Maitani

"The slaughtering of animals and preparing of meat for the winter are the labours highlighted in these final calendar pages of the year.   On the opening folio can be found the beginning of the saints’ days for December.  Below, a roundel miniature shows two men in a barn; one has his hands firmly on the horns of a bull, holding him steady, while the other man is preparing to deliver the coup de grâce with a wooden mallet.   In the facing folio, another man is butchering a hog outdoors, wielding a long, sharp knife.  A bucket of blood is beneath the slaughtering table, and above, we can see a wooly ram (perhaps aghast at the carnage), for the zodiac sign Capricorn.  Surrounding this scene is another golden architectural frame, populated with angels playing musical instruments, and a kneeling monk above, perhaps in honour of the feast of the Nativity." - Maitani

"The aim of the project is the reconstruction and online publication of about 1700 prints, which appeared between 1500 and 1900. In a next step forms of semantic networks are to be approached in separate subprojects. This is to be illustrated through the direct contextualisation of objects from Philipp von Stosch's Gem Collection." - Maitani

"The aim of the project "Reception of Antiquity in a Semantic Network" within the Arachne database is the development and provision of web-based prints from the period between 1500 and 1830. The project’s basis is defined by engravings to classical, Near Eastern and Egyptian Archaeology of the 16th till the 19th century from the library of the Rome Department of the DAI. These early prints (e.g. travel, research and excavation reports, catalogs) have been published in the examination of the excavations and discoveries of ancient cultures in the Mediterranean region." - Maitani

via AWOL AncientWorldOnline http://ancientworldonline.blogspot.de/2014... - Maitani

"There are two ways, perhaps, of looking at Goya, who was born near Zaragoza in 1746 and died in exile in France in 1828. In the first version, he was almost innocent, a serious and ambitious artist interested in mortality and beauty, but also playful and mischievous, until politics and history darkened his imagination. In this version, “history charged,” took him by surprise, and deepened his talent. In the second version, it is as though a war was going on within Goya’s psyche from the very start. While interested in many subjects, he was ready for violence and chaos, so that even if the war between French and Spanish forces between 1808 and 1814 and the insurrection in Madrid in 1808 had not happened, he would have found some other source and inspiration for the dark and violent images he needed to create. His imagination was ripe for horror." - Maitani

"Yesterday, it was Thanksgiving Thursday in the United States.  On Thanksgiving Day, I often think about wine.  It is a day many associate with the drink.  Beaujolais Nouveau, a bland and generic vin du primeur, is released in the week leading up to the holiday and, thanks to a marketing strategy straight from the house of De Beers, promoted as the traditional Thanksgiving wine.  For me though, it is the memories of spicy Burgundies and rich Bandols that are hard to shake." - Maitani

"As a committed wino, I think about wine quite often, but yesterday I thought about thinking about wine. A school boy error, perhaps. Most authors of books about wine I have read would, no doubt, reproach me. Wine is about unabashed hedonism, they say, not a subject for jejune philosophising or ersatz self-seriousness." - Maitani

"Sheena Iyengar's excellent anthropological survey of "choice" across cultures, with special focus on its meaning in the U.S. She "studies how we make choices—and how we feel about the choices we make", including "both trivial choices (Coke v. Pepsi) and profound ones" (18 mins)." - Maitani

"Scientists have captured what is believed to be the first photographic evidence of brown bears within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ)." - Maitani

"Camera traps, used by a project assessing radioactive exposure impacts on wildlife, recorded the images. Brown bears had not been seen in the area for more than a century, although there had been signs of their presence." - Maitani

"You may not recall any memories from the first year of life, but if you were exposed to a different language at the time, your brain will still respond to it at some level, a new study suggests. Brain scans show that children adopted from China as babies into families that don't speak Chinese still unconsciously recognize Chinese sounds as language more than a decade later." - Maitani

""It was amazing to see evidence that such an early experience continued to have a lasting effect," said Lara Pierce, lead author of the study published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, in an email to CBC News." - Maitani

It's incredible to think that at only 10-12 months, baby brains are already becoming bound to the language of their environment. - Ken Morley

"AWOL passed the three million page views benchmark today. A million in the last eleven months." - Maitani

"The primary focus of the project is notice and comment on open access material relating to the ancient world, but I will also include other kinds of networked information as it comes available. The ancient world is conceived here as it is at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, my academic home at the time AWOL was launched. That is, from the Pillars of Hercules to the Pacific, from the beginnings of human habitation to the late antique / early Islamic period." - Maitani

"We usually hear that being “authentic” is to “be yourself”, as opposed to “pretending”. But consider some clues about authenticity:" - Maitani

"This clue seems especially telling: Subjects sometimes reported feeling more authentic when they acted “out of character” during activities in the lab, such as playing Twister or debating medical ethics. Introverts felt “truer to themselves” when they were acting like extroverts; ditto disagreeable people who were acting agreeable, and careless people who were acting conscientiously. " - Maitani

