Discover Kōlams, the Traditional Indian Patterns That Combine Art, Mathematics & Magic

in Art, Math, Religion | May 20th, 2019

Have accom­plished abstract geo­met­ri­cal artists come out of any demo­graph­ic in greater num­bers than from the women of South Asia? Not when even the most demand­ing art-school cur­ricu­lum can’t hope to equal the rig­or of the kōlam, a com­plex kind of line draw­ing prac­ticed by women every­where from India to Sri Lan­ka to Malaysia to Thai­land. Using hum­ble mate­ri­als like chalk and rice flour on the ground in front of their homes, they inter­weave not just lines, shapes, and pat­terns but reli­gious, philo­soph­i­cal, and mag­i­cal motifs as well — and they cre­ate their kōlams anew each and every day.

“Feed­ing A Thou­sand Souls: Kōlam” by Thacher Gallery at the Uni­ver­si­ty of San Fran­cis­co is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

“Tak­ing a clump of rice flour in a bowl (or a coconut shell), the kōlam artist steps onto her fresh­ly washed can­vas: the ground at the entrance of her house, or any patch of floor mark­ing an entry­point,” writes Atlas Obscu­ra’s Rohi­ni Cha­ki.

“Work­ing swift­ly, she takes pinch­es of rice flour and draws geo­met­ric pat­terns: curved lines, labyrinthine loops around red or white dots, hexag­o­nal frac­tals, or flo­ral pat­terns resem­bling the lotus, a sym­bol of the god­dess of pros­per­i­ty, Lak­sh­mi, for whom the kōlam is drawn as a prayer in illus­tra­tion.”

Col­or­ful Kolam — Sivasankaran — Own work

Kōlams are thought to bring pros­per­i­ty, but they also have oth­er uses, such as feed­ing ants, birds, and oth­er pass­ing crea­tures. Cha­ki quotes Uni­ver­si­ty of San Fran­cis­co The­ol­o­gy and Reli­gious Stud­ies pro­fes­sor Vijaya Nagara­jan as describ­ing their ful­fill­ing the Hin­du “karmic oblig­a­tion” to “feed a thou­sand souls.” Kōlams have also become an object of gen­uine inter­est for math­e­mati­cians and com­put­er sci­en­tists due to their recur­sive nature: “They start out small, but can be built out by con­tin­u­ing to enlarge the same sub­pat­tern, cre­at­ing a com­plex over­all design,” Cha­ki writes. “This has fas­ci­nat­ed math­e­mati­cians, because the pat­terns elu­ci­date fun­da­men­tal math­e­mat­i­cal prin­ci­ples.”

“Kolam” by resakse is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

Like any tra­di­tion­al art form, the kōlam does­n’t have quite as many prac­ti­tion­ers as it used to, much less prac­ti­tion­ers who can meet the stan­dard of mas­tery of com­plet­ing an entire work with­out once stand­ing up or even lift­ing their hand. But even so, the kōlam is hard­ly on the brink of dying out: you can see a few of their cre­ators in action in the video at the top of the post, and the age of social media has offered kōlam cre­ators of any age — and now even the occa­sion­al man — the kind of expo­sure that even the busiest front door could nev­er match. Some who get into kōlams in the 21st cen­tu­ry may want to cre­ate ones that show ever more com­plex­i­ty of geom­e­try and depth of ref­er­ence, but the best among them won’t for­get the mean­ing, accord­ing to Cha­ki, of the for­m’s very name: beau­ty.

Read more about kōlams at Atlas Obscu­ra.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Math­e­mat­ics Made Vis­i­ble: The Extra­or­di­nary Math­e­mat­i­cal Art of M.C. Esch­er

New Iran­ian Video Game, Engare, Explores the Ele­gant Geom­e­try of Islam­ic Art

The Com­plex Geom­e­try of Islam­ic Art & Design: A Short Intro­duc­tion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Mapping Emotions in the Body: A Finnish Neuroscience Study Reveals Where We Feel Emotions in Our Bodies

in Biology, Neuroscience, Psychology | May 8th, 2019

“East­ern med­i­cine” and “West­ern medicine”—the dis­tinc­tion is a crude one, often used to mis­in­form, mis­lead, or grind cul­tur­al axes rather than make sub­stan­tive claims about dif­fer­ent the­o­ries of the human organ­ism. Thank­ful­ly, the med­ical estab­lish­ment has large­ly giv­en up demo­niz­ing or ignor­ing yog­ic and med­i­ta­tive mind-body prac­tices, incor­po­rat­ing many of them into con­tem­po­rary pain relief, men­tal health care, and pre­ven­ta­tive and reha­bil­i­ta­tive treat­ments.

