Amira

"We now know that the founders of the first advanced European civilization were European," said study co-author George Stamatoyannopoulos, a human geneticist at the University of Washington. "They were very similar to Neolithic Europeans and very similar to present day-Cretans," residents of the Mediterranean island of Crete. (...) The Minoan culture emerged on Crete, which is now part of Greece, and flourished from about 2,700 B.C. to 1,420 B.C. Some believe that a massive eruption from the Volcano Thera on the island of Santorini doomed the Bronze Age civilization, while others argue that invading Mycenaeans toppled the once-great power. Nowadays, the Minoans may be most famous for the myth of the minotaur, a half-man, half-bull that was fabled to lived within a labyrinth in Crete." - Amira

See also: Minoan civilization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Amira

minoan bull leapers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - ufuk

"This is the culmination of Rick Aschmann's years-long "hobby" of collecting dialects. It's a comprehensive and detailed map of the dialects (and sub-dialects!) of English-speakers in Canada and the United States. (...) Aschmann's site is a veritable font of information on English dialects. There's the Dialect Information Chart which tells you which vowel sounds can be found in what dialect and each dialect's "unique features." Like Mat-Su Valley Alaska, which has the unique feature of being "strongly like North Central" but with some "main Alaska dialect" mixed in. If that doesn't mean anything to you, there's a helpful parenthetical there: "See Sarah Palin." Aschmann bases his map and dialect information on the Atlas of North American English, his own research created the names of some of the dialects and made adjustments to their borders." - Amira from Bookmarklet

"On December 7, 1938, a BBC radio crew visited Sigmund Freud at his new home at Hampstead, North London. Freud had moved to England only a few months earlier to escape the Nazi annexation of Austria. He was 81 years old and suffering from incurable jaw cancer. Every word was an agony to speak. Less then a year later, when the pain became unbearable, Freud asked his doctor to administer a lethal dose of morphine. The BBC recording is the only known audio recording of Freud." - Amira from Bookmarklet

In heavily accented English, he says: "I started my professional activity as a neurologist trying to bring relief to my neurotic patients. Under the influence of an older friend and by my own efforts, I discovered some important new facts about the unconscious in psychic life, the role of instinctual urges, and so on. Out of these findings grew a new science, psychoanalysis, a part of... more... - Amira

"This object was in common use in medieval libraries, even though very few survive today. It’s a bookmark - and a smart one for that matter. As with our own bookmarks, it tells you where you are in the book: the rope was attached to the binding and placed between two pages. The reader subsequently pulled down the marker along the rope to the line where he had stopped reading. Since an open medieval book often presented four text columns, the reader then turned the disk to indicate in which column he had left off. In this case we read “4” in medieval Arabic numerals - the column on the far right. So this tiny piece of parchment marks it all: page, column and line. That’s what I call smart. Source unknown, likely 13th or 14th century." - Amira from Bookmarklet

"Astronomers have found a planetary system orbiting the star Kepler-62. This five-planet system has two worlds in the habitable zone — the distance from their star at which they receive enough light and warmth for liquid water to theoretically exist on their surfaces. (...) Kepler-62e is 60 percent larger than Earth, while Kepler-62f is about 40 percent larger, making both of them “super-Earths.” They are too small for their masses to be measured, but astronomers expect them to be composed of rock and water, without a significant gaseous envelope. As the warmer of the two worlds, Kepler-62e would have a bit more clouds than Earth, according to computer models. More distant Kepler-62f would need the greenhouse effect from plenty of carbon dioxide to warm it enough to host an ocean. Otherwise, it might become an ice-covered snowball. “Kepler-62e probably has a very cloudy sky and is warm and humid all the way to the polar regions. Kepler-62f would be cooler, but still potentially life-friendly,” said Harvard astronomer and co-author Dimitar Sasselov." - Amira from Bookmarklet

Thank you, @Amira!! :) - Harold Cabezas

Bernadette Roberts: “Through past experience I had become familiar with many different types and levels of silence. // There is a silence within, a silence that descends from without; a silence that stills existence and a silence that engulfs the entire universe. There is a silence of the self and its faculties of will, thought, memory, and emotions. There is a silence in which there is nothing, a silence in which there is something; and finally, there is the silence of no-self (…). // If there was any path on which I could chart my contemplative experiences, it would be this ever-expanding and deepening path of silence.” - Amira from Bookmarklet