"In contrast to these special lexicons, Romany itself—spoken primarily in Central and Eastern Europe—is a full-fledged language, possessing a distinctive sound system and grammar. As with other languages, Romany exhibits geographic variation. Overall, however, this variation is relatively recent, going back to the settlement of Gypsies in Europe in 14th and 15th centuries. All Romany dialects derive from a single ancestral tongue, and the differences among them resemble the kind of variations found among dialects of such European languages as German and Italian. The exact enumeration and classification of Romany dialects remains a controversial subject, but several groups can be distinguished by the degree of mutual intelligibility. For example, Romany dialects spoken in Balkans and the Danubian Basin are largely mutually intelligible. A second group of closely-related dialects includes those spoken in central-eastern Europe: northern Slovenia, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, southern Poland and western Ukraine. A third is found between central Poland, the Baltic states and Russia (see map of Northeastern Romany dialects; additional maps of Romany dialectal groups can be found on the University of Manchester Romani Project website). The Northwestern group of Romany dialects includes those found in, or formerly found in, Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, Italy, and Finland." - Maitani

"For over 2,000 years the civilizations of ancient Greece and Rome have captivated our collective imagination and provided inspiration for many aspects of our lives, from culture, literature, drama, cinema, and television to society, education, and politics. With over 700 entries on everything and anything related to the classical world in the Oxford Companion to Classical Civilization, we created an A-Z list of facts you should know about the time period." - Maitani

"Baths: Public baths, often located near the forum (civic centre), were a normal part of Roman towns in Italy by the 1st century BC, and seem to have existed at Rome even earlier. Bathing occupied a central position in the social life of the day." - Maitani

"Huh. Someone built a working particle accelerator out of Lego bricks. Ok, it doesn't accelerate protons, but it does spin a small Lego ball around the ring much faster than I would have guessed." - Maitani

"Researchers performed memory tests with 5-month-old babies, and found that the babies better remembered shapes that were introduced with happy voices and faces. Past studies have shown that babies are very tuned to emotions, including the emotions of animals." - Maitani

"A new study suggests that Bronze Age cultures everywhere collapsed not because of sustained drought or flooding, but because of technological change. The gradual spread of iron foundries and smithies, they say, undermined the economic strengths of those centres with monopolies on the production of, and trade in, copper and tin—the elements in the alloy bronze." - Maitani

Upon closer examination, the study doesn't seem to be about the Eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age collapse at all, Todd. It's about the later transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age in north western Europe, and Ireland in particular. Hard to tell from the article except that dates are way too late. The title of the paper is "Rapid climate change did not cause population collapse at the end of the European Bronze Age." - Eivind

"Everywhere, every day, everybody uses language. There is no human society, no matter how small or how isolated, which does not employ a language that is rich and diverse. This course introduces you to linguistics, featuring interviews with well-known linguists and with speakers of many different languages. Join us to explore the miracles of human language!" - Maitani

Yes, I keep it (also elsewhere on the Internet). :-) - Maitani

"The annual Stoic Week is approaching [1], so it seems like a good time to return to my ongoing exploration of Stoicism as a philosophy of life. I have been practicing Stoicism since 4 October 2014 [2], and so far so good. I have been able to be more mindful about what I do at any particular moment in my day — with consequences ranging from much less time spent on electronic gadgets to more focused sessions at the gym; I have exercised self-control in terms of my eating habits, as well as with my emotional reactions to situations that would have normally been irritating, or even generating anger; and I feel generally better prepared for the day ahead after my morning meditation." - Maitani

"I have also spent some time reading Stoic texts, ancient and modern (indeed, I will probably offer a course on Stoicism “then and now” at City College in the Fall of ’15. Anyone interested?). Which in turn has led to an interest in exploring ways to update Stoicism to modern times not only in terms of its practice (where it’s already doing pretty well), but also its general theory, as far as it is reasonable to do so." - Maitani

"How did Indian tradition transform the Bhagavad Gita (the “Song of God”) into a bible for pacifism, when it began life, sometime between the third century BC and the third century CE, as an epic argument persuading a warrior to engage in a battle, indeed, a particularly brutal, lawless, internecine war? It has taken a true gift for magic—or, if you prefer, religion, particularly the sort of religion in the thrall of politics that has inspired Hindu nationalism from the time of the British Raj to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi today." - Maitani

"The Gita (as it is generally known to its friends) occupies eighteen chapters of book 6 of the Mahabharata, an immense (over 100,000 couplets) Sanskrit epic. The text is in the form of a conversation between the warrior Arjuna, who, on the eve of an apocalyptic battle, hesitates to kill his friends and family on the other side, and the incarnate god Krishna, who acts as Arjuna’s charioteer (a low-status job roughly equivalent to a bodyguard) and persuades him to do it." - Maitani

"Reckless military interventions in other countries' affairs are becoming the norm globally. So what hope for international law? After all, argues Rein Müllerson, when it comes to bending and breaching international law, Russia has no lack of excellent examples to follow." - Maitani