Hin­du and Bud­dhist crit­ics may find much not to like in the sec­u­lar appro­pri­a­tion of prac­tices like mind­ful­ness and yoga, and they may find it odd that such a fun­da­men­tal insight as the rela­tion­ship between mind and body should ever have been in doubt. But we know from even a slight famil­iar­i­ty with Euro­pean phi­los­o­phy (“I think, there­fore I am”) that it was from the Enlight­en­ment into the 20th cen­tu­ry.

Now, says Riit­ta Hari, co-author of a 2014 Fin­ish study on the bod­i­ly loca­tions of emo­tion, “We have obtained sol­id evi­dence that shows the body is involved in all types of cog­ni­tive and emo­tion­al func­tions. In oth­er words, the human mind is strong­ly embod­ied.” We are not brains in vats. All those col­or­ful old expressions—“cold feet,” “but­ter­flies in the stom­ach,” “chill up my spine”—named qual­i­ta­tive data, just a hand­ful of the embod­ied emo­tions mapped by neu­ro­sci­en­tist Lau­ri Num­men­maa and co-authors Riit­ta Hari, Enri­co Glere­an, and Jari K. Hieta­nen.

In their study, the researchers “recruit­ed more than 1,000 par­tic­i­pants” for three exper­i­ments, reports Ash­ley Hamer at Curios­i­ty. These includ­ed hav­ing peo­ple “rate how much they expe­ri­ence each feel­ing in their body vs. in their mind, how good each one feels, and how much they can con­trol it.” Par­tic­i­pants were also asked to sort their feel­ings, pro­duc­ing “five clus­ters: pos­i­tive feel­ings, neg­a­tive feel­ings, cog­ni­tive process­es, somat­ic (or bod­i­ly) states and ill­ness­es, and home­o­sta­t­ic states (bod­i­ly func­tions).”

After mak­ing care­ful dis­tinc­tions between not only emo­tion­al states, but also between think­ing and sen­sa­tion, the study par­tic­i­pants col­ored blank out­lines of the human body on a com­put­er when asked where they felt spe­cif­ic feel­ings. As the video above from the Amer­i­can Muse­um of Nat­ur­al His­to­ry explains, the researchers “used sto­ries, video, and pic­tures to pro­voke emo­tion­al respons­es,” which reg­is­tered onscreen as warmer or cool­er col­ors.

Sim­i­lar kinds of emo­tions clus­tered in sim­i­lar places, with anger, fear, and dis­gust con­cen­trat­ing in the upper body, around the organs and mus­cles that most react to such feel­ings. But “oth­ers were far more sur­pris­ing, even if they made sense intu­itive­ly,” writes Hamer “The pos­i­tive emo­tions of grate­ful­ness and togeth­er­ness and the neg­a­tive emo­tions of guilt and despair all looked remark­ably sim­i­lar, with feel­ings mapped pri­mar­i­ly in the heart, fol­lowed by the head and stom­ach. Mania and exhaus­tion, anoth­er two oppos­ing emo­tions, were both felt all over the body.”

The researchers con­trolled for dif­fer­ences in fig­u­ra­tive expres­sions (i.e. “heartache”) across two lan­guages, Swedish and Finnish. They also make ref­er­ence to oth­er mind-body the­o­ries, such as using “somatosen­so­ry feed­back… to trig­ger con­scious emo­tion­al expe­ri­ences” and the idea that “we under­stand oth­ers’ emo­tions by sim­u­lat­ing them in our own bod­ies.” Read the full, and ful­ly illus­trat­ed, study results in “Bod­i­ly Maps of Emo­tions,” pub­lished by the Nation­al Acad­e­my of Sci­ences.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Inter­ac­tive Map of the 2,000+ Sounds Humans Use to Com­mu­ni­cate With­out Words: Grunts, Sobs, Sighs, Laughs & More

How Med­i­ta­tion Can Change Your Brain: The Neu­ro­science of Bud­dhist Prac­tice

A Dic­tio­nary of Words Invent­ed to Name Emo­tions We All Feel, But Don’t Yet Have a Name For: Vemö­dalen, Son­der, Chrysal­ism & Much More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Hear Raymond Carver’s Story “Fat” Read by Anne Enright

in | April 28th, 2019

“Fat” is the first sto­ry in Ray­mond Carver’s 1976 col­lec­tion Will You Please Be Qui­et Please?. Thanks to The Guardian, you can hear the sto­ry read above by Irish author Anne Enright.

