THE HOBBIT Trailer - 2012 Movie - Official [HD]

Sad news indeed

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/07/08/gabriel-garcia-marquez-dementia_n_1657008.html

One-Minute Physics: Why the Higgs is the missing link

Bookbookbookbookbookbook

Bookshoweroverbookbookplosion

*Doing the panda dance*

Giant panda Shin Shin gives birth at Ueno Zoo; first cub born in 24 years | The Japan Times Online

Fiona Apple - Every Single Night

Here's Fiona Apple's official website (from which I took the following lyrics)

From observation to discovery, to History

The confirmation of the discovery.

The Higgs particle explained.

The Higgs boson or God’s particle

Post by the AFP...the press article on the CERN website...but the video which triggered it is nowhere to be found.

but I found

The live announcement of the particle's 'discovery'.

and

a more thorough, albeit complex, summary of the particle's characteristics.

Expensive...but not quite so.

Vente de "The Lock" de John Constable. Article intéressant en soi, mais l'est plus encore le classement des 10 oeuvres les plus chères de l'histoire qui suit directement l'article.

Fools

They're tearing their own flesh apart. I do not understand.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-18657463

Beauty must lie somewhere

Here are two links on the same topic: Mr Toledano's new exhibition on beauty in LA, and the Huffington Post's cover of the event. Starting tomorrow.

I regret the absence of comment from the people who were photographed in any of the articles I have read. If anyone visits the exhibition over the next month, could he or she kindly tell me if comments/reaction are available with the pictures. I'd be curious to have these men and women's take on the representation and staging of themselves. And what 'self' means.

Our galaxy on a collision course with another: NASA

WASHINGTON (AFP)

Our galaxy is on a collision course with its nearest neighbor, Andromeda, and the head-on crash is expected in four billion years, the US space agency NASA said on Thursday.

Astronomers have long theorized that a clash of these galaxy titans was on the way, though it was unknown how severe it might be, or when, with guesses ranging from three to six billion years.

But years of "extraordinarily precise observations" from NASA's Hubble Space telescope tracking the motion of the Andromeda galaxy "remove any doubt that it is destined to collide and merge with the Milky Way," NASA said in a statement.  

"It will take four billion years before the strike."

After the initial impact it will take another two billion years for them "to completely merge under the tug of gravity and reshape into a single elliptical galaxy similar to the kind commonly seen in the local universe," NASA added.

The stars inside each galaxy are so far apart that they are not likely to collide with each other, but stars will likely be "thrown into different orbits around the new galactic center."

Scientists have long known that Andromeda, also known as M31, is moving toward the Milky Way at a speed of 250,000 miles (402,000 kilometers) per hour, or fast enough to travel from the Earth to the Moon in one hour.

But the nature of the crash depended on the galaxy's sideways motion in the sky, and that trajectory remained a mystery for more than 100 years until the latest analysis of Hubble's findings were revealed.

"This was accomplished by repeatedly observing select regions of the galaxy over a five- to seven-year period," said Jay Anderson of Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.

Andromeda was first spotted as "a little cloud" by the Persian astronomer Abd-al-Rahman Al Sufi in 964.

"In the worst-case-scenario simulation, M31 slams into the Milky Way head-on and the stars are all scattered into different orbits," said Gurtina Besla of Columbia University in New York.

"The stellar populations of both galaxies are jostled, and the Milky Way loses its flattened pancake shape with most of the stars on nearly circular orbits," Besla added.

"The galaxies' cores merge, and the stars settle into randomized orbits to create an elliptical-shaped galaxy."

Source: AFP website and article.

Joke in the midst of the fray

"Don't worry, for $99m, I've got all the time in the world."


Auctioneer and Sotheby's head of modern art Tobias Meyer, at the auction of Edvard Munch's painting "The Scream", which was bought for a swooping $119,922,500 (£74m) and which lasted 12 minutes. Most expensive work of art ever sold, dethroning Pablo Picasso's "Nude, Green Leaves and Bust" (which went for $106.5 m or £65.6 m) two years ago at Christie's.


Link to Sotheby's.

The Grey

"Once more into the fray
Into the last good fight I'll ever know
Live and die on this day
Live and die on this day."

Joe Carnahan, director/writer.


The lines appear in the movie "The Grey", which I highly recommend. Reminiscent of Shakespeare's Henry V ("Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more; / Or close the wall up with our English dead." III, 1, 1-2) and of Tennyson's The Last Charge of the Light Brigade.

Interesting spin-off: Rudyard Kipling's much overlooked The Last of the Light Brigade (I'm root-quoting, dudes, so Kipling's poem has little to do with the subject I started with).

