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World: Openculture.com: [ Geolocation ] (Laatste update: vrijdag 13 oktober 2023 13:02:48)
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Researchers Use AI to Decode the First Word on an Ancient Scroll Burned by Vesuvius
In the year 79, AD Mount Vesuvius erupted, burying both Pompeii and Herculaneum. In 1750, an Italian farmworker discovered an entombed seaside villa in Herculaneum while digging a well. When excavated, the residence yielded hundreds of scrolls, all of them turned into what looked and felt like lumps of ash, and practically all of them […]
Fri, 13 Oct 2023 09:01:15 +0000
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How to Be Happier in 5 Research-Proven Steps, According to Popular Yale Professor Laurie Santos
Nature doesn’t care if you’re happy, but Yale psychology professor Laurie Santos does. As Dr. Santos points out during the above appearance on The Well, the goals of natural selection have been achieved as long as humans survive and reproduce, but most of us crave something more to consider life worth living. With depression rising […]
Fri, 13 Oct 2023 08:00:41 +0000
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A Lavishly Illustrated Catalog of All Hummingbird Species Known in the 19th Century Gets Restored & Put Online
If you don’t live in a part of the world with a lot of hummingbirds, it’s easy to regard them as not quite of this earth. With their wide array of shimmering colors and frenetic yet eerily stable manner of flight, they can seem like quasi-fantastical creatures even to those who encounter them in reality. […]
Thu, 12 Oct 2023 09:00:06 +0000
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Discover the Regions in Italy Where the People Descended from the Medieval or Ancient Greeks, and Still Speak Greek
All of us, across the world, know that Italy is shaped like a boot. But almost none of us know that, in the regions of Apulia and Calabria at the country’s “heel” and “toe,” live small communities who, among themselves, still speak not Italian but Greek. The word “still” applies because these peoples, known as […]
Thu, 12 Oct 2023 08:00:19 +0000
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Ian Bremmer on The Israel-Hamas War, and What It Means for the World
In the wake of Hamas’ gruesome attack on Israeli civilians, political scientist Ian Bremmer explains “the historical context of the conflict, how Israel might respond and what it means for Jews, Palestinians and the world at large.” The conversation also covers “how the US may factor into the global response and how to find reliable […]
Wed, 11 Oct 2023 10:34:29 +0000
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How Artemisia Gentileschi, the Pioneering 17th-Century Female Painter, Outdid Caravaggio with the Striking, Violent Judith Beheading Holofernes (c. 1620)
Today, the name Judith hardly calls to mind a woman capable of great violence. Things seem to have been different in antiquity: “The Biblical story from the Book of Judith tells how the beautiful Israelite widow Judith bravely seduces and then kills the sexually aggressive Assyrian general Holofernes in order to save her people,” says […]
Wed, 11 Oct 2023 09:00:42 +0000
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An Introduction to René Magritte, and How the Belgian Artist Used an Ordinary Style to Create Extraordinarily Surreal Paintings
With his dark suit, neat haircut, and bowler hat, René Magritte embodied early-twentieth-century Belgian normality. Yet the feelings his work stirred in their viewers were very much the opposite of normal. He had various ways of accomplishing this. One was “to combine two familiar objects and make a new one,” says gallerist-Youtuber James Payne in […]
Tue, 10 Oct 2023 09:00:42 +0000
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The Fantastic Women Of Surrealism: An Introduction
When André Breton, a leader of the Surrealist movement and author of its first manifesto, wrote that “the problem of woman is the most marvelous and disturbing problem in all the world,” he was not alluding to the unfair lack of recognition experienced by his female peers. Marquee name Surrealists like Breton, Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, René Magritte, […]
Tue, 10 Oct 2023 08:00:54 +0000
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When the US Government Commissioned 7,497 Watercolor Paintings of Every Known Fruit in the World (1886)
A picture is worth 1000 words, especially when you are a late-19th or early-20th century horticulturist eager to protect intellectual property rights to newly cultivated varieties of fruit. Or an artistically gifted woman of the same era, looking for a steady, respectable source of income. In 1886, long before color photography was a viable option, […]
Mon, 09 Oct 2023 09:00:37 +0000
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Why Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s Rococo Masterpiece, The Swing, Is Less Innocent Than It First Appears
If you were to see Jean-Honoré Fragonard‘s L’Escarpolette, or The Swing, at the Wallace Collection, you might not think particularly hard about it. Though all the subtle light effects that make the young woman in pink pop out of the lush garden that surrounds her are impressive, granted and they’ve become even more so […]
Fri, 06 Oct 2023 09:00:43 +0000
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The Physics of Playing a Guitar Visualized: Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters” Seen from the Inside of a Guitar
Give it a chance, you won’t be disappointed. While the first 30 seconds of the video above may resemble an amateur iPhone prank, it soon becomes something unexpectedly enchanting a visualization of the physics of music in real-time. The Youtuber places his phone inside an acoustic guitar, then plays Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters” against a backdrop […]
Fri, 06 Oct 2023 08:00:34 +0000
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How to Read Five Books Per Month & Become a Serious Reader: Tips from Deep Work Author Cal Newport
If those who have read Cal Newport’s Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World and even more so, those who’ve been meaning to read it share any one desire, it’s surely the desire to read more books. And for those who have reading habits similar to Newport’s, it wouldn’t actually […]
Thu, 05 Oct 2023 09:00:45 +0000
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Carl Jung on the Power of Tarot Cards: They Provide Doorways to the Unconscious & Perhaps a Way to Predict the Future
It is generally accepted that the standard deck of playing cards we use for everything from three-card monte to high-stakes Vegas poker evolved from the Tarot. “Like our modern cards,” writes Sallie Nichols, “the Tarot deck has four suits with ten ‘pip’ or numbered cards in each…. In the Tarot deck, each suit has four […]
Thu, 05 Oct 2023 08:00:55 +0000
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Coffee Can Make Concrete 30% Stronger, a New Study Finds
The Romans fashioned their buildings with concrete that has endured for 2,000 years. Their secret? Some researchers think it’s how the Romans heated lime. Others think it’s how they used pozzolanic material such as volcanic ash. Nowhere does coffee figure into the equation. Too bad. Happily, researchers at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) […]
Wed, 04 Oct 2023 09:00:56 +0000
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A BBC Science Show Introduces the Moog Synthesizer in 1969
In the fall of 1969, there were still a great many people who’d never heard a synthesizer. And even among those who had, few would have known how its unfamiliar sounds were actually made. Hence the importance of the segment from the BBC program Tomorrow’s World above, which introduced the Moog synthesizer (originally created by Robert […]
Wed, 04 Oct 2023 08:00:11 +0000
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