"IBM scientists using a special microscope they invented to move atoms around on a surface. The movie, titled "A Boy and His Atom," consists of nearly 250 frames of stop-motion action and tells the simple story of a boy named Atom who dances and plays with an atom. By drawing viewers in with the film (a technological marvel that will no doubt be passed around far and wide), IBM then uses an engrossing behind-the-scenes clip to tell its larger story—about how the company has worked at the nanoscale for decades to explore the limits of data storage, among other things with real-world applications. (...) Today's electronic devices need roughly 1 million atoms to store a single bit of data. But IBM researchers have shown that only 12 atoms are actually needed to store one bit. The implications for data storage are astonishing—it means that one day, every movie ever made could be stored in a device the size of a fingernail." - Amira from Bookmarklet

he dalloslar he. bu kafayla olur o is 100 yila. - kunthar

"When people look slowly at a piece of art they make discoveries. (...) One day each year – April 27 in 2013 – people all over the world visit local museums and galleries to look at art slowly. Participants look at five works of art for 10 minutes each and then meet together over lunch to talk about their experience. That’s it. Simple by design, the goal is to focus on the art and the art of seeing. In fact, Slow Art Day works best when people look at the art on their own slowly and then meet up to discuss the experience (though some hosts decide to do the discussion right in the gallery)." - Amira from Bookmarklet

“Better living through data? When a pioneer of data collection and organization turned his analytical tools on himself, he revealed the complexity of automating human judgment and the difficulty of predicting just what is predictable. (...) The question is, what’s the space with all possible models that you can imagine using? A good way to describe that space is to think about computer programs. (...) I’ve discovered that very simple programs can serve as remarkably accurate models for lots of things that happen in nature. In natural science, that gives us a vastly better pool of possible models to use than we had from just math. We then see that these may be good models for how nature works. They tell us something about how nature is so easily able to make all this complicated stuff that would be very hard for us to make if we just imagined that nature worked according to math. Now we realize that there’s a whole different kind of engineering that we can do, and we can look at all of these possible simple programs and use those to create our engineering systems." - Amira from Bookmarklet

"This is different from the traditional approach. (...) As we accumulate more data, there will certainly be patterns that can be seen, and things that one can readily see that are predictable. You can expect to have a dashboard—with certain constraints—showing how things are likely to evolve for you. You then get to make decisions: Should I do this? Should I do that? But some part of... more... - Amira

"[Thomas] Jefferson’s language emphasized the requirement of newness, or novelty, and bespoke the necessity of an inventive step. It also implied that products made by nature, which were held to belong to everyone, were not to be removed from common possession. Thus products of nature such as the naturally occurring elements in the periodic table or the creatures of the earth, being neither new in the world nor made by man, were taken to be ineligible for patents. So, tacitly, were laws of nature, natural manifestations, abstract ideas, and thought. (...) Judge Moore did acknowledge that Myriad’s patents “raise substantial moral and ethical issues” about the allowance of property rights in “human DNA—the very thing that makes us humans, and not chimpanzees,” and she allowed that BRCA DNA “might well deserve to be excluded from the patent system.” But she considered such a “dramatic” destruction of property rights properly the province of Congress, not the courts. Against this strict... more... - Amira

"A famous example cited in numerous briefs in the current appeal involved Dr. Jonas Salk's development and invention of the polio oral vaccine in 1952. When his life-saving treatment was announced, he said the people would "own" the vaccine, adding "Could you patent the sun?" -- http://www.cnn.com/2013... // A ruling from the court is expected in June. // See also: Biological patent, Wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Amira

"atNight project aims to constitute a first step towards the construction of nightscape image, a necessary first contribution to the (re)definition of the nigh-time identity. We have taken the opportunity to explore the potential of city's representation techniques -by means of data visualization and cartography- to generate an interpretative model of nocturnal landscape as a common framework for collective thought. (...) atNight is a research project based on the (re)definition of the term "nightscape"." - Amira from Bookmarklet

