Thug Sentenced To Nine Years For Destroying Timbuktu Mausoleums
“Ahmad Al Mahdi could have faced up to 30 years in prison, but mitigating circumstances—including his guilty plea, his initial reluctance to destroy the sites and his co-operation with the prosecution—meant this term was reduced.”
Is The Mysterious Medieval Code Of The Voynich Manuscript Actually Meaningless Gibberish?
“The manuscript has baffled cryptographers since book dealer Wilfrid Voynich found it in an Italian monastery in 1912. It contains hundreds of pages of fine calfskin parchment, which scientists have dated to the first half of the 15th century. … Academics continue to hotly debate whether the manuscript is an elaborate hoax designed to fool 15th-century book collectors, or a detailed secret code that remains unbroken.”
Here Are Five Finalists For Design Of New Port Authority Bus Terminal In New York
“The designs that may one day replace the existing hellish landscape [sic] of the Port Authority Bus Terminal are finally here. Earlier today, the Port Authority revealed the five finalists and their mammoth proposals for a new bus terminal as part of the agency’s international design and deliverability contest.” (Aw c’mon, it’s not that bad.)
The Personalities Of Rocks, A Chemistry Award For Volkswagen, And $10 Trillion Prizes: The 2016 Ig Nobels
“Investigations into rats wearing pants, the personalities of rocks and the truthfulness of 1,000 liars won Ig Nobel prizes on Thursday night at Harvard, where Nobel-winning scientists gathered to honor the strangest research of the year.”
Maastricht Art Fair Makes A Move Into Manhattan
“The American debut of the European Fine Art Fair … is more than just another event on the cultural calendar. It’s an attempt by the fair, whose 270 exhibitors face a shrinking audience in Europe, to secure and revitalize its future.”
William Eddins To Step Down From Edmonton Symphony At End Of This Season
“Eddins, who lives in Minneapolis, Minn. and spends about 14 weeks of the year in Edmonton, joined the ESO in 2005. Under his tenure, the orchestra worked with cellist Yo-Yo Ma and soprano Renée Fleming, started a late-night series of performances, and played unconventional works by Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů and weirdo genius Frank Zappa, among others.”
Simon Keenlyside Back In Action After Almost Two Years Of Throat Trouble
First he felt a “tick” in his vocal cords during a live simulcast of Rigoletto from Vienna (he had to bow out mid-opera), then his doctors told him he needed thyroid surgery. “Luckily it was a false alarm, but they had to take some out, and they did a bad job. That stopped me dead in my tracks. I couldn’t sing a note for five, six, seven months. Nothing.”
Pierre Huyghe Wins Second-Ever $100K Nasher Sculpture Prize
“Huyghe, 54, succeeds last year’s inaugural winner, Colombian artist Doris Salcedo, who received, as Huyghe will, the $100,000 grand prize, along with a special award created by Italian architect Renzo Piano, who designed the Nasher.”
Fire Closes Paris’s Mogador Theatre
The blaze began on Sunday morning (Sept. 25) under the theatre’s stage; it damaged the stage floor and scenery for the upcoming, and now postponed, production of Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera.
Construction Of The Philharmonie De Paris Cost Triple The Original Budget
When the concert hall was approved in 2006, the projected cost was €173.1 million; the final cost as of 2015 was €534.7 million, an overrun of 208%, according to a report from the regional auditors’ office for Ile-de-France. (in French; Google Translate version here)
Star Of UK’s Favorite Soap Fired For Anti-Indian Twitter Rant (He’s From Pakistan)
“[Marc Anwar joined the cast of Coronation Street] as Sharif Nazir in February 2014 as a member of the first Muslim family on the cobbles. The Sunday Mirror published screenshots of messages posted on his private Twitter account that appeared to hit out at India over Kashmir … They also referred to Indian people as [redacted].”
Fire Ravages Stockholm’s Royal Institute Of Art
“The institution, which focuses on the fine arts and architecture at the undergrad, grad, and post-grad level, is located near downtown Stockholm on Skeppsholmen island” next door to the city’s modern art museum. “The fire reportedly started on the fourth floor, and it quickly spread to the building’s attic and roof.”
Why Writing About Science Seems Like Little More Than PR
“Think about it. For every article singing the praises of new science, how often do you see one that is critical? Not often. Unless you’re talking about eugenics or fission bombs, a new scientific result or technology is almost always treated as an unequivocally good thing.”
What Machine Learning Is Teaching Us About How We Learn
“By bringing the tools of computation and machine intuition to the table, AI researchers are giving us a more complete picture of how we learn. They are also broadening the study of education to include quantitative, numerical models of the learning process itself. “The thing that AI brings to the table is that it forces us to get into the details of how everything works,” says John Laird, a computer scientist at the University of Michigan. If there was any doubt that good teachers are important, machine learning is helping put it to rest.”
The Currency Of Feelings – What’s It Worth To You?
