Maitani

Past tense - but a site still living in the present. - Iain Baker

they just didn't scheduled IMO. I guess they'll shut it down on the spare time, so it could be at any moment. - M.

<3 - Kristin

Love you all, and love this place. - Maitani

I really hope to get in touch with you again. - Maitani

<3 - Anne Bouey

"But we posted that almost two and a half years ago, and you can hardly call the Rijksmuseum an institution that sits idly by while time passes, or indeed does anything at all by half measures: think of their creation of Rembrandt’s Facebook timeline, their commissioning of late Rembrandt canvases brought to life, or of their accommodation of terminally ill patients visiting one last time. And so they’ve kept hard at work adding to their digital archive, which, as of this writing, offers nearly 210,000 works of art. This brings them within shouting distance of having doubled the collection in size since we first wrote about it." - Maitani

Can't get that title out of my head. :( - Maitani

Now this is in my feed before I am doing my last backup. - Maitani

Who wrote this? - Anne Bouey

http://friendfeed.com/mkz - Maitani

No. :( - Kristin

Haven't been very active lately, but I've had a last minute desire to preserve as much as possible via http://export-friendfeed.com/ Good luck to everyone! - The Neurocritic

I want to mention to you people from the Americas how very unfamiliar much of your "cultural background" appeared to me. I am talking of food (what are jalapenos? what's a cupcake, what's the difference between cheesecake and Käsekuchen? and so forth without end), holiday traditions, the school system, education, family traditions and rituals, remembered movies, books, music, citations from tv series, characters, not to speak of US domestic politics, religious and ethnic communities, and so on. There were so many allusions I didn't understand. I googled a lot and and sometimes asked for an explanation, and I am a lot more aware of your cultures now than I was back then. - Maitani

Thank you, Alistair. :-) - Maitani

I fondly remember friendfeeders who left this place years ago: Aryo, Esther, Mert Ulus, Shawn...just to name a few of them. - Maitani

:) - edythe

Search is still working! - Maitani

"The two top-selling books on Amazon right now are a pair of coloring books for adults by Johanna Basford: Enchanted Forest and Secret Garden." - Maitani

I have to google Dover's "stained glass" and Asian art books. :-) I just subscribed to the Coloring room, my last subscription on ff. :( The pages shown there are splendid! - Maitani

"I wrote a technical paper titled "Attention Based Syntax" and sent it to Giorgio Marchetti, the philosopher based in Urbino, Italy who has been doing the heavy lifting of bringing together students of attention and language. He showed the paper to three reviewers who offered comments, which led me to produce a better paper. The revised version has been posted on the Mind, Consciousness, and Language website which is maintained by Marchetti and Giulio Benedetti. People who are interested can download my paper here." - Maitani

"One of the most influential books for me in trying to understand how the American system has operated in relation to “religious freedom” is Winnifred Fallers Sullivan’s The Impossibility of Religious Freedom. A lawyer, she recounts how the legal framework of balancing religious freedom and the conformity to law expected by the state arose in the United States in the context of a particular Protestant confessional framework. More precisely, the exact purview of religion was delimited in such a way as to be congenial with the cultural expectations of Anglo-American Protestantism, and what that implied as to the shape of what a “religion” was. Religious traditions in earlier centuries which did not conform to these outlines were subject to cultural censure, or even repression (for example, see Catholicism and American Freedom: A History)." - Maitani

"To me a measure of the worth of a society is its ability to tolerate heretics. That is why I sympathize with the ancient Hellenists, and not the waxing homogeneity of Christendom über alles." - Maitani

"Anyone with a heart – or for that matter a brain – is aghast at what has happened to Greece over the last few years.  I can’t think of another recent example of where the people of an entire nation have been punished for something which was effectively not their fault." - Maitani

"It is rare, however, that we in the rest of Europe get the opportunity to hear what young Greek people feel about the whole situation. So it was wonderful to watch this short ‘talking head’ featuring Danny Giannakopoulou and directed by Nicolas Androulakis. It’s poetic, elegiac while optimistic and beautifully composed. Watch it and understand a generation." - Maitani

