Code: VB02727
Artist: ********
Title: Lock of Lucrezia Borgia’s hair (1480-1519)
Location: Pinacoteca Ambrosiana
City: Milan
Country: Italy
Period/Style: Renaissance
Genre: Documentary
Note: Casket on a malachite stand, height 30 cm. (Inv. 282).
Credits:© Veneranda Biblioteca Ambrosiana/DeAgostini Picture Library/Scala, Florence
(via thirtyknives)
Source: digitalgallery.nypl.org
Unexpected intrusions of beauty. This is what life is.
— Saul Bellow, from Herzog (via rainydaysandblankets)
(via blueberrybridges)
Source: wordpainting
French artist Edouard Martinet (previously featured here) scours flea markets for everyday objects that he uses to create awesome animals and insect sculptures like the ones you see here.
“Working with a variety of refuse materials such as rusted kitchen pans, typewriter keys, car lights and other scrap metals, Edouard Martinet sculpts several types of animals and insects. His sculptures are made without the use of solder. He fits each component into place as if putting together a puzzle of random pieces and parts. Each masterpiece is carefully assembled after having drafted several detailed sketches.”
Visit Edouard Martinet’s website to view even more of his amazingly intricate creatures.
[via Free York]
(via thirtyknives)
Source: archiemcphee
Queen Tamar of Georgia. Ruled the Kingdom of Georgia from 1184-1213.
Even though her father left her the throne, a lot of her counselors were wary about having a woman rule, so they picked out a husband for her - Yuri, Prince of the Rus’ (Russia). She complied, but when he started getting drunk and abusing her, she called off the marriage and kicked him out of Georgia. He came back with an army to try and overthrow her, but she and her armies beat them to a pulp and sent them packing.
A lot of neighboring countries tried to invade, actually, because they thought that a woman leader was a sign of weakness.
She showed them otherwise.
She expanded the Kingdom of Georgia to its largest size, created a Golden Era of peace in which the greatest Georgian poetry and art was created, and eventually married her friend and equal, David Soslan, prince of Alan.
She was incredible, guys.
(via thirtyknives)
Source: fuckyeahhistorycrushes
Cover design for ‘Au Quartier Latin’ magazine (1898) by Alphonse Mucha.
Hasn’t Gustav Klimt’s style been inspired by Mucha or was it vice versa?
(via immlass)
Source: kreysa
Things that ACTUALLY EXISTED FOR REAL IN EUROPEAN HISTORY: Non-white people, mostly those of North African and Middle Eastern heritage who were immigrants, merchants, missionaries, mercenaries advisors, and scholars; female leaders, including…
Source: fandomsandfeminism
To say, “This is my uncle,” in Chinese, you have no choice but to encode more information about said uncle. The language requires that you denote the side the uncle is on, whether he’s related by marriage or birth and, if it’s your father’s brother, whether he’s older or younger.
“All of this information is obligatory. Chinese doesn’t let me ignore it,” says Chen. “In fact, if I want to speak correctly, Chinese forces me to constantly think about it.”
This got Chen wondering: Is there a connection between language and how we think and behave? In particular, Chen wanted to know: does our language affect our economic decisions?
Chen designed a study — which he describes in detail in this blog post — to look at how language might affect individual’s ability to save for the future. According to his results, it does — big time.
While “futured languages,” like English, distinguish between the past, present and future, “futureless languages,” like Chinese, use the same phrasing to describe the events of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Using vast inventories of data and meticulous analysis, Chen found that huge economic differences accompany this linguistic discrepancy. Futureless language speakers are 30 percent more likely to report having saved in any given year than futured language speakers. (This amounts to 25 percent more savings by retirement, if income is held constant.) Chen’s explanation: When we speak about the future as more distinct from the present, it feels more distant — and we’re less motivated to save money now in favor of monetary comfort years down the line.