Find the sto­ry list­ed in our col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Hear JG Ballard’s ‘My Dream of Flying to Wake Island,’ Read by William Boyd

in | April 27th, 2019

Above, author William Boyd reads a JG Bal­lard sto­ry, ‘My Dream of Fly­ing to Wake Island,’ which is “dom­i­nat­ed by image and sym­bol rather than char­ac­ter and nar­ra­tive.” The sto­ry was orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished in the 1978 sci-fi col­lec­tion, Low-Fly­ing Air­craft and Oth­er Sto­ries. The record­ing, which comes cour­tesy of The Guardian, will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Hear Italo Calvino’s “The Night Driver,” Read by Jeanette Winterson

in | April 27th, 2019

Record­ed by The Guardian, Jeanette Win­ter­son reads Ita­lo Calvi­no’s 1967 sto­ry “The Night Dri­ver,” a sto­ry of two lovers falling out in the dis­tant era ‘b4 mobile phones.’

This read­ing has been added to our col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Freddie Mercury Reimagined as Comic Book Heroes

in Comics/Cartoons, Music | April 24th, 2019

Pop cul­ture thrives on super­heroes, both fic­tion­al and real. This isn’t unique in human his­to­ry. Read most any col­lec­tion of ancient myth and lit­er­a­ture and you’ll find the same. The demigods and chief­tains beat­ing their chests and talk­ing trash in the Ili­ad, for exam­ple, remind me of macho pro­fes­sion­al wrestlers or char­ac­ters in the Mar­vel and DC uni­vers­es, cul­tur­al arti­facts indebt­ed in their var­i­ous ways to clas­si­cal leg­ends. One thread runs through all of the epic tales of heroes and hero­ines: a seem­ing need to immor­tal­ize peo­ple who embody the qual­i­ties we most desire. Heroes may suf­fer for their trag­ic flaws, but that’s the price they pay for uni­ver­sal acclaim or an iron throne.

The traits ascribed to late modernity’s fic­tion­al heroes haven’t changed over­much from the dis­tant past—power, wit, agili­ty, per­sis­tence, anger issues, spicy, com­pli­cat­ed love lives…. But when it comes to the real peo­ple we admire—the celebri­ties who get the super­hero treatment—creativity, style, and musi­cal tal­ent top the list. Why not?

David Bowie’s larg­er-than-life per­sonas sure­ly deserve to live on, trans­mit­ted not only via his music but by way of his posthu­mous trans­for­ma­tion into a series of pulp and com­ic heroes as imag­ined by screen­writer and design­er Todd Alcott, who has giv­en the same treat­ment to beloved musi­cal char­ac­ters like Prince and Bob Dylan.

Per­form­ing a sim­i­lar ser­vice for Fred­die Mer­cury, Brazil­ian artist Butch­er Bil­ly sat­is­fies the cul­tur­al crav­ing for demigods in his immor­tal­iza­tion of Fred­die Mer­cury as var­i­ous heroes like The Hulk, Super­man, and Shaz­am (or “Flash”); a con­tender for the Iron Throne; and him­self: rid­ing on Darth Vader’s shoul­ders, break­ing free in house­wife drag, and sport­ing Bowie’s Aladdin Sane light­ning bolt. What are the super­pow­ers of these super-Fred­dies? The usu­al smash­ing, punch­ing, and fly­ing, it seems, but also the essen­tials of his real-life power—an impos­si­bly big per­son­al­i­ty, huge stage pres­ence, per­son­al mag­net­ism, and a god­like force of a voice.

