the strangest thing in existence.” Strange? To whom?… more

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Dragon that looks like a tree
via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz

In Chellah, an abandoned city south of Rabat, Morocco, there lives a dragon that resembles a tree. Photo posted by Seiteta on Reddit. (via Laughing Squid where there's another photo of the tree, sorry, dragon)