But that’s only the beginning. There’s a wide field of research on the link between language and both psychology and behavior. Here, a few fascinating examples:
Navigation and Pormpuraawans
In Pormpuraaw, an Australian Aboriginal community, you wouldn’t refer to an object as on your “left” or “right,” but rather as “northeast” or “southwest,” writes Stanford psychology professor Lera Boroditsky (and an expert in linguistic-cultural connections) in the Wall Street Journal. About a third of the world’s languages discuss space in these kinds of absolute terms rather than the relative ones we use in English, according to Boroditsky. “As a result of this constant linguistic training,” she writes, “speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes.” On a research trip to Australia, Boroditsky and her colleague found that Pormpuraawans, who speak Kuuk Thaayorre, not only knew instinctively in which direction they were facing, but also always arranged pictures in a temporal progression from east to west.Blame and English Speakers
In the same article, Boroditsky notes that in English, we’ll often say that someone broke a vase even if it was an accident, but Spanish and Japanese speakers tend to say that the vase broke itself. Boroditsky describes a study by her student Caitlin Fausey in which English speakers were much more likely to remember who accidentally popped balloons, broke eggs, or spilled drinks in a video than Spanish or Japanese speakers. (Guilt alert!) Not only that, but there’s a correlation between a focus on agents in English and our criminal-justice bent toward punishing transgressors rather than restituting victims, Boroditsky argues.Color among Zuñi and Russian Speakers
Our ability to distinguish between colors follows the terms in which we describe them, as Chen notes in the academic paper in which he presents his research (forthcoming in the American Economic Review; PDF here). A 1954 study found that Zuñi speakers, who don’t differentiate between orange and yellow, have trouble telling them apart. Russian speakers, on the other hand, have separate words for light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy). According to a 2007 study, they’re better than English speakers at picking out blues close to the goluboy/siniy threshold.Gender in Finnish and Hebrew
In Hebrew, gender markers are all over the place, whereas Finnish doesn’t mark gender at all, Boroditsky writes in Scientific American (PDF). A study done in the 1980s found that, yup, thought follows suit: kids who spoke Hebrew knew their own genders a year earlier than those who grew up speaking Finnish. (Speakers of English, in which gender referents fall in the middle, were in between on that timeline, too.)
(via thirtyknives)
Source: divineirony
Living Life in Front of the Screen
http://memehumor.tumblr.comThe accused stood mute and the judge ordered a plea of nolo contendere entered into the record.
*meeps pathetically*
(via elizaevans)
Source: memehumor
She stubs out her cigarette in the brown glass ashtray, then settles herself against him, ear to his chest. She likes to hear his voice this way, as if it begins not in his throat but in his body, like a hum or a growl, or like a voice speaking from deep underground. Like the blood moving through her own heart: a word, a word, a word.
— Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin (via larmoyante)
(via blueberrybridges)
Source: larmoyante
NOOOOO here come the MNCs! One of the great things about Kenya is that despite being a really international hub in East Africa, many MNC franchises are banned there. You can’t find McDonald’s, Starbucks, or Subway (until now).
I personally think that allows local business to take the place of these establishments, which is great - although McDick’s and Sbux are franchises, so I suppose they could provide a franchisee opportunity. Definitely having mixed feelings about this development.
I agree and also have mixed feelings
Source: prepaidafrica
If a kid realizes how much you love your job, there’s nothing better you can convey to a child.In her SXSW keynote, the inimitable Tina “Swiss Miss” Roth Eisenberg is a living testament to avoiding “work” by finding your purpose and doing what you love.
Consumption is motivated by complex emotional factors and is about far more than just the purchasing of new and shinier things. It is a journey towards the ideal or desired self that, through cyclic patterns of desire and disappointment, becomes a seemingly endless process of serial destruction. Manufactured products serve to illustrate our aspirations whilst defining us existentially. ‘The human being is engaged, throughout his life span, in an unceasing struggle to differentiate himself increasingly fully, not only from his human, but also from his nonhuman environment.
— Longer Lasting Products, by Tim Cooper (via erikbernhardsson)
(via l-ll-lll)
Source: erikbernhardsson
Scientists from Illinois have found a rare, 600-year-old Chinese coin on the Kenyan island of Manda.
The Field Museum in Chicago announced the find Wednesday. The joint expedition was led by Chapurukha Kusimba of the museum and Sloan Williams of the University of Illinois-Chicago. Researchers say the coin proves trade existed between China and eastern Africa decades before European explorers set sail.
The coin is made of copper and silver. It has a square hole in the center so it could be worn on a belt. Scientists say it was issued by Emperor Yongle of China and his name is written on the coin.
Source: The Huffington Post
We looked at each other with a mix of tenderness and befuddlement, moist-eyed. It was clear to both of us, after the five or ten minutes of our hasty conversation, that this chance meeting was the last time we ever were going to see each other… But that was O.K. Knowing we would never see each other again—it was O.K. When you’re young, you think there’ll be plenty of time for everything in your life: counting all the grains of sand in the Sahara Desert, seeing all the people in the world, becoming greater than Jesus and Lenin and Lomonosov and Pushkin and Einstein all rolled into one, reuniting at some point with everyone you’ve met once in your life, befriending every man, falling in love with every woman… Life is a process of gradually coming to terms with the meaning and the very concept of never-ness. Never—well, so be it. Quoth the raven: oh well, them’s the breaks. Get used to it. Get over it. Life is a perishable proposition of rapidly diminishing returns. You could’ve become this or that; you could’ve been here and there and everywhere; but that didn’t happen—and well, so be it. There won’t be, in the end of your life, a joyous, transcendentally meaningful regathering of everyone you’ve ever met on your path, with stories shared and wine flowing and laughter lilting and happiness abounding and life never-ending—well, so be it.
— Mikhail Iossel reflects on his experience meeting an old friend far away from home: http://nyr.kr/Yb0OyF (via newyorker)
(via blueberrybridges)
Source: newyorker.com
For timedesk ;p