Add to these char­ac­ter­is­tics a unique tal­ent for writ­ing  lyrics punchi­er than your favorite Twit­ter feed, and we have the mak­ings of a mod­ern epic giant with abil­i­ties that seemed to sur­pass those of mere mor­tals, with the swag­ger and ego to match. This trib­ute to Mer­cury is unabashed hero wor­ship, turn­ing the singer into an arche­type. In the sim­ple, bold, col­or­ful lines of com­ic cov­er art we might just see that there’s a Fred­die Mer­cury in all of us, want­i­ng to break free, pump a fist in the air, and belt out our biggest feel­ings in cap­i­tal let­ters and giant excla­ma­tion marks.

See more “Plan­et Mer­cury Comics” below and at Butch­er Bil­ly’s Behance site.

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Bowie Songs Reimag­ined as Pulp Fic­tion Book Cov­ers: Space Odd­i­ty, Heroes, Life on Mars & More

Clas­sic Songs by Bob Dylan Re-Imag­ined as Pulp Fic­tion Book Cov­ers: “Like a Rolling Stone,” “A Hard Rain’s A‑Gonna Fall” & More

Scenes from Bohemi­an Rhap­sody Com­pared to Real Life: A 21-Minute Com­pi­la­tion

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Street Art for Book Lovers: Dutch Artists Paint Massive Bookcase Mural on the Side of a Building

in Architecture, Art, Books, Travel | April 19th, 2019

Book­cas­es are a great ice break­er for those who love to read.

What relief those shelves offer ill-at ease par­ty­go­ers… even when you don’t know a soul in the room, there’s always a chance you’ll bond with a fel­low guest over one of your hosts’ titles.

Occu­py your­self with a good browse whilst wait­ing for some­one to take the bait.

Now, with the aid of Dutch street artists Jan Is De Man and Deef Feed, some res­i­dents of Utrecht have turned their book­cas­es into street art, spark­ing con­ver­sa­tion in their cul­tur­al­ly diverse neigh­bor­hood.

De Man, whose close friends occu­py the ground floor of a build­ing on the cor­ner of Mimosas­traat and Ams­ter­dam, had ini­tial­ly planned to ren­der a giant smi­ley face on an exte­ri­or wall as a pub­lic morale boost­er, but the shape of the three-sto­ry struc­ture sug­gest­ed some­thing a bit more lit­er­ary.

The trompe-l’oeil Boekenkast (or book­case) took a week to cre­ate, and fea­tures titles in eight dif­fer­ent lan­guages.

Look close­ly and you’ll notice both artists’ names (and a smi­ley face) lurk­ing among the spines.

Design mags may make an impres­sion by order­ing books accord­ing to size and col­or, but this com­mu­nal 2‑D boekenkast looks to belong to an avid and omniv­o­rous read­er.

Some Eng­lish titles that caught our eye:

Sapi­ens

The Sub­tle Art of Not Giv­ing a F*ck

Kei­th Richards’ auto­bi­og­ra­phy Life

The Curi­ous Inci­dent of the Dog in the Night­time 

Pride and Prej­u­dice

The Lit­tle Prince

The World Accord­ing to Garp

Jumper

And a classy-look­ing hard­bound Play­boy col­lec­tion that may or may not exist in real life.

(Read­ers, can you spot the oth­er fakes?)

Boekenkast is the lat­est of a num­ber of glob­al book­shelf murals tempt­ing lit­er­ary pil­grims to take a self­ie on the way to the local indie book­shop.

via Bored Pan­da

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Japan­ese Artist Cre­ates Book­shelf Dio­ra­mas That Mag­i­cal­ly Trans­port You Into Tokyo’s Back Alleys

157 Ani­mat­ed Min­i­mal­ist Mid-Cen­tu­ry Book Cov­ers

David Bowie Songs Reimag­ined as Pulp Fic­tion Book Cov­ers: Space Odd­i­ty, Heroes, Life on Mars & More

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in New York City this May for the next install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

9 Science-Fiction Authors Predict the Future: How Jules Verne, Isaac Asimov, William Gibson, Philip K. Dick & More Imagined the World Ahead

in History, Sci Fi | April 18th, 2019

Pressed to give a four-word def­i­n­i­tion of sci­ence fic­tion, one could do worse than “sto­ries about the future.” That stark sim­pli­fi­ca­tion does the com­plex and var­ied genre a dis­ser­vice, as the defend­ers of sci­ence fic­tion against its crit­ics won’t hes­i­tate to claim. And those crit­ics are many, includ­ing most recent­ly the writer Ian McE­wan, despite the fact that his new nov­el Machines Like Me is about the intro­duc­tion of intel­li­gent androids into human soci­ety. Sci-fi fans have tak­en him to task for dis­tanc­ing his lat­est book from a genre he sees as insuf­fi­cient­ly con­cerned with the “human dilem­mas” imag­ined tech­nolo­gies might cause, but he has a point: set in an alter­nate 1982, Machines Like Me isn’t about the future but the past.

