via A Don’s Life by Mary Beard
One of my favourite “assemblages” (as archaeologists say) of ancient material from the Greco-Roman world is the stuff from the “Antikythera Wreck”, a cargo boat that went down between Crete and the southern tip of the Peloponnese probably in the 60s BC (dated by coins), on its way with a load of prestige (and some not so prestige) goods for the Roman market, trade not loot almost certainly.
Continue reading
==========================================
Computational Anthropology Reveals How the Most Important People in History Vary by Culture
via MIT Technology Review by Julia Greer
Data mining Wikipedia people reveals some surprising differences in the way eastern and western cultures identify important figures in history, say computational anthropologists.
Continue reading
“They” say that you learn something new every day but this item taught me two things, the cultural differences that are the subject of the item and that there exists such a profession as a computational anthropologist (another one to add to the occupations thesaurus).
==========================================
The Healthiest Typeface
via Stephen's Lighthouse: Cari Romm in The Atlantic
In a New York Times column in July 2012, the filmmaker Errol Morris took a few paragraphs to ponder the likelihood of death by asteroid.
“NASA issued reassuring public statements [after an asteroid flew close to Earth in 2011], but I’m not so sure,” he wrote. “It’s about the size of an aircraft carrier. Okay. That seems pretty big to me. Do you mean I shouldn’t worry about being hit by a meteor the size of an aircraft carrier?”
Continue reading
==========================================
Astronomers Investigate “Stillborn” Galaxies 300 Million Light-years Away
via Big Think by Robert Montenegro
It never ceases to amaze me the wonders astronomers are able to observe and calculate. For instance, this story at Space.com reports on a team of astronomers in New Mexico that has determined that a group of 48 galaxies located within the Coma Cluster are so saturated with dark matter that they may be what one expert describes as “stillborn” galaxies.
Continue reading
==========================================
How Our Brains Respond When We Read Harry Potter
via Big Think by Natalie Shoemaker
How do our brains resolve the supernatural descriptions we read in fantasy literature compared to more mundane descriptions? It's a loaded question, but Tom Jacobs from Pacific Standard has the scoop. He recently wrote on a new study that has found portions of our minds associated with emotion processing are quite tickled by the fantastic and supernatural – more specifically, when we read Harry Potter.
Continue reading
==========================================
Infinite variety: Archiving the Arts
via National Archives by Melinda Haunton
What links a springboard , a sonnet, a commode, a peacock, many hairpins and a sad lack of teleportation facilities? Read on to find out:
Way back in December 2012, when the world was young, I was pleased to introduce on this blog a new arts archives initiative, supported by The National Archives and Arts Council England. We called it Archiving the Arts. Since then, we’ve checked in with the project a couple of times – hearing about its development last spring and about one workshop held here at Kew to engage artists with the archive.
Continue reading
==========================================
Calligrapher of the Rings
via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz
New Zealand-based artist Daniel Reeves created the calligraphy and cartography seen in The Lord of the Rings trilogy along with several other big fantasy films, and merchandise associated with the movies.
You can purchase his work, including fonts, prints, and commissions via his site: DanielReeve.co.nz (via Laughing Squid)
Beautiful
==========================================
England’s immigrants 1330-1550
via National Archives by Dr Jessica Lutkin and Dr Laura Tompkins
This month [February 2015]sees the launch of England’s Immigrants 1330-1550, a major new research database by the University of York, in partnership with the Humanities Research Institute (University of Sheffield) and The National Archives.
The vibrant nature of the population of the British Isles owes a great deal to the steady flow of immigrants over the past two millennia. Invasions by the Romans and Normans, sanctuary sought by the Protestant Huguenots, or the need for a workforce encouraging West Indians to immigrate all have had a part to play in making Britain the nation it is today.
Continue reading
The one fact that stuck with me from reading this is that non-English people were referred to as aliens in the official documentation. And at this time that included the Scots and Irish.
==========================================
A master of miniatures’ incredible small town
via Boing Boing by David Pescovitz
Michael Paul Smith's Elgin Park is a town that does not exist except in the mind and miniatures of this master of tabletop photography. It is “a 1/24th-scale recreation of everyday scenes from mid-20th century America, ranging from the 1920s to the mid-1960s”.
Continue reading
==========================================
Add nature, art and religion to life’s best anti-inflammatories
via 3 Quarks Daily from Science Daily
Taking in such spine-tingling wonders as the Grand Canyon, Sistine Chapel ceiling or Schubert's “Ave Maria” may give a boost to the body’s defence system, according to new research from UC Berkeley. Researchers have linked positive emotions – especially the awe we feel when touched by the beauty of nature, art and spirituality – with lower levels of pro-inflammatory cytokines, which are proteins that signal the immune system to work harder. “Our findings demonstrate that positive emotions are associated with the markers of good health,” said Jennifer Stellar, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Toronto and lead author of the study, which she conducted while at UC Berkeley.
Continue reading
No comments:
Post a Comment