“Art fraud officers detained the two dealers for questioning were both Paris-based experts in 18th century furniture. They are suspected of selling two fake chairs out of a batch of four to the Chateau at Versailles, home of Louis XIV, for €1.7m … sending France’s high-end antiques world into ‘panic’.”
Tag: 06.09.16
Is It Harder To Be Immersed In A Book As We Age?
“Like everything else, the way we read changes with time and age. The books I find engrossing now still have the power to make the world around me vanish. But I can’t inhabit them as I did with my childhood favorites.”
Elon Musk: Odds Are Good We’re All Living In A Giant Simulation
Citing the speed with which video games are improving, he suggested that the development of simulations “indistinguishable from reality” was inevitable. The likelihood that we are living in “base reality,” he concluded, was just “one in billions.”
Why The Silence On The Chicago Theatre Abuse Case?
“Was everyone hypnotized and mesmerized like some kind of Manson Family Member? Were all these women and stage managers and directors bedazzled by all the attention and full houses to the point where they simply had to submit to the abuse? Were they drugged? C’mon, people, where is the personal responsibility?”
Vast Ancient Cities Discovered Beneath The Jungles Of Cambodia
“The new cities were found by firing lasers to the ground from a helicopter to produce extremely detailed imagery of the Earth’s surface. The airborne laser scanners had also identified large numbers of mysterious geometric patterns formed from earthen embankments, which could have been gardens. Experts in the archaeological world agree these are the most significant archaeological discoveries in recent years.”
New Robot Can Find Misshelved Library Books
“Misplaced library books frustrate patrons and give librarians migraines. The whole system relies on books being precisely in their proper location. … [Researchers in Singapore] have created an autonomous shelf-scanning robot called AuRoSS that can tell which books are missing or out of place … and instruct librarians how to get the books back in order when they arrive in the morning.”
UK’s National Theatre To Commission Virtual Reality Theatre Works
“The National Theatre is to commission new work for virtual reality headsets. … The first project to be produced is an immersive, 360-degree, verbatim documentary, HOME: AAMIR, which tells the story of a refugee living at the Calais migrant camp. It will premiere at Sheffield Doc/Fest 2016.”
Classical CD Distributor Lays Off Staff, Stiffs Client Labels
“Portland-based Allegro Media Group, a distributor for small, independent music and video labels, appears to be leaving a swath of unhappy business partners in the wake of its financial problems.” (The comments include testimony from an exec (under his own name) at one of the client labels, as well as from an ex-employee and a former competitor.)
The Problem With All Of Those Hot New Food Halls In Big Cities
” It’s easy (if you’re not poor, that is) to be swept away with excitement by the sight of all that quivering, umami, gleaming, exciting food. Smoked whitefish with rice from Ivan Ramen! Hibiscus doughnuts from Dough! Popsicles made from cherry blossoms! Wow! But when you finally eat them, the revolutionary pleasures they seemed to offer are compressed out of all existence by the crowded, uncomfortable, competitive space, the lackluster culinary skills of the food workers, and the pressures of doing what is in effect the unpaid job of Instagramming, tweeting, and blogging about the hyped-up food you just ate.”
Do We Expect Too Much From Poetry?
We want too much from poetry. We want it ” — to defeat time, to still it beautifully; to express irreducible individuality in a way that can be recognized socially or … to achieve universality by being irreducibly social,” and so much more. “The one thing all these demands share is they can’t ever be fulfilled with poems.”