Daisuke Inoue has been honored with a rare, indeed almost certainly unique combination of laurels. In 1999, Time magazine named him among the “Most Influential Asians of the Century.” Five years later he won an Ig Nobel Prize, which honors particularly strange and risible developments in science, technology, and culture. Inoue had come up with the …
To me Robert Johnson’s influence — he was like a comet or a meteor that came along and, BOOM, suddenly he raised the ante, suddenly you just had to aim that much higher. As Keith Richards tells it, the first time he met Brian Jones, the two “went around to his apartment crash-pad,” where all …
A quick FYI: Udacity is running a 75% off flash sale, and it has been extended to June 8. Founded by computer scientist and entrepreneur Sebastian Thrun, Udacity partners with leading tech companies and offers an array of courses (and Nanodegree programs) in data science, cyber security, machine learning, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and autonomous …
From KCET (the public broadcaster serving SoCal) comes the documentary, That Far Corner: Frank Lloyd Wright in Los Angeles. “During his time spent in Southern California in the late 1910s and early 1920s, Frank Lloyd Wright accelerated the search for L.A.’s authentic architecture that was suitable to the city’s culture and landscape. Writer/Director Chris Hawthorne, …
@_theiconoclassIf youse come at me again for my Australian pronunciation I swear 😂 #arthistory #arthistorytiktok #baroque♬ original sound – AyseDeniz Art Historian Mary McGillivray believes art appreciation is an acquired skill. Her TikTok project, The Iconoclass, is bringing those lacking formal art history education up to speed. The 25-year-old Australian’s pithy observations double as surprisingly sturdy mnemonics, useful …
Not so long ago, a wave of long-form entreaties rolled through social media insisting that we stop building rock cairns. Like many who scrolled past them, I couldn’t quite imagine the offending structures they meant, let alone recall constructing one myself. The cairns in question turned out, mundanely, to be those little stacks of flat …
Image via Ebay The big, stand-up double bass or “bull fiddle,” as it’s been called, dates to the 15th century. The design has evolved, but its four strings and EADG tuning have remained standard features of basses for several hundred years of classical and, later, jazz, country, and early rock and roll. Its booming tone …
https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/secure/partiallyexaminedlife/PMP_93_4-30-21.mp3 The tech genius has become the go-to bad guy in recent films: They’re our modern mad scientists with all imaginable resources and science at their command, able to release dystopic technology to surveil, control, and possibly murder us. Even Lex Luthor was made into a “tech bro” in Batman v. Superman. Your Pretty Much …
Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Ray Bradbury: they and other 20th-century notables all gave serious thought to the ideal city, what it would include and what it would exclude. To that extent we could describe them, in 21st-century parlance, as urbanists. But the roots of the discipline — or area of research, or profession, or obsession — we …
Three-thousand, seven-hundred, and seventy-one years ago, in the city of Dilmun, near Ur in Mesopotamia, there was a merchant named Ea-nasir. His business was in selling metal ingots that he purchased in the Persian Gulf. Was he a good merchant? Not according to one of his customers, Nanni. If Yelp had existed back in 1750 …