St Matthew Passion online! - Maitani

I love listening to this during the Easter days, too. Unfortunately, my current sound system is way too bad. - Maitani

"Attention is much older than the genus Homo but we have turned it into a liberating power. Attention began as a reflex action. Something unexpected happens—there is a sudden noise, bright color, disgusting scent, hard poke—and an animal focuses on it, becomes aware of it. I was once on a walk in Zambia and far away, maybe a quarter of a mile distant, viewed from one ridge to another, a giraffe came out of a clearing and began walking down a slope toward water. It was the first time I ever saw a giraffe before it saw me. One of the people I was with whispered, "Look," and the giraffe heard the word. It stopped and stared straight at us. Then it turned and retreated back into the woodlands. There you have the classic animal use of attention: focus, awareness, action." - Maitani

"A pastoral scene greets us on the calendar page for April, with budding leaves on the trees heralding the onset of spring. Sheep and their lambs, a goat and two oxen are being shepherded out from half-timbered barns, to graze in the fields beyond. A cockerel, hens and their hatchlings scrabble about in farmyard, while in the background a woman stands churning milk for butter. The roundels depict the two main feast days for the month – for St George (on horseback, vanquishing a dragon with his lance) and for St Mark (seated at his desk and accompanied by his emblem, a winged lion). Taurus the Bull – the Zodiac sign for April – is standing at the head of page." - Maitani

"A new article in Horizon, Ice-age Europeans roamed in small bands of fewer than 30, on brink of extinction (via Eurogenes), basically gives away the game in the headline. But please keep in mind my earlier post, as low effective population numbers may not accurately convey the actual census size over long periods of time. These results are not particularly surprising, as the ancient genomes we have from hunter-gatherers tend to indicate a very high level of inbreeding in comparison to modern populations. The main difference here is that it seems that they have more and more ancient genomes sampled from diverse locations to add confidence to the original conjecture:" - Maitani

http://ff.im/1kUfVv - Maitani

"New genomic data suggests that when Europeans emerged from the last ice age they were close to becoming extinct. In some cases, small bands of potentially as few as 20 to 30 people could have been moving over very large areas, over the whole of Europe as a single territory, according to Professor Ron Pinhasi, principal investigator on the EU-funded ADNABIOARC project. This demographic model is based on new evidence that suggests populations were much smaller than is generally thought to be a stable size for healthy reproduction, usually around 500 people. Such small groupings may have led to reduced fitness and even extinctions." - Maitani

via Dienekes http://dienekes.blogspot.de/2015... - Maitani

Razib Khan's comment on this: http://ff.im/1kUfVu - Maitani

"Yeats wanted precision and security of outline, not in order to specify what his physical eye saw, but to specify what his imagination saw.  Yeats hated realism.  For Yeats, as for the Romantic poets he loved, there were two chief species of art: one mimetic and factual, the other subjective, luminous; one the mirror, the other the lamp:" - Maitani

"A library? Here in the forests and wilderness of Idukki district? This is a low literacy spot in Kerala, India’s most literate state. There are just 25 families in this hamlet of the state’s first elected tribal village council. Anyone else wanting to borrow a book from here would have to trek a long way through dense forest. Would they, really?" - Maitani

"“Well, yes,” says P.V. Chinnathambi, 73, Tea Vendor, Sports Club Organizer and Librarian. “They do.” His little shop — selling tea, ‘mixture,’ biscuits, matches and other provisions – sits at the hilly crossroads of Edamalakudi. This is Kerala’s remotest panchayat, where just one adivasi group, the Muthavans, resides. Getting there had meant an 18-km walk from Pettimudi near Munnar. Reaching Chinnathambi’s tea-shop library meant even more walking. His wife is away on work when we stumble across his home. They too, are Muthavans. “Chinnathambi,” I ask, puzzled. “I’ve had the tea. I see the provisions. Where the heck is your library?” He flashes his striking smile and takes us inside the small structure. From a darkened corner, he retrieves two large jute bags - the kind that can carry 25 kg of rice or more. In the bags are 160 books, his full inventory. These he lays out carefully on a mat, as he does every day during the library’s working hours." - Maitani

