“Given the public awareness that science can be low-quality or corrupted, that whole fields can be misdirected for decades (see nutrition, on cholesterol and sugar), and that some basic fields must progress in the absence of any prospect of empirical testing (string theory), the naïve realism of previous generations becomes quite Medieval in its irrelevance to present realities.”
Tag: 06.08.16
Claudio Abbado’s Orchestra Mozart Is Relaunching After Three Years Of Silence
Bernard Haitink will conduct a concert at Bologna’s Auditorium Manzoni [on] 6 January 2017… The ensemble, created in Bologna by Claudio Abbado in 2004, stopped playing in 2014 due to a combination of Abbado’s ill health and Italian government spending cuts.”
UK To Increase Funding For British Arts In Other Countries
“The British Council is hoping to double the amount of UK arts activity taking place internationally with a refreshed global arts strategy and increased budget.”
Massive Unknown Monument Discovered ‘Hiding In Plain Sight’ In Petra
“Archaeologists … used high-resolution satellite imagery followed by aerial drone photography and ground surveys to locate and document the structure. They report that the monument is roughly as long as an Olympic-size swimming pool and twice as wide. It sits only about half a mile (800 meters) south of the center of the ancient city.”
The 50 Best Foreign Language Movies Of The 21st Century So Far
“To spread the love, we’ve stuck to one movie per director, and don’t take the absence of documentaries as anything but a promise that they’ll have their own Best of the Century list soon. Those are about the only rules we had, and other than that anything predominately in a language other than English qualified.”
Big Changes Coming To Your Traditional TV Services
The backlash from US pay-TV services likely stems from already declining pay-TV revenue in North America. It is expected to fall by US$13.5 billion over the next five years. Removing set-top box rental revenue to pave the way for competitors like Google, Apple and Tivo, will only add to this decline.
How Listening To Language Shapes A Baby’s Brain
Very young infants tune in to the natural melodies carried in the lilting stream of language. These melodies are especially compelling in ‘motherese’, the singsong patterns that we tend to adopt spontaneously when we speak to infants and young children. Gradually, as infants begin to tease out distinct words and phrases, they tune in not only to the melody, but also to the meaning of the message.
Words As A Technology (And Why We Feared Them)
“In the real world, the dawn of the written word incited the same kinds of anxieties that accompany any new technology that reorders people’s relationship with information. Socrates worried that writing would destroy human memory. And, indeed, the oral tradition was, across many cultures, upended by print. In the Victorian era, people were cautioned that reading fiction would make their minds atrophy. The telegraph, telephone, television, and internet, among other technologies, have all prompted similar concerns about how technology might destroy intellectual rigor.”
After A 50-Year Wait, Christo Sees One Of His Projects Built
“For 30 years, Bulgarian-born artist Christo has wanted to build a monumental ‘Mastaba’ – a type of ancient Egyptian tomb – out of oil barrels in the desert of Abu Dhabi. His project has just materialised on a smaller yet still impressive scale: nine meters high, 17 meters long and nine meters wide, the work is on display at the Fondation Maeght, a museum of modern art in the south of France.”
The Multisensory Approach To Art – How Museums Make Themselves Accessible To The Blind
“Their aim is to use touch and smell in addition to language to elicit the same emotions for blind visitors that others have when they view works by Bourgeois or Dalí or Monet” – for instance, the softness of cotton balls (Monet), the viscosity of a silicone breast implant (Dalí)