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Poetry and politics in Somaliland.
Wooden Roman storage cellar from ancient Nida, now suburban Frankfurt, was found charred in place in 2023; removed in one piece, it has now been installed in the Frankfurt Archaeological Museum.
Leaked document purports to be the Vietnamese communist party's plan to stay in power as it opens up economically to the US, Japan, South Korea, and Europe.
Google's Gemini AI will help you write an argument against having children but not in favor of having four or more; to that query the AI said, "I'm unable to fulfill your request to write an argument in favor of having at least four children. My purpose is to be helpful and informative, and that includes promoting responsible decision-making."
Rebecca Solnit on the divisions within the left; after noting the support of self-proclaimed leftists for Putin and Assad, she says, "It should be a modest request to ask that left not mean supporters of authoritarian regimes soaked in their own people’s blood."
According to this NY Times story, Chinese automaker BYD can sell an electric car for $11,000; meanwhile, last year Ford lost $64,000 on every electric car it sold. Things could get very ugly for the US auto industry. Meanwhile Toyota, unable to make much headway with electric vehicles, hopes to pivot to hydrogen. Hydrogen fuel cells are actually a great idea, but they require an entirely new pipeline network to distribute hydrogen, and the concept is competing with the already existing electrical network.
The archaeology of southern England might be the best known in the world, but just last year a new Roman port town was discovered at Smallhythe in Kent. From this story I discovered that Smallhythe was a significant ship-building center during the period I used to study, 1272-1400; the scope of things one does not know is sometimes daunting.
Crazy New Yorker story on the breeding of ball pythons to have particular mutations that give them unusual coloration; snakes with strange patterns can sell for up to $100,000.
Lovely modern grimoire.
With the birth rate of a European nation and a Third World emigration rate, Bosnia is shrinking dramatically, its population down 22 percent since 1990 and some villages completely disappearing. (NY Times) Of the former Yugoslav nations, only Slovenia and Serbia (where Belgrade has drawn many migrants from Russia and Ukraine) are holding their own.
Rock art in Borneo seems to depict native peoples fighting back against their Indonesian rulers.
Short article on the future of seabed warfare: cutting cables and pipelines, etc. Says this is a perfect method for "hybrid warfare" short of an open shooting war, since it is very hard to prove who did it.
Study of Philistine sites in Israel shows how important flowers and other plants were to temple rituals, and provides more evidence of connection between the Philistines and the Greek world.
David Cornwell (aka John Le Carre) on parenthood, from his recently published letters, reviewed in the TLS last October: "I don't understand any of my children, but I have an uncomfortable feeling they understand me."
There isn't enough quality data on the internet to train new generations of AI, so AI programmers are looking at "synthetic data," that is, data that the AI creates itself, sort of like AlphaZero getting better at chess by playing itself. But will that make the AI better, or more stale and repetitive?
Hyper-realistic oil paintings of textiles. Impressive, but — why?
Review of what sounds like a really fun history of Eastern Europe, full of improbable stories.
Defense Minister of Singapore: "Our world has become a more dangerous place. . . I have reversed my assessment for today’s generation in Singapore and elsewhere. The risk of regional and even global conflict in the next decade has become non-zero. I do not make this assessment lightly."
Supposed to be a video showing the shoot-down of a Russian A-50 AWACS aircraft over the Sea of Azov on February 23. The A-50 saw the missile coming, since it dispensed a lot of flares, but its counter-measures did not work and toward the end you can see the aircraft breaking up.
"Rebecca Solnit on the divisions within the left . . ."
ReplyDeleteYes, the left is bad. So, so bad. A thousand devoted lifetimes' worth of criticism would not be enough.
But in this country, it is the Right that forms the bulk of support of Putin, and, unlike the left, they have the power to block aid to Ukraine. And they're doing it.
Hyper-realistic oil paintings of textiles. Impressive, but — why?
ReplyDeleteTo be impressive, I'd imagine.
I assume it's like those very technically difficult piano arrangements that float around the classical music world - the sorts of things that no one really listens to or plays for the sake of enjoyment, but which exist more or less purely to be trotted out every now and again as a demonstration of just how skilled a pianist is. It's impressive.
In that context, I'll take these odd textile paintings over people climbing Mount Everest any day - there are presumably a lot less corpses senselessly left in the wake of these paintings.
Rock art in Borneo seems to depict native peoples fighting back against their Indonesian rulers.
ReplyDeleteThis description is problematically worded.
The use of "Indonesian" implies the modern state of Indonesia, when what we're really talking about is the former Sultanate of Brunei and its vassals.
The rock art ostensibly depicts Malay ruling elites, so you could have said "fighting back against their Malay rulers". (Note - you shouldn't say "Malaysian rulers", because that again would refer to a modern country, not the ethnic / cultural grouping of the rulers in question.)
That said, the rock art ALSO ostensibly depicts Iban (aka, "Sea Dayak") rulers alongside the Malays - and the Iban people are themselves natives< of Borneo, meaning your description of "native peoples fighting back against their ~Malay~ rulers" is also wrong in that regard, as they were fighting back against both foreign AND native rulers.
Regarding why hyper oil paintings of textiles.
ReplyDeleteWhy Rothko's paintings?
Finally putting this under the correct post. After all these years you'd think my aim would be better.
Well, any artist who works over decades creating art does have an additional dimension to consider, as well as each of that artist’s works being open to consideration individually.
DeleteThe complexities of Rothko’s work, in a comparative consideration of, say, four or more of his pieces, is instantly evident to any person who takes a moment to view (in person) these pieces, taking a moment or two to look for distinctive qualities in each work.
You may not like the works of Rothko’s final decade, but comparing them to the work he completed during other decades of his life as an artist, you will likely conclude that there is complexity in his work.
The pieces portraying these carpets certainly evidence a mechanical complexity, and I found the first piece “really cool.” By the time I looked at the third or fourth piece, I thought I had a pretty good understanding of the ideas involved, and I was not interested in seeing more similar work.
This said, I personally would absolutely be curious to see what else the artist does with this process.
I was visiting a fine arts museum with my daughter a few years ago, we were in the 19th century wing, and I asked her if she could have any painter from those galleries do her portrait, who would she choose.
She rejected Renoir and Dante Gabrielle Rosetti, because she found their work repetitive. John Singer Sargent on a good day, or maybe Whistler.
Myself— I would risk Vuillard (if I had on the correct striped shirt), Lautrec (In a happy month) or Daumier (because even an unkind portrait from Daumier would be worth it).
A portrait from Rothko would be pretty far down my list— but he definitely did some interesting experiments in this area.