Maitani › Comments

"The ancient city of Kish was occupied from at least as early as 3200 B.C. through the 7th century A.D. Located on the floodplain of the Euphrates River eighty kilometers south of modern Baghdad, the city held an extraordinary position during the formative periods of Mesopotamian history. At that time, it seems to have been the only important city in the northern part of the alluvium, while there were several major centers in the south. The ancient Mesopotamians regarded Kish as the first city to which "kingship descended from heaven" after the great flood that had destroyed the world. During the third millennium B.C., rule over Kish implied dominance over the entire northern part of the plain, and the title "King of Kish" bestowed prestige analogous to that of the medieval "Holy Roman Emperor."" - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"From 1923 through 1933, joint archaeological expeditions of The Field Museum of Natural History and Oxford University explored many of the twenty-four-square-kilometer site's forty mounds, uncovering significant evidence of Kish's extremely early urbanization and its prominence as a dominant regional polity. However, no final site report of the work of those seasons was ever published." - Maitani

"The Travelers in the Middle East Archive (TIMEA) is a digital archive that focuses on Western interactions with the Middle East, particularly travels to Egypt during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. TIMEA offers electronic texts such as travel guides, museum catalogs, and travel narratives, photographic and hand-drawn images of Egypt, historical maps, and interactive GIS (Geographic Information Systems) maps of Egypt and Cyprus. In addition, TIMEA provides educational modules that set the materials in context and explore how to conduct historical research." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

The Middle East in Early Prints and Photographs http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldig... - Maitani

"Microbes have been found living deep inside this crust at the bottom of the sea. The crust is several kilometers thick and covers 60 percent of the planet's surface, making it the largest habitat on Earth" - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"For the first time, scientists have discovered microbes living deep inside Earth’s oceanic crust — the dark volcanic rock at the bottom of the sea. This crust is several kilometers thick and covers 60% of the planet’s surface, making it the largest habitat on Earth." - Maitani

"The microbes inside it seem to survive largely by using hydrogen, formed when water flows through the iron-rich rock, to convert carbon dioxide into organic matter. This process, known as chemosynthesis, is distinct from photosynthesis, which uses sunlight for the same purpose.2 - Maitani

"I've put together the following feed aggregators for the benefit of anyone who would like to make use of them. Please remember: the content pulled together here is still governed by the licensing or copyright preferences of the originating bloggers. Always check with the original author before re-using any of this content!" - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"I've long been aware that many of the languages of Southeast Asia are referred to as bahasa. Here's a list from Wikipedia:" - Maitani from Bookmarklet

" The Indonesian language, or Bahasa Indonesia The Malay language, or Bahasa Melayu The Javanese language, or Basa Jawa, also Basa Jawi The Sundanese language, or Basa Sunda The Balinese language, or Basa Bali The Tausug language, or Bahasa Sūg The Betawi language, or Bahasa Betawi The Cia-Cia language, or Bahasa Ciacia (often discussed on LLog) The Khmer language, or Phiesa Khmae The... more... - Maitani

"I had always assumed that "bahasa" was a Malayo-Polynesian word. Consequently, I was surprised when — reading the Wikipedia page in question– I learned that bahasa "derives from the Sanskrit word bhāṣā भाषा ("spoken language"). In many modern languages in South Asia and Southeast Asia which have been influenced by Sanskrit or Pali, bahasa and cognate words are now used to mean 'language' in general."" - Maitani

"What characteristics are shared by all cities, from the earliest to today, and around the world? Many of the features shared by all cities are not exclusive to cities or urban settlements. Things like housing, big buildings, wide streets, or social diversity are often found in villages and other non-urban settlements. Three features of cities seem to be true universals. That is, features that are found in all known cities -- but not in all non-urban settlements -- and have a major impact on life in cities. These are neighborhoods, urban services, and elites." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"For years I've been telling my classes that neighborhoods are one of the few urban universals. Figure 1 here shows the walled neighborhoods at the Chinese Tang city of Chang'an. Recent research of our urban group here at Arizona State University, has been targeting the neighborhood at cities through time. Archaeologists have woken up to the importance of urban neighborhoods, and this... more... - Maitani