12 Last Known Speakers Of A Language

Quite interesting article.

12 Last Known Speakers Of A Language

Link

This is a very interesting site on the art of Sesshū Tōyō, famous Japanese painter (1420-1506). The site is in Italian, though. Enjoy!

At a single glance

For those who don't know the immense talent of Stephen Wiltshire yet. This man, because of his spectacular visual memory (I refrained myself from using the expression 'eidetic' because I include the five senses' experience into this word) is called an 'autistic savant'. Why not simply calling him a genius, without any reference to what people will immediately think of as a handicap? This man reminds me of Da Vinci at times. Go get a look if you're on London, it is stunning. Tomorrow, I'll go again to the gallery he opened in the Royal Opera Arcades, I haven't been there in a while.

The Frog Whisperer

Basho's frog leaps - plop! -
In the pond like a thunderclap
Summer evening's rain


I composed this haiku in honour of Bashō, who incidentally came to my mind the other day, and his famous haiku on the frog. Here is Bashō's masterpiece.

水 蛙 古

の 飛 池

音 び や

     こ

     む

Furu ike ya
kawazu tobikomu
mizu no oto




Here's a link to a website hoarding 31 translations of the same haiku. I love Japanese just for this.


Matsuo Basho (1644-1694)

The Peripatetic's Preambular Guide to the Wild World

Recently, a friend of mine asked me to compile some sort of guide in order not to forget the basic things when travelling overseas. I hope I fulfilled her desiderata. It is composed of a handful of preparation tips before you set out on your journey (very few are inserted for the 'during' part). The information provided regard things such as: visas, equipment, guidebooks, maps, currency etc.

As per usual, if you have any comment and/or addition, please feel free to add up!

Safe trip!

The Peripatetic's Preambular Guide to the Wild World

My precious...obsidian stones

Obsidian is a naturally occurring volcanic glass formed as an extrusive igneous rock.

"It is produced when felsic lava extruded from a volcano cools rapidly with minimum crystal growth. Obsidian is commonly found within the margins of rhyolitic lava flows known as obsidian flows, where the chemical composition (high silica content) induces a high viscosity and polymerization degree of the lava. The inhibition of atomic diffusion through this highly viscous and polymerized lava explains the lack of crystal growth. Obsidian is hard and brittle; it therefore fractures with very sharp edges, which had been used in the past in cutting and piercing tools, and are still used as surgical scalpel blades."

(Thank you Wikipedia)

These two stones always are in my pockets. Don't ask me why. When I stumbled across this stone, I was petrified by its intense blackness. It's darker than onyx (sometimes one can see through onyx). But, if you look two pictures down, you'll see that it can have an iridescent sheen. The stones I possess are quite dark, having only a dark green tinge to them when you look at them in full sun (due to iron and magnesium).

I wish the dark green/purplish tinge would come out better on the picture.

A very nice link to the obsidian page on Geology.com. There will you find much better pictures.

Obsidian stones was polished into mirrors and knives back in the days (around 5th millennium BC) in Ancient Egypt, Turkey, Irak etc. The pupils of the Moai on Easter Island are obsidian stones. Its sharpness is legendary, so much so that now some manufacturers make scalpel blades out of it. This is an extract from the Wikipedia article:

"Obsidian has been used for blades in surgery, as well-crafted obsidian blades have a cutting edge many times sharper than high-quality steel surgical scalpels, the cutting edge of the blade being only about 3 nanometers thick.[15] Even the sharpest metal knife has a jagged, irregular blade when viewed under a strong enough microscope; when examined even under an electron microscope an obsidian blade is still smooth and even. One study found that obsidian incisions produced narrower scars, fewer inflammatory cells, and less granulation tissue in a group of rats."

Back in the olden days, men didn't have our technology, but they made the most of the fact that obsidian breaks with an idiosyncratic conchoidal fracture - when the stone breaks, it creates a curved, rather plane surface with gradual rippling shockwaves (in shape it resembles the outer shell of a mussel, if you can't picture it to yourself. If you still can't picture what a conchoidal fracture looks like, just have a peep at the first picture on the page on Geology.com). So if you rather deftly used this characteristic of the stone on the two sides, you'd end up with a very sharp edge.


Having written this, my obsidian stones always accompany me wherever I go, and have done so for the past ten years or so, for next to no reason. I sometimes hold them in the palm of my hands because they absorb and diffuse my body heat, for a long time. I like their form and their smoothness, the way they fit in my hands, their darkness. But I suppose that possessing them is akin to superstition. I have to dig the esotericism attached to the obsidian.