"Considering landscape in a broad sense, the research aims to build bridges between different technical and humanistic disciplines The research explores night urban landscape as a sensitive and cognitive relationship between people and their environment. The project focuses on the aesthetical process of identification of citizenship with their territory to emphasize the role of night in... more... - Amira

"Murad Osmann and his girlfriend like to travel. And, when they do, they document their journeys in incredible style. (...) The project started during a vacation to Barcelona in 2011. Zakharova became annoyed that Osmann was so occupied with his camera and started pulling him by the hand… but it didn’t stop Osmann from snagging a shot. That shot would spark a project that has now spanned over a year and many different locations. Regarding the look of the images: Osmann snaps the photos with his iPhone or DSLR, adds various effects to them using Camera+, and then uploads them to Instagram. He’s based in Moscow, but it’s his job that has taken Osmann around the world." More: http://mashable.com/2013... - Amira

“Aleppo located in northwestern Syria 310 kilometres from Damascus, is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world; it has been inhabited since perhaps as early as the 6th millennium BC. (...) What it had was tradition, heritage and incredible diversity. Five hundred years after Shakespeare made Aleppo souk the epitome of a distant cornucopia, you could still buy almost anything here, eat and drink a vast range of dishes, and even bathe in the traditional Hammam Nahasin. (...) When I first wandered in via the gate near the citadel, I discovered that there was only one thing I could not find in there: the desire to leave. It was just too diverting and fascinating. Every shopkeeper seemed to want to have a chat over a glass of red tea. (...) Architecturally and culturally, Aleppo carries the genetic imprint of a succession of ruling powers and invaders including Hittites, Assyrians, Arabs, Greeks, Romans, crusading European Christians, Mamelukes and Ottomans." - Amira

Photo: "The Pianist" [Warsaw city after WW2] vs Syria 2013 https://twitter.com/LineHol... - Amira

“A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish - but there was no diamond inside. That’s what I like about coincidence.” - Amira from Bookmarklet

“What I think is so interesting about this photograph is the way that the girls are responding to the space of the modern art gallery: they are not merely ignoring the art on the walls, but literally looking beyond those walls. It is not a quick glance or sneaky peek, either. This is intense, curious looking that requires them to physically crouch down and brace themselves against the grate in order to get the closest possible view through the vent. The square grid-like vent seems congruous with the canvasses of the modern art gallery, and the children are inspired to look beyond the surface of lines and shapes. (…)" - Amira from Bookmarklet

"As Clement Greenberg, that stalwart champion of abstract expressionism, once said: “To hold that one kind of art must invariably be superior or inferior to another kind means to judge before experiencing; and the whole history of art is there to demonstrate the futility of rules of preference laid down beforehand: the impossibility, that is, of anticipating the outcome of aesthetic... more... - Amira

That's beautiful. I love it :) - Eivind

Yay! there's still time... - WoH: Professor MOTHRA

"Scientists at the University of California Los Angeles have found a way to create stunningly detailed 3D reconstructing of platinum nanoparticles at an atomic scale. These are being used to study tiny structural irregularities called dislocations." Read the paper here: http://dx.doi.org/10... - Amira from Bookmarklet

“Artists and scientists analyze the world in surprisingly similar ways.” (...) “[The residual purpose of art is] purposeless play. This play, however, is an affirmation of life - not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.” (John Cage) - Amira from Bookmarklet

"Consider that you can see less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum and hear less than 1% of the acoustic spectrum. As you read this, you are traveling at 220 km/sec across the galaxy. 90% of the cells in your body carry their own microbial DNA and are not “you.” The atoms in your body are 99.9999999999999999% empty space and none of them are the ones you were born with, but they all originated in the belly of a star. Human beings have 46 chromosomes, 2 less than the common potato. The existence of the rainbow depends on the conical photoreceptors in your eyes; to animals without cones, the rainbow does not exist. So you don’t just look at a rainbow, you create it. This is pretty amazing, especially considering that all the beautiful colors you see represent less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum." - Amira