"The Baltic Sea is a brackish mediterranean sea located between Central and Northern Europe, from 53°N to 66°N latitude and from 10°E to 30°E longitude. It is bounded by the Scandinavian Peninsula, the mainland of Europe, and the Danish islands. It drains into the Kattegat by way of the Øresund, the Great Belt and the Little Belt. The Kattegat continues through Skagerrak into the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. The Baltic Sea is connected by man-made waterways to the White Sea via the White Sea Canal, and to the North Sea via the Kiel Canal. The Baltic Sea might be considered to be bordered on its northern edge by the Gulf of Bothnia, on its northeastern edge by the Gulf of Finland, and on its eastern edge by the Gulf of Riga. These various gulfs can also be considered part of the Baltic Sea." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

(same here. I hadn't read "mediterranean" meaning "mediterranean" yet. :-)) - Maitani

"To follow up on the recent GeoNote on wine, beer, and cider consumption in France in 1870s, let’s consider the worldwide spatial patterns of another drink—milk. To North Americans and especially Europeans, both drinking and eating dairy products is very common, but this is far from the global norm, as can be seen in the map reposted on the left from FoodBeast.com. Nordic countries, such as Finland and Sweden, top the list of milk consumption per capita, with over 350 kg (770 lbs) of dairy per person per year. Much of the dairy consumed in these countries is in the form of milk, though Finland is the leading consumer of ice cream in Europe, with 13.7 liters per person in 2003. The third spot in the list of milk-loving countries is occupied by the Netherlands, which ranks as the 5th top cheese producer, the 3rd top cheese exporter, and the 6th top cheese consumer. Among the other top ten dairy consuming countries are such cheese-loving countries as Greece and Switzerland (ranking #1... more... - Maitani from Bookmarklet

i am surprised that italy is not somewhere towards the top of the list. - grizabella

"Drawing a map means understanding our world a bit better. For centuries, we have used the tools of cartography to represent both our immediate surroundings and the world at large—and to convey them to others. On the one hand, maps are used to illustrate areal relationships, including distances, dimensions, and topographies. On the other, maps can also serve as projection screens for a variety of display formats, such as illustration, data visualization, and visual storytelling. In our age of satellite navigation systems and Google Maps, personal interpretations of the world around us are becoming more relevant. Publications, the tourism industry, and other commercial parties are using these contemporary, personal maps to showcase specific regions, to characterize local scenes, to generate moods, and to tell stories beyond sheer navigation." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"A new generation of designers, illustrators, and mapmakers are currently discovering their passion for various forms of illustrative cartography. A Map of the World is a compelling collection of their work—from accurate and surprisingly detailed representations to personal, naïve, and modernistic interpretations. The featured projects from around the world range from maps and atlases inspired by classic forms to cartographic experiments and editorial illustrations." - Maitani

Wow, the design on some of those maps are amazing. - Anika

A friend and I spent a few hours in a café, and on our way home we saw this. I love this place, and I feel so lucky to live in this town. :-) - Maitani

Beautiful :) - Eivind from Android

"Sheherazade (Scheherazade; Russian: Шехерезада, Shekherezada in transliteration), Op. 35, is a symphonic suite composed by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in 1888. Based on One Thousand and One Nights, sometimes known as The Arabian Nights,[1] this orchestral work combines two features typical of Russian music and of Rimsky-Korsakov in particular: dazzling, colorful orchestration and an interest in the East, which figured greatly in the history of Imperial Russia, as well as orientalism in general. It is considered Rimsky-Korsakov's most popular work.[2] The music was used in a ballet by Michel Fokine. This use of the music was denounced by the Rimsky-Korsakov estate, led by the composer's widow, Nadezhda Rimskaya-Korsakova.[3]" - Maitani from Bookmarklet

from http://ff.im/1eNYNl - Maitani

"“How can one be Persian?” asks Montesquieu. “How can one learn Persian?” they ask me sometimes." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