"Welcome to the website of the documentation database of endangered language varieties spoken on the territory of Poland and developed in - synchronic or diachronic - language contact(s) with Polish (excluding the dialects of the Polish language itself). The focus of the present inventory is on a wide range of non-Polish languages and their non-standard varieties illustrating the richness and diversity of Poland's language landscape and the variety of its language contacts." - Maitani

"In Poland and in its neighbouring countries (once included in the territory of Poland) there are many languages spoken by small groups of speakers that have not been documented so far and they are severely endangered. These languages prove the linguistic diversity and richness of the former Republic of Poland (the Polish historical name is "Rzeczypospolita") and are an important component of the Polish national legacy. In terms of linguistic diversity, the territory of "Rzeczypospolita" is a region of contacts between various languages and communication communities. Although today the diversity is significantly impoverished as compared to earlier times, it still exists." - Maitani

"For many people, Bretton Woods stands for that rarest of moments: when governments and experts come together to restore order to a chaotic global economy. After the financial meltdown of 2008, the president of the World Bank and the financier George Soros joined Bill Clinton’s and Tony Blair’s earlier call for a “new Bretton Woods.” It didn’t happen. The world and especially America may yet come to regret that." - Maitani

"To its admirers, many good things were achieved at the Bretton Woods conference over three hectic weeks in the summer of 1944. As the Allies made their final push to liberate Europe, 730 representatives of 44 countries gathered in New Hampshire to set the rules for the postwar economy. Crowded into the half-restored grandeur of a hotel named after nearby Mount Washington, they agreed to create two new institutions to oversee the world economy, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, and to establish a managed system of exchange rates." - Maitani

"When we look at a known word, our brain sees it like a picture, not a group of letters needing to be processed. That's the finding from a new study that shows the brain learns words quickly by tuning neurons to respond to a complete word, not parts of it." - Maitani

Anika, thank you. Fascinating how they combine the words in such creative ways. :-) - Maitani

"The ancient city of Mohenjo Daro was one of the world's earliest major urban settlements - but as Razia Iqbal found on a recent visit to Pakistan, its remains are in danger of crumbling away." - Maitani

"As a lover of language, I am convinced that certain combinations of letters have in them some innate magic - like Kubla Khan, or Xanadu, or Nineveh. So allow the words Mohenjo Daro to roll slowly off your tongue. And let me tell you about this ancient city, rediscovered nearly 100 years ago, but which had its heyday 4,000 years ago." - Maitani

"Why do some people believe conspiracy theories? It’s not just who or what they know. It’s a matter of intellectual character" - Maitani

"Meet Oliver. Like many of his friends, Oliver thinks he is an expert on 9/11. He spends much of his spare time looking at conspiracist websites and his research has convinced him that the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC, of 11 September 2001 were an inside job. The aircraft impacts and resulting fires couldn’t have caused the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center to collapse. The only viable explanation, he maintains, is that government agents planted explosives in advance. He realises, of course, that the government blames Al-Qaeda for 9/11 but his predictable response is pure Mandy Rice-Davies: they would say that, wouldn’t they?" - Maitani

Das erste Ei ist da! - Maitani

Spring! :) - Eivind

Yay! - Kirsten loves you

"Socotri's origins are close to the oldest written Semitic tongues that died out thousands of years ago" - Maitani

"Socotri is the most archaic and isolated of several archaic and isolated tongues spoken in Yemen and Oman known as "modern South Arabian languages". Its vocabulary is immensely rich - for example, there are distinct verbs for "to go" according to the time of the day, or for "to give birth" depending on the animal involved." - Maitani

"Socotri's roots are close to the oldest written Semitic tongues that died out thousands of years ago - and it has grammatical features that no longer exist in Arabic, Hebrew or Aramaic. The study of Socotri helps understand the deep, prehistoric past - and the subsequent evolution - of all Semitic tongues." - Maitani

For a second there I was like "eeewwww what do you mean 'depending on the animal involved'?!" before I was like "Oh :")" - Eivind