"Methods of research in social science disciplines differ in many ways from those used in the natural sciences. However, it is advisable, even necessary, for the former to try to emulate the methods of the latter in at least one important respect: one should attempt to get as far away as possible from the viewpoint of an activist and as close as possible to the viewpoint of an impartial researcher." - Maitani

"In preparation for this week's 2014 Annual Meeting of the American Schools of Oriental Research I have pulled together this short list of open access materials from ASOR:" - Maitani

"All of the journals of the American School of Oriental Research, under past and present names, are accessible at JSTOR. Early volumes, for which copyright has expired, are available in open access:" - Maitani

"Fed up with futile internet arguments, a bunch of psychologists investigated how best to correct false ideas. Tom Stafford discovers how to debunk properly." - Maitani

"According to tradition, the historical Buddha lived from 563 to 483 B.C., although scholars postulate that he may have lived as much as a century later. He was born to the rulers of the Shakya clan, hence his appellation Shakyamuni, which means "sage of the Shakya clan." The legends that grew up around him hold that both his conception and birth were miraculous. His mother, Maya, conceived him when she dreamed that a white elephant entered her right side (The Dream of Queen Maya, 1976.402). She gave birth to him in a standing position while grasping a tree in a garden (Birth of the Buddha, 1987.417.1). The child emerged from Maya's right side fully formed and proceeded to take seven steps. Once back in the palace, he was presented to an astrologer who predicted that he would become either a great king or a great religious teacher and he was given the name Siddhartha ("He who achieves His Goal"). His father, evidently thinking that any contact with unpleasantness might prompt Siddhartha to seek a life of renunciation as a religious teacher, and not wanting to lose his son to such a future, protected him from the realities of life." - Maitani

prompted by reading Adriano's post http://ff.im/1kKZsy - Maitani

"Klaus Kastner suggests that Germans cannot sympathise with my analogy of the Greek Bailout as a new Versailles Treaty because many, in Germany, feel that Maastricht was another Verseilles Treaty imposed, by France, upon them. While there is no doubt that France tried, and failed, to adopt a predatory attitude toward Germany (and toward the Bundesbank in particular), the Maastricht-Versailles analogy is unsustainable and patently incorrect – in sharp contrast to the Greek Bailout-Versailles parallelism which is spot on." - Maitani

"Soon after the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, it became evident that the publication was far too big a project for the local institutions. It was logical that other scholars were invited to join the researchers. From the beginning, Qumranology was an international and multidisciplinary affair." - Maitani

"Still, the publication of the scrolls proceeded slowly. There is nothing strange about this. A parallel is the non-publication of the tens of thousands of unpublished cuneiform tablets in the British Museum, some of which have been waiting for more than a century. The finds in the Dead Sea caves were not different: thousands of fragments belonging to some 970 scrolls." - Maitani

"The Ancient World Image Bank is a collaborative effort to distribute and encourage the sharing of free digital imagery for the study of the ancient world. ISAW started AWIB by distributing imagery donated by its faculty, staff, and students via Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution (cc-by) license. You can view and download those images via the isawnyu flickr account. That means that all you have to do to reuse one of our images is cite it in the manner indicated below. The effort has now expanded to include everyone interested in improving the free availability of ancient world imagery by way of the Ancient World Image Bank Flickr Group." - Maitani

Work in Progress at the Ancient World Image Bank http://isaw.nyu.edu/news... - Maitani

http://ancientworldonline.blogspot.de/2014... - Maitani

up - Maitani

"Because it is impossible in fast speech to tell whether the sound /n/ belongs to the indefinite article or the following noun, over the years the letter N has on rare occasions migrated from one word to the other. This process is referred to as metanalysis." - Maitani

"Below are a few examples of words that had their beginnings in beginning with N." - Maitani

"I haven't watched an entire episode of The Daily Show or The Colbert Report in months. My disengagement coincided with the debut of Last Week Tonight With John Oliver, which ended its first season Sunday night. Oliver’s show gives me the same giddy charge that really great segments of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report once did. If you’re a fan of those Comedy Central time-slot-mates, you share their embedded video segments not just because they’re repeating your favorite bits of received political wisdom (which is a huge part of their appeal), but because there’s a high level of craft happening from one minute to the next: clever writing, acting, editing, and graphics. But there’s a big difference between those shows and Last Week: When I watch John Oliver, I feel as if some sort of progress is being made." - Maitani

Stuff that then. Not sending a penny to old Rupert - Mo Kargas

"Pleiades gives scholars, students, and enthusiasts worldwide the ability to use, create, and share historical geographic information about the ancient world in digital form. At present, Pleiades has extensive coverage for the Greek and Roman world, and is expanding into Ancient Near Eastern, Byzantine, Celtic, and Early Medieval geography." - Maitani

"The most recently modified resources are shown in the map at left." - Maitani