With an extensive link list on Persian history, poetry, music, languages... - Maitani

"The Wikipedia list of the world’s most widely spoken languages, by mother tongue, puts Punjabi in tenth place, with its roughly 100 million native speakers exceeding the figures given for German, French, Italian, Turkish, Persian and many other well-known languages. The Wikipedia article on the Punjabi language stresses its growing appeal, noting that, “The influence of Punjabi as a cultural language in Indian Subcontinent is increasing day by day mainly due to Bollywood. Most Bollywood movies now have Punjabi vocabulary mixed in, along a few songs fully sung in Punjabi.”" - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"But despite Punjabi’s obvious importance, it is extremely difficult to find a map of the language on the internet. Partly this is due to the fact that Punjabi spans the India-Pakistan border, and most maps of individual languages are country-based. One can thus find many language maps of India that depict Punjabi, and virtually all language maps of Pakistan do so as well. But on... more... - Maitani

"The Silk Road, the famous network of trade routes connecting China to the West, was essential not only for the transfer of material goods, but also for the exchange of language and culture. Along with many other Central Asian civilizations, Tocharian A and Tocharian B could so come to flourish as literary languages in the wake of the spread of Buddhism in the middle of the first millennium CE. Although Tocharian was spoken in Kucha and Turfan along the northern edge of the Tarim Basin in North-West China (= present-day Xinjiang), it is not related to Chinese. Instead, Tocharian A and Tocharian B constitute a separate branch of the so-called Indo-European language family, which comprises ancient languages such as Latin, Greek and Sanskrit, as well as modern languages like English and Spanish." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"Towards the end of the first millennium, Tocharian became extinct: it is now only known from documents that could be preserved over a period of more than 1000 years thanks to the arid climate of the Taklamakan Desert. The documents were discovered during a series of archaeological expeditions undertaken from the end of the nineteenth century onwards, and transferred to museums in China, Japan, and Europe." - Maitani

"Gertrude Stein (February 3, 1874 – July 27, 1946) was a noted American art collector of seminal modernist paintings and an experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays, which eschewed the narrative, linear, and temporal conventions of 19th century literature. She was born in West Allegheny (Pittsburgh), Pennsylvania, raised in Oakland, California, and moved to Paris in 1903, making France her home for the remainder of her life. For some forty years, the Stein home on the Left Bank of Paris would become a renowned Saturday evening gathering place for expatriate American artists and writers, and others noteworthy in the world of vanguard arts and letters. Entrée and membership in the Stein salon was a sought-after validation, signifying that Stein had recognized a talent worthy of inclusion into a rarefied group of gifted artists. Stein became combination mentor, critic, and guru to those who gathered around her. A self-defined "genius", she was described as an imposing figure with... more... - Maitani from Bookmarklet

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Maitani

"Since 1971, the Office for National Statistics has been asking thousands of Britons about their lives. The General Household Survey shows the Britain of the 1970s was a very different country to 2011 (the latest results we have). Here are 10 ways things have changed." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

Is the shower a new invention? - Eivind from Android

i mistook the head (last photo) for a severed head on the plate! :) - grizabella

from http://ff.im/1eM5jj - Halil from Bookmarklet

<3 that open window by Matisse :-) - Maitani

These crazy dances are the first thing I remember about Lo's presence on Friendfeed. I hope you're doing a lot of crazy dancing today! - Spidra Webster from Bookmarklet