"For clearly the first particles of things // did not all place themselves in due order // by their own planning or intelligence, // nor did they through some agreement assign // the motions each of them should have. Instead, // since there are many of them and they change // in many ways through all the universe, // they are pushed, energized by collisions, // for a limitless length of time, and then, /// having gone through every kind of motion // and combination, they at length fall into // those arrangements which make up and create // this totality of things, which also, // once suitably set in patterned motion, // has been preserved through many lengthy years. // (...)" - Amira from Bookmarklet

"Since earth // was made by nature. Seeds of things themselves, // jostling freely here and there in various ways // and forced to random, confused collisions, // produced nothing—then finally those ones // suddenly united which could become, // every time, the beginnings of great things. (...) Since the moment earth was first created, // that day sea, land, and rising sun were born, //... more... - Amira

See also: How Epicurus’ ideas survived through Lucretius’ poetry, and led to toleration http://aminotes.tumblr.com/post... Lucretius: ‘O unhappy race of men, when they ascribed actions to the gods’ http://amiquote.tumblr.com/post... #universe #atoms #higgsboson #ancient #poetry - Amira

"Lucretius (borrowing from Democritus and others), says [more than 2,000 years ago] the universe is made of an infinite number of atoms. (...) All things, including the species to which you belong, have evolved over vast stretches of time. The evolution is random, though in the case of living organisms, it involves a principle of natural selection, (...) there is no life after death, and that there is no purpose to creation beyond pleasure. (...) Lucretius argued for a mechanistic universe governed by chance. He also argued for a plurality of worlds (and these planets, like the Earth, need not be spherical) and a non-hierarchical universe. (...)" - Amira from Bookmarklet

"[It] dropped like an atomic bomb on the fixedly Christian culture of Western Europe. But this poem’s radical and transformative ideas survived (...) One reason is that it was art. (...) In the spirit of commonplace books, readers of that era focused on individual passages rather than larger (and disturbing) meanings. Readers preferred to see the poem as a primer on Latin and Greek... more... - Amira

"From ancient Egyptian religions to Edgar Allen Poe's The Black Cat to the latest I Can Haz Cheeseburger meme, felines, literature, and culture have enjoyed a long love affair. But perhaps no other feline has walked through history in quite the fashion that a Mediterranean cat did when it left paw prints across the pages of a 15th century manuscript from Dubrovnik, Croatia." - Amira from Bookmarklet

"We’re beginning to come to grips with the idea that your brain is not this well-organized hierarchical control system where everything is in order, a very dramatic vision of bureaucracy. In fact, it’s much more like anarchy with some elements of democracy. Sometimes you can achieve stability and mutual aid and a sort of calm united front, and then everything is hunky-dory, but then it’s always possible for things to get out of whack and for one alliance or another to gain control, and then you get obsessions and delusions and so forth. You begin to think about the normal well-tempered mind, in effect, the well-organized mind, as an achievement, not as the base state. (...) You’re going to have a parallel architecture because, after all, the brain is obviously massively parallel. It’s going to be a connectionist network. (...)" - Amira from Bookmarklet

Bernard Williams: “The generic human need to make and listen to music, for instance, might be explained at the level of evolutionary psychology, but the emergence of the classical symphony certainly cannot. In fact, the insistence on finding explanations of cultural difference in terms of biological evolution exactly misses the point of the great evolutionary innovation represented by... more... - Amira

"In [Hilary Putnam’s] view, there is no reason to suppose that a complete account of reality can be given using a single set of concepts. That is, it is not possible to reduce all types of explanation to one set of objective concepts. (...) The full scope of reality is simply too complex to be fully described by one method of explanation. The problem with all of this, and one that Putnam has struggled with, is what sort of picture of reality we are left with once we accept these three central arguments: the collapse of the fact-value dichotomy, the truth of semantic externalism and conceptual relativity. (...)" - Amira from Bookmarklet

"We could—like Putnam before the 1970s—become robust realists and simply accept that values and norms are no less a part of the world than ,elementary particles and mathematical objects. We could—like Putnam until the 1990s—become “internal realists” and, in a vaguely Kantian move define reality in terms of mind-dependent concepts and idealised rational categories. Or we could adopt... more... - Amira