Then again, per­haps McE­wan’s nov­el is about the future, and the androids sim­ply haven’t yet arrived on our own time­line — or per­haps, like most endur­ing works of sci­ence fic­tion, it’s ulti­mate­ly about the present moment. The writ­ers in the sci-fi pan­theon all com­bine a height­ened aware­ness of the con­cerns of their own eras with a cer­tain gen­uine pre­science about things to come.

Writ­ing in the ear­ly 1860s, Jules Verne imag­ined a sub­ur­ban­ized 20th cen­tu­ry with gas-pow­ered cars, elec­tron­ic sur­veil­lance, fax machines and a pop­u­la­tion at once both high­ly edu­cat­ed and crude­ly enter­tained. Verne also includ­ed a sim­ple com­mu­ni­ca­tion sys­tem that can’t help but remind us of the inter­net we use today — a sys­tem whose promise and per­il Neu­ro­mancer author William Gib­son described on tele­vi­sion more than 130 years lat­er.

In the list below we’ve round­ed up Verne and Gib­son’s pre­dic­tions about the future of tech­nol­o­gy and human­i­ty along with those of sev­en oth­er sci­ence-fic­tion lumi­nar­ies. Despite com­ing from dif­fer­ent gen­er­a­tions and pos­sess­ing dif­fer­ent sen­si­bil­i­ties, these writ­ers share not just a con­cern with the future but the abil­i­ty to express that con­cern in a way that still inter­ests us, the denizens of that future. Or rather, some­thing like that future: when we hear Aldous Hux­ley pre­dict in 1950 that “dur­ing the next fifty years mankind will face three great prob­lems: the prob­lem of avoid­ing war; the prob­lem of feed­ing and cloth­ing a pop­u­la­tion of two and a quar­ter bil­lions which, by 2000 A.D., will have grown to upward of three bil­lions, and the prob­lem of sup­ply­ing these bil­lions with­out ruin­ing the planet’s irre­place­able resources,” we can agree with the gen­er­al pic­ture even if he low­balled glob­al pop­u­la­tion growth by half.

In 1964, Arthur C. Clarke pre­dict­ed not just the inter­net but 3D print­ers and trained mon­key ser­vants. In 1977, the more dystopi­an-mind­ed J.G. Bal­lard came up with some­thing that sounds an awful lot like mod­ern social media. Philip K. Dick­’s time­line of the years 1983 through 2012 includes Sovi­et satel­lite weapons, the dis­place­ment of oil as an ener­gy source by hydro­gen, and colonies both lunar and Mar­t­ian. Envi­sion­ing the world of 2063, Robert Hein­lein includ­ed inter­plan­e­tary trav­el, the com­plete cur­ing of can­cer, tooth decay, and the com­mon cold, and a per­ma­nent end to hous­ing short­ages. Even Mark Twain, despite not nor­mal­ly being regard­ed as a sci-fi writer, imag­ined a “ ‘lim­it­less-dis­tance’ tele­phone” sys­tem intro­duced and “the dai­ly doings of the globe made vis­i­ble to every­body, and audi­bly dis­cuss­able too, by wit­ness­es sep­a­rat­ed by any num­ber of leagues.”

As much as the hits impress, they tend to be out­num­bered in even sci­ence fic­tion’s great­est minds by the miss­es. But as you’ll find while read­ing through the pre­dic­tions of these nine writ­ers, what sep­a­rates sci­ence fic­tion’s great­est minds from the rest is the abil­i­ty to come up with not just inter­est­ing hits but inter­est­ing miss­es as well. Con­sid­er­ing why they got right what they got right and why they got wrong what they got wrong tells us some­thing about the work­ings of their imag­i­na­tions, but also about the eras they did their imag­in­ing in — and how their times led to our own, the future to which so many of them ded­i­cat­ed so much thought.

