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Prospect/Foreign Policy release their list of
the world's top public intellectuals(
full list). Number 1? The Islamic scholar
Fethullah Gulen.The rest of the top 10? The microfinancier Muhammad Yunus, the cleric Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, the writer Orhan Pamuk, the politician Aitzaz Ahsan, the evangelist Amr Khaled, the philosopher Abdolkarim Soroush, the philosopher Tariq Ramadan, the cultural theorist Mahmood Mamdani and activist Shirin Ebadi. Sense a theme? Yes, all Muslims.
This is a striking turnabout from
the 2005 poll topped by Chomsky, Eco and Dawkins.
What happened? Prospect Magazine
explains. The Turkish newspaper Zaman
weighs in. The UK's Independent
is outraged. Fethulah Gulen
defends himself.
posted to MetaFilter by vacapinta
at 10:17 AM on July 3, 2008
(51 comments)
"It so often happens that I receive mail - well-intended but totally useless - by amateur physicists who believe to have solved the world. They believe this, only because they understand totally nothing about the real way problems are solved in Modern Physics...It should be possible, these days, to collect all knowledge you need from the internet. Problem then is, there is so much junk on the internet... I know exactly what should be taught to the beginning student...I can tell you of my own experiences. It helped me all the way to earn a Nobel Prize. But I didn't have internet.
I am going to try to be your teacher. It is a formidable task."
posted to MetaFilter by vacapinta
at 4:22 PM on August 29, 2007
(47 comments)
"At a convocation of writers in Seville, Spain, six weeks before Bolaño died [in 2003], he was declared to be the most influential Latin-American writer of his generation." (
NYer)
And since then, Roberto Bolaño's reputation has been growing (NYRB:
"The Great Bolano").
A man who dismissed magical realism as "shit" is more the heir of Cortazar and Borges (his two idols) than Garcia Marquez or Vargas Lllosa yet he is also something entirely new. Bolano was also the founder of infrarealism, a movement whose manifesto proclaims "A new lyricism springing up in Latin America, nourishing itself in ways that continue to amaze us.... Tenderness like an exercise in speed. Breath and heat. Experience at full tilt, self-consuming structures, stark raving contradictions."
Why has the
English speaking world not heard of Bolaño? His great novel,
The Savage Detectives, a sprawling work about youth and poetry and chaos (with no less than 52 narrators across several continents) has
only this year been translated.
posted to MetaFilter by vacapinta
at 10:27 AM on August 27, 2007
(24 comments)
Brazilian Blogger Bashing! The respected Brazilian newspaper
Estadao decided to promote its new online presence by jokingly
producing a series of ads with obvious misfits and asking such questions as "Is this the guy giving you dating advice?" and
a video (youtube) comparing bloggers to monkeys. Bloggers
are outraged "Why would you read a newspaper that compares bloggers to monkeys?".
In today's newspaper, Estadao offers no apology but instead dryly recounts the facts. Meanwhile, the resulting controversy, with thousands of blogs weighing in, has driven a lot of traffic to their new site.
posted to MetaFilter by vacapinta
at 10:35 AM on August 21, 2007
(25 comments)
The Quinta de Regaleira, completed in 1910, was the
dream palace of the Portuguese millionaire Antonio Agusto de Carvalho Monteiro who was a devotee of mysticism and lost arts. The
enormous gardens include a
Templar initiation well,
underground labyrinths,
hidden doorways, fantastic
grottos, lookout
towers, and of course the palace itself (
hunting room, outside
detail,
gargoyles) More photos
here and
here.
posted to MetaFilter by vacapinta
at 9:05 PM on August 18, 2007
(21 comments)
Mapping the StarMaze
A tale of mathematical obsession: "Before I can explain my decades-long quest to map the starmaze I must acquaint you with a small puzzle...I have a habit of seeing everything (cities, organizations, computers, networks, brains) as a maze, so I named this puzzle the starmaze....The first problem I ran into was that there were a lot of rooms...I invented
wacky names for each room...But something funny happened...In that instant I finally grasped that the starmaze was arranged on the edges of a
nine-dimensional hypercube..."
posted to MetaFilter by vacapinta
at 9:10 PM on June 4, 2006
(38 comments)
"In 1953, while working a hotel switchboard, a college graduate named Shea Zellweger began
a journey of wonder and obsession that would eventually lead to the invention of a radically new notation for logic. From a basement in Ohio, guided literally by his dreams and his innate love of pattern, Zellweger developed an extraordinary visual system - called the
“Logic Alphabet” - in which a group of specially designed letter-shapes can be
manipulated like puzzles to reveal the geometrical patterns underpinning logic."