Happy Birthday! - Maitani

"The British Library holds an outstanding collection of Classical and Byzantine manuscripts, including highlights such as Codex Alexandrinus, the Theodore Psalter, and the Aratea." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"There is a community of medievalists on Twitter who re-tweet their latest finds in their studies of illustrated manuscripts. I follow some of them, and this popped up in my Twitter stream today. It is a stupendous 112 page 13th century Sicilian manuscript from the Vatican Library, dealing with birds and falconry (De Artes Venandi Cum Avibus, Pal. lat. 1071). Here are just some of the examples of the illustrations. Birders who think they can ID the beasts, chip in below. Better still, go to the Vatican site (not often you’ll read those words here) and then come back to tell us what you’ve found – please give the page number, which will be a number followed by r (recto) or v (verso). All the illustrations here are taken from there, and are obviously their copyright." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"In 1916 the artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant moved to Sussex with their unconventional household. Over the following half century Charleston became the country meeting place for the group of artists, writers and intellectuals known as Bloomsbury. Clive Bell, David Garnett and Maynard Keynes lived at Charleston for considerable periods; Virginia and Leonard Woolf, E.M. Forster,... more... - Maitani

"As it happens, I was looking for something else in a bookcase when I spotted my tattered 1981 paperback of “Tales and Legends of Sistan”, an annotated publication of the Soviet Academy of Sciences – and I was surprised to recognize that I can still recite a few verses of the beautiful Russian translation, and that I still remember how the book project was born, after a surprise discovery that an expat Sistani legend-teller lived, quietly, in a small town in Turkmenistan. But I realized that I knew nothing about the linguist and poet who recorded and translated these stories, some of them canonical Rustam legends from Shahnameh, the Book of Kings, and other, hitherto unknown legends also recited as historic truth, and others retold as fictionary fairy tales with their own canon." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"Aleksandr Gruenberg joined the Pamir Expedition group of Anna Rozenfeld, also a native of St Petersburg but a generation older, also an iranologist, dialectologist, and folklorist, also a translator of folk tales. Anna Rozenfeld was a snowman sceptic who approached the Yeti question as a folklore-gathering exercise. The all-St.Petersburger group also included two members without any... more... - Maitani

"The attention of Gruenberg thus turned to the isolated diasporas of the ethnic groups with homelands south of the Soviet border, which could have been studied within the confines of the Soviet Union. Between 1958 and 1960, he discovered and documented Teymuri, Jamshidi, and Sistani populations in Saraghs and Kushka, in the South of Turkmenistan. And then Gruenberg got a unique... more... - Maitani

"Das halvo-Projekt ist eine studentisch initiierte Datenbank für das Studium der Vorderasiatischen Archäologie. Es ist nicht Ziel diese Datenbank Informationen zu archäologischen Themen möglichst komplett aufzunehmen, sondern vielmehr eine Grundlage für die Recherche innerhalb des Studiums oder für frei Interessierte zu bieten." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

Wait, who are you again? - Zulema ❧ spicy cocoa tart from Android

Woot. - Micah from FFHound(roid)!

"The traditional role of the curator was closely related to the Latin origins of the word, “curare” refers to “to take care of”, “to nurse” or “to look after”. Curators of museums or art collections were primarily in charge of preserving, overseeing, archiving and cataloging the artifacts that were placed under their guardianship. As outlined in “Thinking Contemporary Curating” by Terry Smith, the latter half of 20th century witnessed the emergence of new roles for art curators, both private curators and those formally employed as curators by museum or art collections. Curators not only organized art exhibitions but were given an increasing degree of freedom in terms of choosing the artists and themes of the exhibitions and creating innovative opportunities for artists to interact with their audiences. The art exhibition itself became a form of art, a collage of art assembled by the curators in a unique manner." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"Internet Curators The internet is now providing us access to an unprecedented and overwhelming amount of information. Every year, millions of articles, blog posts, images and videos are being published online. Older texts, images and videos that were previously published in more traditional formats are also being made available for online consumption. The book “The Information: A... more... - Maitani