• Jules Verne 
• Mark Twain
• Aldous Hux­ley
• Arthur C. Clarke
• Robert Hein­lein
• J.G. Bal­lard
• William Gib­son
• Philip K. Dick
• Isaac Asi­mov (1964)
• Isaac Asi­mov (1983)

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Read Hun­dreds of Free Sci-Fi Sto­ries from Asi­mov, Love­craft, Brad­bury, Dick, Clarke & More

Free Sci­ence Fic­tion Clas­sics on the Web: Hux­ley, Orwell, Asi­mov, Gaiman & Beyond

The Ency­clo­pe­dia of Sci­ence Fic­tion: 17,500 Entries on All Things Sci-Fi Are Now Free Online

Isaac Asi­mov Recalls the Gold­en Age of Sci­ence Fic­tion (1937–1950)

The Art of Sci-Fi Book Cov­ers: From the Fan­tas­ti­cal 1920s to the Psy­che­del­ic 1960s & Beyond

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

How Digital Scans of Notre Dame Can Help Architects Rebuild the Burned Cathedral

in Architecture, Technology | April 17th, 2019

“Every­one help­less­ly watch­ing some­thing beau­ti­ful burn is 2019 in a nut­shell,” wrote TV crit­ic Ryan McGee on Twit­ter the day a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of Notre Dame burned to the ground. He might have includ­ed 2018 in his metaphor, when Brazil’s Nation­al Muse­um was total­ly destroyed by fire. Before the Parisian mon­u­ment caught flame, peo­ple watched help­less­ly as his­toric black church­es burned in the U.S., and while the muse­um and cathe­dral fire were not the direct result of evil intent, in all of these events we wit­nessed the loss of sanc­tu­ar­ies, a word with both a reli­gious mean­ing and a sec­u­lar one, as colum­nist Jarvis DeBer­ry points out.

Sanc­tu­ar­ies are places where peo­ple, price­less arti­facts, and knowl­edge should be “safe and pro­tect­ed,” sup­pos­ed­ly insti­tu­tion­al bul­warks against dis­or­der and vio­lence. They are both havens and potent symbols—and they are also phys­i­cal spaces that can be rebuilt, if not replaced.

And 21st-cen­tu­ry tech­nol­o­gy has made their rebuild­ing a far more col­lab­o­ra­tive and more pre­cise affair. The recon­struc­tion of church­es in Louisiana can be fund­ed through social media. The con­tents of the Nation­al Muse­um of Brazil can be rec­ol­lect­ed, vir­tu­al­ly at least, through crowd­sourc­ing and dig­i­tal archives.

And the rav­aged wood frame, roof, and spire of Notre Dame can be rebuilt, though nev­er replaced, not only with mil­lions in fund­ing from Apple and fashion’s biggest hous­es, but with an exact 3D dig­i­tal scan of the cathe­dral made in 2015 by Vas­sar art his­to­ri­an Andrew Tal­lon, who passed away last year from brain can­cer. In the video at the top, see Tal­lon, then a pro­fes­sor at Vas­sar, describe his process, one dri­ven by a life­long pas­sion for Goth­ic archi­tec­ture, and espe­cial­ly for Notre Dame. A “for­mer com­pos­er, would-be monk, and self-described gear­head,” wrote Nation­al Geo­graph­ic in a 2015 pro­file of his work, Tal­lon brought a unique sen­si­bil­i­ty to the project.

His fas­ci­na­tion with the spaces of Goth­ic cathe­drals began with an inves­ti­ga­tion into their acoustic prop­er­ties. He devel­oped the idea of using laser scan­ners to cre­ate a dig­i­tal repli­ca of Notre Dame after study­ing at Colum­bia under art his­to­ri­an Stephen Mur­ray, who tried and failed in 2001 to make a laser scan of a cathe­dral north of Paris. Four­teen years lat­er, the tech­nol­o­gy final­ly caught up with the idea, which Tal­lon also improved on by attempt­ing to recon­struct not only the struc­ture, but also the meth­ods the builders used to build it yet did not record in writ­ing.