"We do know that limp binding was used in the 14th & 15th centuries and that it became a quite popular style in the 16th century, with some library collections having over 50% of their works bound in this fashion thanks to the efforts of scholar-publishers. (...) One of the examples that stood out for me was a limp binding with a linen cloth cover, held by the National Library of Sweden. It's a document from 1451-1452, which is simply referred to as the Vadstena Observance. Vadstena was a monastery. (...) It's a simple way of binding things. I can't help but feel that these books are meant for use; a copy meant for wear, rather than a library reference, which would be the grander version of the manuscript that you'd want to keep nice. Some of the records from 14th and 15th century convent libraries certainly agree as most of these books were in the hands of the nuns, with only 9% of the books in the library being limp bound. That doesn't mean these books weren't of value though. They still contained information and have even been documented as being taken as part of the spoils of war." - Amira from Bookmarklet

"They don’t always have enough to eat, they may lack education, they despair at daily injustices and some want to emigrate. But most Africans no longer fear a violent or premature end and can hope to see their children do well. That applies across much of the continent, including the sub-Saharan part, the main focus of this report. African statistics are often unreliable, but broadly the numbers suggest that human development in sub-Saharan Africa has made huge leaps. Secondary-school enrolment grew by 48% between 2000 and 2008 after many states expanded their education programmes and scrapped school fees. Over the past decade malaria deaths in some of the worst-affected countries have declined by 30% and HIV infections by up to 74%. Life expectancy across Africa has increased by about 10% and child mortality rates in most countries have been falling steeply." - Amira

"A booming economy has made a big difference. Over the past ten years real income per person has increased by more than 30%, whereas in the previous 20 years it shrank by nearly 10%. Africa is the world’s fastest-growing continent just now. Over the next decade its GDP is expected to rise by an average of 6% a year, not least thanks to foreign direct investment. FDI has gone from $15... more... - Amira

"Many [African countries] have stopped fighting. War and civil strife have declined dramatically. Local conflicts occasionally flare up, but in the past decade Africa’s wars have become a lot less deadly. Perennial hotspots such as Angola, Chad, Eritrea, Liberia and Sierra Leone are quiet, leaving millions better off, and even Congo, Somalia and Sudan are much less violent than they used to be. (...) This report covers plenty of places where progress falls short. But their number is shrinking." - Amira

"Afraid you will miss “something important”? From my experience, if something really important happens, you will hear about it, even if you live in a cocoon that protects you from the news. Friends and colleagues will tell you about relevant events far more reliably than any news organization. They will fill you in with the added benefit of meta-information, since they know your priorities and you know how they think. You will learn far more about really important events and societal shifts by reading about them in specialized journals, in-depth magazines or good books and by talking to the people who know. (…) The more “news factoids” you digest, the less of the big picture you will understand. (…)" - Amira from Bookmarklet

"Thinking requires concentration. Concentration requires uninterrupted time. News items are like free-floating radicals that interfere with clear thinking. News pieces are specifically engineered to interrupt you. They are like viruses that steal attention for their own purposes. (…) [F]ewer than 10% of the news stories are original. Less than 1% are truly investigative. And only once... more... - Amira

“When people struggle to describe the state that the Internet puts them in they arrive at a remarkably familiar picture of disassociation and fragmentation. Life was once whole, continuous, stable; now it is fragmented, multi-part, shimmering around us, unstable and impossible to fix. The world becomes Keats’s “waking dream,” as the writer Kevin Kelly puts it.” — Adam Gopnik - Amira

"Medieval manuscripts often begin with a portrait of the author, a practice taken from Roman books. When this copy of 'About Virginity' was made, an artist drew on the first page a man writing, presumably meant as a 'portrait' of Aldhelm. The drawing was done with a stylus, indented into the surface of the vellum, but it was never inked in or painted. Later in the 10th century, when many of the glosses in Old English were added, the drawing was partly redrawn with ink, leaving part of the indented original drawing is clearly visible." http://www.bl.uk/onlineg... - Amira

"Saul Steinberg (June 15, 1914 – May 12, 1999) was a Jewish Romanian-born American cartoonist and illustrator, best known for his work for The New Yorker. (...) He studied philosophy for a year at the University of Bucharest, then later enrolled at the Politecnico di Milano, studying architecture and graduating in 1940." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... More info: http://www.saulsteinbergfounda... - Amira