"This overwhelming and disorienting torrent of digital information has given rise to a new group of curators, internet or web curators, who primarily focus on the navigatory and discerning roles of curatorship. Curatorial websites or blogs such as 3quarksdaily, Brainpickings or Longreads comb through mountains of online information and try to select a handful of links to articles,... more... - Maitani

"The full-page miniature at the opening of the calendar pages for March (above) shows the labours associated with the beginning of the agricultural season. In the foreground, a man pauses from clearing a garden to tip his hat to two richly-dressed ladies, one of whom is carrying a small dog. Outside of the garden, men are at work trimming vines, while a horseman crosses a moat into a small town in the background. In the bas-de-page, a group of men are playing with rattles in what appears to be a far more wintry landscape than that above. On the following folio (below) are the saints' days for March, along with a roundel containing a small ram, for the zodiac sign Aries. At the bottom of the page a man is ploughing behind a team of horses, while another man on the right (partially trimmed away) is clearing the field of branches." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"Neuroscience has entered the public consciousness, and changed the way we talk about ourselves. But much of what passes as knowledge is inaccurate" - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"I never used to discuss neuroscience on the bus but it's happened twice in the last month. On one occasion a fellow passenger mentioned that her "brain wasn't working properly" to explain that she had gone through a long period of depression. On another, an exchange student enthusiastically told me that one of the advantages of learning abroad is that a new language "made your brain... more... - Maitani

"But it's the sheer penetration of neuroscience into everyday life that makes it remarkable. We talk about left- and right-brain thinking, brainstorming and brain disorders. Differences between the male and female brain are the subject of regular press speculation and newspapers publish stories on brain scans that claim to explain everything from love to memory. Young people are... more... - Maitani

"at the bridge of the Yaselda, next to the already mentioned Malecz, on March 3, 1918, at the news of Russia’s withdrawal from the war." (both images are nicely zoomable) - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"It’s not often that we get to listen to a genuine, bona fide genius in the Graduate Interdisciplinary Seminar, but that’s just what we were treated to this week. Michael Ventris’s crisp, cut-glass tones played out, announcing his decipherment of Linear B. This was of course a clip from the famous 1952 radio broadcast in which Ventris revealed that h could prove beyond any reasonable doubt that the script of the Mycenaean Aegean did in fact render Greek, rather than Etruscan as he’d initially believed or any of the other fanciful suggestions which had been made over the years. This audio clip was met with swoons of delight by some members of the audience. I’d heard it before, but the frisson you get listening to it doesn’t go away. It’s no exaggeration to say Ventris is one of my academic heroes, and the fact that he was barely older than I am now when he made his most famous discovery kind of puts one’s academic contributions into perspective. The fact that he was dead 4 years later only adds to the poignancy." - Maitani from Bookmarklet

"But the decipherment of Linear B didn’t end with Ventris, as our own Anna Judson explained in her paper ‘Deciphering Linear B after Michael Ventris’. For even after the decipherment of the core signs of the syllabary had been accepted, a large number of signs remained uncertain. Many of these were filled in over time, but even now fourteen signs – around a fifth of the total syllabary... more... - Maitani

"If you pay attention to global warming skeptics, you’ve probably heard the oft-repeated meme: global warming has stopped. It’s not really true, of course. (More on that in a minute.) But there is evidence that over the past 10 or so years, the underlying rate of warming has slowed. What gives? One hypothesis has pointed to a 60 percent upswing in sulfur dioxide air pollution from coal burning in China and India. Sulfur dioxide aerosols act like a parasol to reflect some of the sun’s energy back into space, and thereby cause cooling. But new research published today shows that sulfur dioxide aerosols spewed into the stratosphere by moderate volcanic eruptions have been a significant reason why warming has slowed. The research was led by Ryan Neely at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, and it has been published online in Geophysical Research Letters. (Disclosure: The University of Colorado, where I work as co-director of the Center for Environmental Journalism, is a partner in CIRES.)" - Maitani from Bookmarklet