By exam­in­ing how the cathe­dral moved when its foun­da­tions shift­ed or how it heat­ed up or cooled down, Tal­lon could reveal “its orig­i­nal design and the choic­es that the mas­ter builder had to make when con­struc­tion did­n’t go as planned.” He took scans from “more than 50 loca­tions around the cathedral—collecting more than one bil­lion points of data.” All of the scans were knit togeth­er “to make them man­age­able and beau­ti­ful.” They are accu­rate to the mil­lime­ter, and as Wired reports, “archi­tects now hope that Tallon’s scans may pro­vide a map for keep­ing on track what­ev­er rebuild­ing will have to take place.”

To learn even more about Tallon’s metic­u­lous process than he reveals in the Nation­al Geo­graph­ic video at the top, read his paper “Divin­ing Pro­por­tions in the Infor­ma­tion Age” in the open access jour­nal Archi­tec­tur­al His­to­ries. We may not typ­i­cal­ly think of the dig­i­tal world as much of a sanc­tu­ary, and maybe for good rea­son, but Tallon’s mas­ter­work poignant­ly shows the impor­tance of using its tools to record, doc­u­ment, and, if nec­es­sary, recon­struct the real-life spaces that meet our def­i­n­i­tions of the term.

via the MIT Tech­nol­o­gy Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Notre Dame Cap­tured in an Ear­ly Pho­to­graph, 1838

A Vir­tu­al Time-Lapse Recre­ation of the Build­ing of Notre Dame (1160)

Wikipedia Leads Effort to Cre­ate a Dig­i­tal Archive of 20 Mil­lion Arti­facts Lost in the Brazil­ian Muse­um Fire

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Brazil’s Nation­al Muse­um & Its Arti­facts: Google Dig­i­tized the Museum’s Col­lec­tion Before the Fate­ful Fire

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Do Ethicists Behave Any Better Than the Rest of Us?: Here’s What the Research Shows

in Philosophy | April 1st, 2019

We’ve heard about the lawyer­ing fool who has him- or her­self for a client. The old proverb does not mean to say that lawyers are espe­cial­ly scrupu­lous, only that the intri­ca­cies of the law are best left to the pro­fes­sion­als, and that a per­son­al inter­est in a case mud­dies the waters. That may go dou­ble or triple for doc­tor­ing, though doc­tors don’t have to bear the lawyer’s social stig­ma.

But can we rea­son­ably expect doc­tors to live health­i­er lives than the gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion? What about oth­er pro­fes­sions that seem to entail a rig­or­ous code of con­duct? Many peo­ple have late­ly been dis­abused of the idea that cler­gy or police have any spe­cial claim to moral upstand­ing­ness (on the con­trary)….

What about ethi­cists? Should we have high expec­ta­tions of schol­ars in this sub­set of phi­los­o­phy? There are no clever say­ings, no genre of jokes at their expense, but there are a few aca­d­e­m­ic stud­ies ask­ing some ver­sion of the ques­tion: does study­ing ethics make a per­son more eth­i­cal?

You might sus­pect that it does not, if you’re a cynic—or the answer might sur­prise you!.… Put more pre­cise­ly, in a recent study—“The Moral Behav­ior of Ethics Pro­fes­sors,” pub­lished in Philo­soph­i­cal Psy­chol­o­gy this year—the “open but high­ly rel­e­vant ques­tion” under con­sid­er­a­tion is “the rela­tion between eth­i­cal reflec­tion and moral action.”

The paper’s authors, pro­fes­sor Johannes Wanger of Austria’s Uni­ver­si­ty of Graz and grad­u­ate stu­dent Philipp Schöneg­ger from the Uni­ver­si­ty of St. Andrews in Scot­land, sur­veyed 417 pro­fes­sors in three cat­e­gories, reports Olivia Gold­hill at Quartz: “ethi­cists (philoso­phers focused on ethics), philoso­phers focused on non-eth­i­cal sub­jects, and oth­er pro­fes­sors.” The paper sur­veyed only Ger­man-speak­ing schol­ars, repli­cat­ing the meth­ods of a 2013 study focused on Eng­lish-speak­ing pro­fes­sors.

The ques­tions asked touched on “a range of moral top­ics, includ­ing organ dona­tion, char­i­ta­ble giv­ing, and even how often they called their moth­er.” After assess­ing gen­er­al views on the sub­jects, the authors “then asked the pro­fes­sors about their own behav­ior in each cat­e­go­ry.” We must assume a base lev­el of hon­esty among the respon­dents in their self-report­ed answers.

