The Buffet Is Back in the U.S., From Las Vegas to Small Southern Towns – The New York Times:
“The buffet is designed so the TikTokers and the Instagrammers can make their pretty pictures of the food,” Ms. Orner said.
The Buffet Is Back in the U.S., From Las Vegas to Small Southern Towns – The New York Times:
“The buffet is designed so the TikTokers and the Instagrammers can make their pretty pictures of the food,” Ms. Orner said.
How did I not know about this earlier?? Very excited to binge on Thin Edge of the Wedge this summer!
Like many who went through college and then grad-school in the religion / literature / philosophy circles, I’ve read and pondered my share of Derrida and the consequences of ontology on our “demon-haunted world” … another reason I’ve absolutely loved playing AC Valhalla (about 125 hours in at this point since picking it up over the Holidays).
A pun coined by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in the early ’90s, hauntology refers to the study of nonexistence and unreality (so the opposite of ontology). Contemporary philosopher Mark Fisher makes extensive use of this concept, describing hauntology in his book The Weird and Eerie as “the agency of the virtual … that which acts without (physically) existing.”
For me, there’s no greater example of this than in Valhalla’s ruins. While open-world games are often dominated by landscape, mirroring the history of art where scenic oil paintings—once considered inferior—grew into a position of relative dominance, the ruin has seen a similar ascendency. Just as Romantic poets mulled over the allure of rivers and mountains, a passion for ancient ruins bloomed too, with painters like J. M. W. Turner and John Constable touring Britain in search of architectural wreckage among the rolling hills.
— Read on www.wired.com/story/assassins-creed-valhalla-eerie-english-landscapes/
The painting has been described as a devotional counterpart to the Mona Lisa, Leonardo’s most famous work, and is said to have an “extraordinary, communicative presence”. But Lewis, the author of the acclaimed book The Last Leonardo, explains why questions remain about its origin. Last year the painting did not appear in the Louvre’s blockbuster Leonardo exhibition, prompting widespread speculation and the question: where is Salvator Mundi?
Source: Leonardo da Vinci and the mystery of the world’s most expensive painting | News | The Guardian
So, when Hagoromo announced that it was going out of business in 2014, it caused a rupture in the math community.”
I referred to it as a chalk apocalypse,” Conrad said. In a panic, mathematicians across America began stockpiling resources in preparation.”
I calculated how many boxes I would need to last 10 to 15 years and I bought that many boxes,” says Lieblich.Dave Bayer took things even further. “I single-handedly bought the rest of the Amazon supply in the middle of the night,” he said.
Source: How a brand of chalk achieved cult status among mathematicians – CNN
I was gifted with an old sliding blackboard in my 2nd year of teaching (and my first year of teaching Physical Science). I loved that board and was sad to leave it later in my career when I went to a new school.
There’s something special about chalk covered hands and the feel of writing on a blackboard to make a point about F=MA or the structure of an atom.
Now I want to go stock up on some Hagoromo and find a good blackboard for my children.
In 1933 nuclear physicist Marie Curie had outgrown her lab in the Latin Quarter in central Paris. To give her the space needed for the messy task of extracting radioactive elements such as radium from truckloads of ore, the University of Paris built a research center in Arcueil, a village south of the city. Today it’s grown into a crowded working-class suburb. And the dilapidated lab, set in an overgrown garden near a 17th century aqueduct, is sometimes called Chernobyl on the Seine.
Source: France Is Still Cleaning Up Marie Curie’s Nuclear Waste – Bloomberg
When undergraduate students at Peking University, which was at the center of the incident, were shown copies of the iconic photograph 16 years afterwards, they were “genuinely mystified”. One of the students said that the image was “artwork”. It is noted in the documentary Frontline: The Tank Man that he whispered to the student next to him “89”, which led the interviewer to surmise that the student may have concealed his knowledge of the event.
I tend to agree with the physicist from UNCC here that the Colosseum and other buildings that exhibit these “metamaterial” designs were probably self-selecting (in that they didn’t fall down during earthquakes), but we definitely don’t give the ancients enough credit with their engineering and scientific prowess…
Scientists are hard at work developing real-world “invisibility cloaks” thanks to a special class of exotic manmade “metamaterials.” Now a team of French scientists has suggested in a recent preprint on the physics arXiv that certain ancient Roman structures, like the famous Roman Colosseum, have very similar structural patterns, which may have protected them from damage from earthquakes over the millennia.
Potentially huge (I appreciate Thomas Römer‘s scholarship a great deal):
A name in Line 31 of the stele, previously thought to read ‘House of David’, could instead read ‘Balak’, a king of Moab mentioned in the biblical story of Balaam (Numbers 22-24), say archaeologist Prof. Israel Finkelstein and historians and biblical scholars Prof. Nadav Na’aman and Prof. Thomas Römer, in an article published in Tel Aviv: The Journal of the Institute of Archaeology of Tel Aviv University.
New reading of Mesha Stele could have far-reaching consequences for biblical history – Phys.org
While studying some of the oldest art in the world found in caves and engraved on animal bones or shells, paleoanthropologist Genevieve von Petzinger has found evidence of a proto-writing system that perhaps developed in Africa and then spread throughout the world.
Source: Stone Age Cave Symbols May All Be Part of a Single Prehistoric Proto-Writing System