posted to MetaFilter by vacapinta
at 11:06 PM on April 17, 2006
(30 comments)
"CabSpotting
traces San Francisco's taxi cabs as they travel throughout the Bay Area. The patterns traced by each cab create a living and always-changing map of city life. This map hints at economic, social, and cultural trends that are otherwise invisible."
posted to MetaFilter by vacapinta
at 4:39 PM on April 6, 2006
(16 comments)
The Roofless realm. Prestes Maia, is a
colossal abandoned clothes factory that towers over central Sao Paulo:
"At first glance Prestes Maia, which sem-teto members occupied in 2002, resembles a chaotic, multi-storey shantytown; cardboard spews out of its cracked windows, graffiti litter its walls and children rattle through its wide corridors on bicycles. But the community is meticulously organised." It was first occupied as part of the
Movimiento dos Sem Teto, an organized movement of homeless families and workers and now houses over 468 families.
But, now, an injunction has been issued for the repossession of the building. Everyone must leave by
February 15th but there is no plan and the authorities fear violence will erupt. There's a
Flickr community.
posted to MetaFilter by vacapinta
at 3:38 PM on February 14, 2006
(15 comments)
UTATA
"is a collective of photographers, writers, and like-minded people who share a compelling interest in the arts. We began (and continue to exist) as a salon-style gathering of photographers who came together on
flickr." Interesting
projects such as the gorgeous
Trains project and the current
Utata pays homage, including works reminiscent of
Arbus,
Man Ray and
Wegman.
posted to MetaFilter by vacapinta
at 11:25 AM on February 2, 2006
(12 comments)
The Rainmaker
After three long years of drought, a desperate San Diego City council, sought out a man who had been creating rain from Central America to the
Yukon, a rainmaker who could bring clouds, fill dams and douse fires. For $10,000,
Charles Hatfield agreed to make rain. Soon after, on January 5, 1916, it started raining and raining...and raining. So much water fell from the sky that two dams overflowed. One dam broke, unleashing floods and devastation.
Instead of gratitude, the city council threatened to sue Hatfield who in the end was saved by a court ruling that deemed rain to be "an act of God."
Hatfield claimed to have invented a chemical formula to summon clouds and was credited with over 500 successes. He took his rain-making secrets to the grave. Hollywood, of course,
produced a movie.
posted to MetaFilter by vacapinta
at 8:56 PM on August 1, 2005
(13 comments)
"This planet
answers an ancient question," said team leader Geoffrey Marcy, professor of astronomy at the University of California, Berkeley. "Over 2,000 years ago, the Greek philosophers Aristotle and Epicurus argued about whether there were other Earth-like planets. Now, for the first time,
we have evidence for a rocky planet around a normal star."
The star,
Gliese 876, visible in the night sky, lies only 15 light-years away.
posted to MetaFilter by vacapinta
at 1:44 PM on June 14, 2005
(19 comments)
Chines government loves Flickr interface!
So, Chinese government copies Flickr interface? So similar that Flickr users have no problem joining and creating accounts. Quickly, they have the most popular photo:
The kitchen sink. As one Chinese user writes "evrything is free in china , you know ,4 example the software that microsoft made"
posted to MetaFilter by vacapinta
at 1:25 PM on June 5, 2005
(27 comments)
Deconstructing Roy Lichtenstein
(image heavy page). It has been noted,
in a current exhibition, that "Lichtenstein drew visual material from a wide range of sources, from comic books to art history. His revisions of this material often drastically altered its original meaning" Did they? David Barsalou
has spent the last 25 years going through over 30,000 comics to find those originals. (via
papelcontinuo)
posted to MetaFilter by vacapinta
at 12:12 AM on October 16, 2004
(11 comments)
Popular De Lujo:
A portrait of a city (Bogota, Colombia) through its folk art and street graphics. "Some sections of this site are not translated in order to keep the original and true sense of local idiomatic expressions which have no precise equivalent in other languages. However, you will realize that the graphic language is so rich in shapes and colours, that it speaks for itself."
posted to MetaFilter by vacapinta
at 1:55 AM on May 31, 2004
(10 comments)
The Matthew effect
"It was Merton who identified and named the tendency always to assign exclusive scientific credit to the most eminent among all the plausible candidates. At least I hope it was he, though I'm sure Merton, who invented many wonderful jokes himself, would have been delighted if the credit for it turned out to be misattributed to him." Or is this called the
flypaper effect? The question remains: Who popularized the phrase 'Shut up and Calculate!'