The results: “the researchers found no sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence in moral behav­ior” between those who make it their busi­ness to study ethics and those who study oth­er things. For exam­ple, the major­i­ty of the aca­d­e­mics sur­veyed agreed that you should call your moth­er: at 75% of non-philoso­phers, 70% of non-ethi­cists, and 65% of ethi­cists (whose num­bers might be low­er here because oth­er issues could seem weight­i­er to them by com­par­i­son).

When it comes to pick­ing up the phone to call mom at least twice a month, the num­bers were con­sis­tent­ly high, but ethi­cists did not rate par­tic­u­lar­ly high­er at 87% ver­sus 81% of non-ethi­cist philoso­phers and 89% of oth­ers. The sub­ject of char­i­ta­ble giv­ing may war­rant more scruti­ny. Ethi­cists rec­om­mend­ed donat­ing an aver­age of 6.9% of one’s annu­al salary, where non-ethi­cists said 4.6%  was enough and oth­ers said 5.1%. The num­bers for all three groups, how­ev­er, hov­er around four and half per­cent.

One notable excep­tion to this trend: veg­e­tar­i­an­ism: “Ethi­cists were both more like­ly to say that it was immoral to eat meat, and more like­ly to be veg­e­tar­i­ans them­selves.” But on aver­age, schol­ars of eth­i­cal behav­ior do not seem to behave bet­ter than their peers. Should we be sur­prised at this? Eric Schwitzgebel, a phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sor at Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, River­side, and one of the authors of orig­i­nal, 2013 study, finds the results upset­ting.

Using the exam­ple of a hypo­thet­i­cal pro­fes­sor who makes the case for veg­e­tar­i­an­ism, then heads to the cafe­te­ria for a burg­er, Schwitzgebel refers to mod­ern-day philo­soph­i­cal ethics as “cheese­burg­er ethics.” Of his work on the behav­ior of ethi­cists with Stet­son University’s Joshua Rust, he writes, “nev­er once have we found ethi­cists as a whole behav­ing bet­ter than our com­par­i­son groups of oth­er pro­fes­sors…. Nonethe­less, ethi­cists do embrace more strin­gent moral norms on some issues.”

Should philoso­phers who hold such views aspire to be bet­ter? Can they be? Schöneg­ger and Wag­n­er frame the issue upfront in their recent ver­sion of the study (which you can read in full here), with a quote from the Ger­man philoso­pher Max Schel­er: “sign­posts do not walk in the direc­tion they point to.” Ethi­cists draw con­clu­sions about ideals of human behav­ior using the tools of phi­los­o­phy. They show the way but should not per­son­al­ly set them­selves up as exem­plars or role-mod­els. As one high-pro­file case of a very bad­ly-behaved ethi­cist sug­gests, this might not do the pro­fes­sion any favors.

Schwitzgebel is not con­tent with this answer. The prob­lem, he writes at Aeon, may be pro­fes­sion­al­iza­tion itself, impos­ing an unnat­ur­al dis­tance between word and deed. “I’d be sus­pi­cious of any 21st-cen­tu­ry philoso­pher who offered up her- or him­self as a mod­el of wise liv­ing,” he writes, “This is no longer what it is to be a philosopher—and those who regard them­selves as wise are in any case almost always mis­tak­en. Still, I think, the ancient philoso­phers got some­thing right that the cheese­burg­er ethi­cist gets wrong.”

The “some­thing wrong” is a lais­sez-faire com­fort with things as they are. Leav­ing ethics to the realm of the­o­ry takes away a sense of moral urgency. “A full-bod­ied under­stand­ing of ethics requires some liv­ing,” Schwitzgebel writes. It might be eas­i­er for philoso­phers to avoid aim­ing for bet­ter behav­ior, he implies, when they are only required, and pro­fes­sion­al­ly reward­ed, just to think about it.

via Quartz

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Can I Know Right From Wrong? Watch Phi­los­o­phy Ani­ma­tions on Ethics Nar­rat­ed by Har­ry Shear­er

Oxford’s Free Course A Romp Through Ethics for Com­plete Begin­ners Will Teach You Right from Wrong

The Hobo Eth­i­cal Code of 1889: 15 Rules for Liv­ing a Self-Reliant, Hon­est & Com­pas­sion­ate Life

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness