There are many delights to be found there, such as art installations, 3D graphics, graphic design, and photography. In a section called Inspiration, there's a subsection called Movies, where there are trailers and reviews of films about art and artists. "Surviving Picasso" is one I missed.
I particularly like the way they've handled 3D art, making the effort to assign a genre to each artist's work. One of Andrea Bertaccini's pieces is below.
In Lev Grossman's very readable article, he reports that startup Tri Alpha Energy is using two linear plasma accelerators pointed at each other to achieve results that larger and far more expensive tokamaks have yet to produce. Furthermore, Tri Alpha Energy will use hydrogen nuclei and boron-11, not the conventional deuterium and tritium, to fuel the reaction. Boron requires a temperature of 3 billion degrees Celsius to fuse. So far Tri Alpha has produced a ball of superheated hydrogen plasma for five milliseconds, a record in the fusion effort. Before I move on, here's Lev's description of attempting fusion:
The heat and pressure necessary are extreme. Essentially you’re trying to replicate conditions in the heart of the sun, where its colossal mass–330,000 times that of Earth–creates crushing pressure, and where the temperature is 17 million degrees Celsius. In fact, because the amounts of fuel are so much smaller, the temperature at which fusion is feasible on Earth starts at around 100 million degrees Celsius.
That’s the first problem. The second problem is that your fuel is in the form of a plasma, and plasma, as mentioned above, is weird. It’s a fourth state of matter, neither liquid nor solid nor gas. When you torture plasma with temperatures and pressures like these, it becomes wildly unstable and writhes like a cat in a sack. So not only do you have to confine and control it, and heat it and squeeze it; you have to do all that without touching it, because at 100 million degrees, this is a cat that will instantly vaporize solid matter.
Today's comments include Bernie Sanders on climate change and terrorism, ISIS, a no-Syrians policy in America, innocent Muslim bystanders, and the 2012 vs. 2015 presidential races.
"If we are going to see an increase in drought, in flood, and extreme weather disturbances as a result of climate change, what that means is that people all over the world are going to be fighting over limited natural resources," the Vermont senator said Sunday on CBS' "Face the Nation," elaborating on an argument he made during the CBS News Democratic debate Saturday night. "If there is not enough water, if there is not enough land to grow your crops, then you're going to see migrations of people fighting over land that will sustain them. And that will lead to international conflict."
Molenbeek, a Muslim community in Belgium, is where Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the suspected architect of the Paris attacks, lived. The residents of Molenbeek are telling us, 'We are not terrorists'.
The attacks in Paris may have been the last straw, they seem to have pierced to heart: so many people going out to have a good time or enjoy a meal together and finding terror.
At any rate now I have a cold, which often happens when I'm depressed. Besides Golden Seal (or its substitute Oregon Grape), Elecampane, germ-fighting essential oils, and rest, I seek out things that make me feel better.
Safe spaces are an expression of the conviction, increasingly prevalent among college students, that their schools should keep them from being “bombarded” by discomfiting or distressing viewpoints. Think of the safe space as the live-action version of the better-known trigger warning, a notice put on top of a syllabus or an assigned reading to alert students to the presence of potentially disturbing material.
Some would argue that college is a place for expanding one's mind and world view. At least that's what it used to be. Now college is where you get training for a profession, then try to get hired.
An American soldier greets his wife and son after returning home from a 14-month deployment to Iraq (Getty Images), BBC News
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Nineteen million veterans (2014 census) of war live among us in America, yet what do we do to help them transition from military life to civilian life? First, learn about their experience.
Here are two stories told by people who experienced war as active participants.
Wes Moore: How to talk to veterans about the war
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Sebastion Junger: Why veterans miss war
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Journalist Sebastian Junger wrote about veterans returning from war an opinion piece in the Washington Post:
Civilians tend to do things that make them, not the veterans, feel better. Yellow ribbons and parades do little to help with the emotional aftermath of combat. War has been part of human culture for tens of thousands of years, and most tribal societies were engaged in some form of warfare when encountered by Western explorers. It might be productive to study how some societies reintegrated their young fighters after the intimate carnage of Stone Age combat. It is striking, in fact, how rarely combat trauma is mentioned in ethnographic studies of cultures.
Typically, warriors were welcomed home by their entire community and underwent rituals to spiritually cleanse them of the effect of killing. Otherwise, they were considered too polluted to be around women and children. Often there was a celebration in which the fighters described the battle in great, bloody detail. Every man knew he was fighting for his community, and every person in the community knew that their lives depended on these young men. These gatherings must have been enormously cathartic for both the fighters and the people they were defending. A question like the one recently posed to me wouldn’t begin to make sense in a culture such as the Yanomami of Brazil and Venezuela or the Comanche.
As you probably know, Google is featuring Hedy Lamarr with its current doodle. Beauty and brains can be a toxic mixture. Take a look at this video to see what I mean.
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Despite her oft-repeated quote--"Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid"--when her beauty faded, she did too.
TCM (Turner Classic Movies) has video clips of films with Ms. Lamarr. The overview page features a biography, her filmography, and other points of interest.
Uh-oh, looks like I've painted myself into a corner--again. There's not a lot of information on the web about using Notan in photography and what's there is very old. I could approach it as post-processing, but many photographers feel that that's cheating. To them a true photo is a capture of the moment. And I can't say I disagree.
Previously I talked about Notan--what it is and how it's used by artists. Here, in part 2, I planned to look at how it can be applied to photography. Granted, balancing light and dark values, as well as framing the picture, while capturing the image can be daunting, especially when you're starting out at photography.
So here's what information I did capture that photographers may find useful.
Available as a free ebook, Arthur Hammond's Pictorial Composition in Photography (American Photographic Publishing Company, 1920) is a small book with some big ideas. He prefaces his book by saying,
To tell a photographer how to compose his pictures is like telling a musician how to compose music, an author how to write a novel or an actor how to act a part. Such things can only grow out of the fulness and experience of life.
Another book relating Notan and photography, one that was elusive, is The Command to Look: A Formula for Picture Success (Camera Craft Publishing Company, 1937) by William Mortensen. This link is to a PDF file with photos of the book, somehow very fitting.
Ridley Scott is hands-down my favorite director. He has produced films as diverse as Alien, Gladiator, Robin Hood, The Martian, and Exodus. The one thing all of the films have in common is his talent for presenting gritty, hands-on characters in detailed, well-visualized worlds.
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That Scott produced a film like Exodus: Gods and Kings is surprising, considering that he is an atheist. It was not a particularly successful movie at the box office, but does have some interesting features. An excellent review of the movie from the standpoint of belief is one by Jack Jenkins at ThinkProgress. Another interesting review in the same vein is available at Time Magazine. In an interview with Jonathan Merritt at Religion News Service Scott described himself and his approach to the elements of Exodus thus
I’m an absolutely very, very practical person. So I was immediately thinking that all science-based elements placed come from natural order or disorder–or could come from the hand of God, however you want to play that.
When trying to pin down when exactly it all happened and who the major players were from an historical viewpoint, one can't. We are, after all, talking about events that may have happened between the 15th and 5th centuries before the Christian Era (BCE, or Before Christ).
Despite being regarded in Judaism as the primary factual historical narrative of the origin of the religion, culture and ethnicity, Exodus is now accepted by scholars as having been compiled in the 8th–7th centuries BCE from stories dating possibly as far back as the 13th century BCE, with further polishing in the 6th–5th centuries BCE, as a theological and political manifesto to unite the Israelites in the then‐current battle for territory against Egypt.
There are a number of strong points that support the idea of no plagues and no exodus in the article. To me the strongest is that, despite the plagues and the death of all first-born sons, and the loss of the army, there is no evidence that Egypt suffered any noticeable setbacks during the period being recorded.
Ussher's 1491 BCE date corresponds with a time of ambitious Egyptian expansion. The reign of Hatshepsut was stable, peaceful and saw extensive construction projects and trading missions; this is known from actual material remains as well as Egyptian records. Her successor, Thutmose III, took Egypt to its greatest imperial extent, forging an empire from the Euphrates to the 4th and possibly the 5th cataract. These are not the signs of a nation that, just a few years before, had lost its entire harvest, its drinkable water, its army and its sons. There is no archaeological evidence at all of mass death and impoverishment in the early New Kingdom period (Rational Wiki).
Archaeologists now widely believe the plagues occurred at an ancient city of Pi-Rameses on the Nile Delta, which was the capital of Egypt during the reign of Pharaoh Rameses the Second, who ruled between 1279BC and 1213BC.
The city appears to have been abandoned around 3,000 years ago and scientists claim the plagues could offer an explanation.
Wikipedia's article on Pi-Ramesses describes the city as flourishing and outlasting Rameses II by 100 years. Although the city was eventually moved south because its branch of the Nile silted up and the city was left without water.
Pi-Ramesses was built on the banks of the Pelusiac branch of the Nile. With a population of over 300,000, it was one of the largest cities of ancient Egypt. Pi-Ramesses flourished for more than a century after Ramesses' death, and poems were written about its splendour (Wikipedia).