“The primacy of feelings in our economy has given rise to a new field of scholarly inquiry. ‘Affect studies’ refers to humanistic and social-scientific investigations of the ways that feelings are generated, experienced, and interpreted. An affect is a particular kind of feeling, one distinct from an emotion. For academics in the field, affects are feelings that reside not in individual people but in social groups, institutions, or physical spaces.”
This Is About To Become The Largest Private Museum In America
“With the new addition, dubbed the Pavilions, Glenstone’s exhibition space will increase fivefold. Eight of the nine discrete but linked buildings will be dedicated to the work of a single artist, including Brice Marden, Charles Ray, Michael Heizer and Cy Twombly. (The ninth pavilion will house special exhibitions.)”
People Who Can Switch Between Street Languages Use Same Cognitive Muscles As Bilinguals
“In the United States, a bidialectal person might be someone who speaks both Standard American English and African-American Vernacular English (called AAVE but also known as ‘Ebonics’), which differ a lot in pronunciation, syntax and vocabulary – so much so that AAVE has controversially been called a distinct language. So do bidialectals enjoy the same cognitive benefits as bilinguals?”
They’re Training Watson To Recognize Emotion, Personality
And then what? As the artificial intelligence computer gets better at understanding humans it starts to interact with them in more complex ways. For now though, Watson is coming up with movie trailers…
The LA Dance Company That Uses Toys And Architecture To Careen Off
Diavolo’s taste for heights, soaring numbers and gigantic playthings hasn’t changed much since its early days, but the method behind the madness has evolved from freewheeling experimentation to fine-tuned research and development, especially after the company was commissioned to develop a trilogy of dance works for the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2005.
The Payoff For Theatre That Stays Small And Local
“It seems the smaller the community, the more space there is to expand and embellish local narratives. Mixing one part fiction, one part myth, and one part truth, these narratives flourish in the festivals, parades, and plaques that have become the cultural landmarks of a city five miles north of Boston.”
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The Next Big Intellectual Revolution Is Coming
All of the past “justice revolutions” have stemmed from improved communications. Oppression thrives on distance, on not actually meeting or seeing the oppressed. The next revolution will not abolish the consequences of place of birth, but the privileges of nationhood will be tempered. While the rise in anti-immigrant sentiment around the world today seems to point in the opposite direction, the sense of injustice will be amplified as communications continue to grow. Ultimately, recognition of wrong will wreak big changes.
Jacques d’Amboise – Still Dancing At 82
“I danced for a long time before I asked myself the question,” he says. The question being, “What is dance?” He now thinks it’s “an invention by human beings to express space and time…to express wonder and emotion by losing control in how we move in time.” Needless to say, that’s something everyone should have in life, in some form, at some time or another. It’s so obvious to D’Amboise he never even says that.
Dear Class Of 2020: You’ve Been Cheated. Time To Build A Bridge To The 16th Century
“The most momentous event in your intellectual formation was the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, which ushered in our disastrous fixation on testing. Your generation is the first to have gone through primary and secondary school knowing no alternative to a national regimen of assessment. And your professors are only now beginning to realize how this unrelenting assessment has stunted your imaginations.”
Where Are The Women Artists? Not Here (And Maybe They Shouldn’t Be?)
The first major survey of abstract expressionism since 1959, which has just opened at the Royal Academy, has been accused of displaying too much testosterone. Commentary developed on social media from early visitors asking: “Where were the women?” But what exactly were they expecting? The telling word from the critic is “few”. There were not many women in the movement to be included in the first place.
The Country’s Only Scientific Glassblowing Degree Program
“As they blow into glass tubes, they hover over bright orange flames that reach as high as 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. That’s hot enough for those stiff tubes to bend like rubbery taffy and twist into candy-cane shapes or snake coils that look machine-made.”
E-books May Be Slipping, But Publishers Hear Audio Is The Next Big Thing
“E-book sales have fallen precipitously for months, in part because many publishers have raised their prices after negotiating with Amazon and gaining the ability to set their own prices.”
The Person Dancers Depend On To Make Those Tutus Flare
“If fashion is chimerical fantasy, Mr. Happel brings a dose of earthbound reality to the work: Will all that detailed embroidery read from far away? Will dancers actually be able to raise their arms in that bodice?”
In The Shadows Of Hollywood, Does Abuse Of Young Actors Thrive?
“If the event resembles a harmless and burlesque version of the better-known award shows, there also has been a darker side to it at times. A handful of people who were actively involved with the show or attended it have been found by authorities to have troubling backgrounds with minors, including two men who were convicted of committing sex crimes against children.”
When A Theatre Venue Shuts Down Suddenly In Virginia, Arts Groups Have To Scramble
“Other venues are stepping in to fill the artistic void, but many people are still expressing disappointment and doubt about the future of the downtown theater.”
The Superhuman Demands Of Singing Tristan
“Young singers usually build their careers by taking on gradually longer and more demanding roles. But the metallic colors and lower vocal center of gravity of prospective Tristans often make them an awkward fit for traditional young tenor repertory.”