posted to MetaFilter by vacapinta
at 12:08 AM on May 15, 2004
(2 comments)
The Art Millenium
"The Encyclopedia was founded in May 1999. It contains more than 15,000 pictures and overviews of about 1000 artists. Total size is 2.5 Gigabytes" I was there in their
Collections looking at
Graphics (Dore, Beardsley, Cranach, Durer, Giger), specifically all of
Max Ernst's Une Semaine de Bonte. I have not begun to scratch the surface.
posted to MetaFilter by vacapinta
at 3:24 PM on April 20, 2004
(4 comments)
Urban Haute Couture
"is about street art and street art only. Since a couple of years ago there's a boom in street art. To be clear we're not talking about graffiti. We're talking about
street art that is spraypaint/marker template based, stickers, posters and combinations of those. This new breed of street art, except for using the urban landscape as a medium, has actually nothing to do with graffiti." Cities include Berlin, Amsterdam and the
Romanian Stencil Archive.
posted to MetaFilter by vacapinta
at 10:27 AM on April 4, 2004
(16 comments)
Flickr!
First launched during the week of no-metafilter, Flickr is a new kind of social software application (in the tradition of
Friendster or
Orkut) - but, after making friends and forming
groups, it actually gives you something to do! Created by a team led by Mefi's own
sylloge, Flickr is also a collaboration focused Flash-based application that allows you to share picture files with friends, comment on them and post them
directly to
your weblog. An exposed
set of services is also leading to a host of interesting
ideas.
posted to MetaFilter by vacapinta
at 9:47 AM on March 12, 2004
(16 comments)
ShipBreaking
The photographer
Edward Burtynsky captures some dramatic images of ShipBreaking. The Perils of this industry were first highlighted in a Pulitzer prize winning
series of articles by the the Baltimore Sun. Today, these ship graveyards still pose serious environmental issues as highlighted by this
shipbreaking weblog maintained by Greenpeace.
posted to MetaFilter by vacapinta
at 4:09 PM on November 28, 2003
(10 comments)
CocoWeb
(
trans) is a project which has assembled 516
manifestations of the Bogeyman in Latin America. The list includes the well-known Coco or Cucuy, a dark figure who makes an appearance in the art world as
the subject of one of Goya's
Caprichos. Any Hispanic child can tell you about
La Llorona, a grieving woman who walks in the night (familiar enough to be used in a controversial
got milk? ad). In South America they can tell you about the
Sack-Man, on of the original bogeymen, who walks in the darkness, looking for children to throw into his sack.
posted to MetaFilter by vacapinta
at 11:55 AM on October 31, 2003
(4 comments)
Strange is this little animal,
because of its exceptional and strange morphology
and because it closely resembles a bear en miniature.
-- So says one of the first men to behold
"water bears" or tardigrades as they are better known.
Resembling a large
gummy bear, or a bear
walking on its claws, but measuring in at no larger than a few 100 microns, the tardigrade occupies its own
phylum in the animal kingdom.
Cuteness aside, they are also known for their extraordinary abilities to
survive extreme conditions:
Tardigrades can survive the process of freezing or thawing, as well as changes in salinity, extreme vacuum pressure conditions, and a lack of oxygen.
posted to MetaFilter by vacapinta
at 12:40 PM on February 24, 2003
(17 comments)
Fantomas
Lives!
Fantômas is the Lord of Terror, the Genius of Evil, the arch-criminal anti-hero of a series of 32 pre-WWI French thrillers written by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain. He carries out the most appalling crimes: substituting sulfuric acid in the perfume dispensers at a Parisian department store, releasing plague-infested rats on an ocean liner, or forcing a victim to witness his own execution by placing him face-up in a guillotine.
In 1912, Apollinaire founded the
Societe des Amis de Fantomas which included prominent artists and writers.
Magritte considered Fantomas to be a major influence in many of his paintings. Fantomas was not only a comic book but also
spawned films, tv and radio shows and plays. (There is, of course, a modern
band as well)(I read the
Mexican comic book as a child)
posted to MetaFilter by vacapinta
at 12:13 PM on September 14, 2002
(6 comments)
.i la lojban mo
Lojban is in many ways like any other language. There's an
English-Lojban dictionary. There's a Lojban
grammar. You can even get your news at
Nuzban, a Lojban-only news site.
Lojban, however, is a
completely constructed language.
Why Lojban? Well, Lojban came from
Loglan, an invented language from the 1950's (Loglan was created as an experiment to study the
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: succinctly, the idea that language and culture are hopelessly intertwined) Today, there are
hundreds of invented languages and a thriving language construction
community. Alongside well-known constructs such as Tolkien's
elven languages and
Klingon, there's also
d'ni - the language of Myst, a
language of flowers,
opus-2 - a language that shuns word order and
Teonat - a language of the imaginary inhabitants of Teon.
With the help of online language construction kits, you too can
create your
own language.
posted to MetaFilter by vacapinta
at 8:44 PM on September 12, 2002
(34 comments)
A Tale of Two Cities: Chicago and New York
This exhibition of more than 150 black-and-white photographs represents a cross-section of the thousands of significant buildings that are protected by local landmark designation in Chicago and New York City. The story of how this came to pass is both as similar and as different as the cities themselves.
posted to MetaFilter by vacapinta
at 9:41 AM on September 7, 2002
(3 comments)
The Zymoglyphic Museum
including the works of
Frederik Ruysch.
Ruysch made about a dozen tableaux, constructed of human fetal skeletons with backgrounds of other body parts, on allegorical themes of death and the transiency of life.... One fetal skeleton holding a string of pearls in its hand proclaims, "Why should I long for the things of this world?" Another, playing a violin with a bow made of a dried artery, sings, "Ah fate, ah bitter fate."
Ruysch's work was eventually purchased by his student and admirer,
Peter the Great.
posted to MetaFilter by vacapinta
at 9:52 PM on August 30, 2002
(13 comments)
Frans
Masereel - a great woodcut artist, pioneer of the
wordless novel. You can see all of his 1925
Die Stadt (The City) and
Landscapes and Voices (1929) at
Graphic Witness (Though his
Passionate Journey is one of my favorite books.)
"First published in Germany in 1925 The City is a portrait of urban Europe between the wars, told in one hundred woodcuts of exceptional force and beauty. Frans Masereel portrays parks and factories, shipyards and brothels, crowds, lovers, and lonely individuals with remarkable subtlety and nuance while exploiting the stark contrast of the woodcut medium.
posted to MetaFilter by vacapinta
at 12:37 AM on August 21, 2002
(8 comments)
Harry Stephen Keeler
has been called one of the strangest writers who ever lived. He has also been called the Ed Wood of Mystery Writers. His plots are labyrinthine, convoluted, insane, built on coincidences. There's a
Harry Stephen Keeler Society. His works are now
being re-printed. And, if you're feeling brave, you can
read many of his works on-line.
Keeler created, and was seemingly the sole practitioner of, a genre he called the "webwork novel." This is a story in which diverse characters and events are connected by a strings of wholly implausible coincidences
posted to MetaFilter by vacapinta
at 3:47 PM on August 18, 2002
(20 comments)
Tick Tock Bang
(
script) (from CBC's
Ideas) (from 1999) is an enjoyable way to spend 45 minutes. A survey of Noise as Music from Schoenberg to Glass to Kraftwerk to Industrial and Techno.
Noise Art is here to stay.
posted to MetaFilter by vacapinta
at 3:32 PM on August 17, 2002
(9 comments)
Oubapo America
is a project to identify and explore constraints in Comics. It is the American cousin of the French
Oubapo project which shares the same goals.
Example: "Draw a comic that is 26 panels long where each panel features in some way the corresponding letter of the alphabet". If this sounds familiar, you may be thinking of
Oulipo.
posted to MetaFilter by vacapinta
at 12:31 AM on August 3, 2002
(6 comments)
The Woman in Hitler's Bathtub
(heres the
story) was none other than
Lee Miller, free spirit, enchantress, Vogue model and
renowned photographer. She was at the center of the Surrealist community, a lover of
Man Ray, a subject of
Picasso paintings, a muse to
Cocteau, a friend to
Agar and Ernst and Duchamp and Miro and, later, wife of the collector and critic
Roland Penrose. Overall, a
fascinating woman.
posted to MetaFilter by vacapinta
at 12:24 PM on July 31, 2002
(13 comments)
Generative Art
The musician
Jem Finer (formerly of The Pogues) has created a musical composition,
The LongPlayer, that will play, without repetition, for a thousand years (made with
SuperCollider). It is currently playing live at a
London lighthouse. The
Dream House is another example of a generative art piece, in this case one that was set to run for eight years. These are both examples of Generative Art, Art generated by rules.
The GA community
is an active one. Also, see
Virangelic - a random composition generator.
Art generated by Artifical Life swarms.
NewZoid - A false News Headline generator. And,
N-Gen - computer generated Graphic Design.
posted to MetaFilter by vacapinta
at 2:27 AM on July 27, 2002
(11 comments)
