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How long has mankind dreamed of an international language? The first answer that comes to mind, of course, dates that dream to the time of the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel. If you don’t happen to believe that humanity was made to speak a variety of mutually incomprehensible tongues as punishment for daring to build a tower tall enough to reach heaven, maybe you’d prefer a date somewhere around the much later development of Esperanto, the best-known language invented specifically to attain universality, in the late 19th century. But look ahead a few decades past that and you find an intriguing example of a language created to unite the world without using words at all: International System Of Typographic Picture Education, or Isotype.
“Nearly a century before infographics and data visualization became the cultural ubiquity they are today,” writes Brain Pickings’ Maria Popova, “the pioneering Austrian sociologist, philosopher of science, social reformer, and curator Otto Neurath (December 10, 1882–December 22, 1945), together with his not-yet-wife Marie, invented ISOTYPE — the visionary pictogram language that furnished the vocabulary of modern infographics.”
First known as the Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics, Isotype’s initial development began in 1926 at Vienna’s Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum (or Social and Economic Museum), of which Neurath was the founding director. There he began to assemble something like a design studio team, with the mission of creating a set of pictorial symbols that could render dense social, scientific technological, biological, and historical information legible at a glance.
Neurath’s most important early collaborator on Isotype was surely the woodcut artist Gerd Arntz, at whose site you can see the more than 4000 pictograms he created to symbolize “key data from industry, demographics, politics and economy.” Arntz designed them all in accordance with Neurat’s belief that even then the long “virtually illiterate” proletariat “needed knowledge of the world around them. This knowledge should not be shrined in opaque scientific language, but directly illustrated in straightforward images and a clear structure, also for people who could not, or hardly, read. Another outspoken goal of this method of visual statistics was to overcome barriers of language and culture, and to be universally understood.”
By the mid-1930s, writes The Atlantic’s Steven Heller in an article on the book Isotype: Design and Contexts 1925–1971, “with the Nazi march into Austria, Neurath fled Vienna for Holland. He met his future wife Marie Reidemeister there and after the German bombing of Rotterdam the pair escaped to England, where they were interned on the Isle of Man. Following their release they established the Isotype Institute in Oxford. From this base they continued to develop their unique strategy, which influenced designers worldwide.” Today, even those who have never laid eyes on Isotype itself have extensively “read” the visual languages it has influenced: Gizmodo’s Alissa Walker points to the standardized icons created in the 70s by the U.S. Department of Transportation and the American Institute of Graphic Arts as well as today’s emoji — probably not exactly what Neurath had in mind as the language of Utopia back when he was co-founding the Vienna Circle, but nevertheless a distant cousin of Isotype in “its own adorable way.”
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.
It’s that time of year when certain songs conspire with certain moods to hit you right in the ol’ brisket.
Thefeeling is voluptuous, and not necessarily unpleasant, provided there’s a bathroom stall or spare bedroom should you need to flee a party like Cinderella, as some old chestnut threatens to turn you into a blubbering mess.
Let the kiddies deck the halls, jingle bells, and prance about with Rudolph and Frosty. The best secular songs for grown ups are the ones with a thick current of longing just under the surface, a yearning for those who aren’t here with us, for a better future, for the way we were…
There’s got to be some hope in the balance though, some sweetness to savor as we muddle through.
(Judy Garland famously stonewalled on the first version of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” until lyricist Hugh Martin agreed to lighten things up a bit. In the end, both got what they wanted. She got her update:
Have yourself a merry little Christmas
Let your heart be light
Next year all our troubles will be out of sight
But the tension between the promise of a better tomorrow and her emotional delivery holds a place for Hughes’ appealingly dark sentiment:
As a rule, the oldies are the goodies in this department.
More recent bids by Coldplay and Taylor Swift have failed to achieve the proper mix of hope and hopelessness.
It’s a difficult balance, but singer-songwriter Ellia Bisker pulls it off beautifully, above, by turning to O. Henry’s enduring short story, “The Gift of the Magi.”
I want to give you something that I can’t afford,
Let you believe with me we’re really not so poor.
You see that package waiting underneath the tree?
It’s just a token of how much you mean to me.
(Spoiler for the handful of people unfamiliar with this tale: he does the same, thus negating the utility of both costly presents.)
In an interview with Open Culture, Bisker praised the O. Henry story’s ironic symmetry:
It’s a little like the death scene in Romeo & Juliet, but without the tragedy. The story itself still feels surprisingly fresh, despite the period details. It has more humor and sympathy to it than sentiment. It surprises you with real emotion.
The Romeo and Juliet comparison is apt. The story covers a time period so brief that the newlyweds’ feelings for each other never stray from purest wonder and admiration.
Bisker’s song starts, as it ends, with a pair of young, broke lovers who only have eyes for each other.
Let’s not forget O. Henry’s parting words:
The magi, as you know, were wise men—wonderfully wise men—who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were no doubt wise ones, possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case of duplication. And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. Of all who give and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.
Enjoy this musical gift, readers. The artist has made the track free for downloading, though perhaps you could scratch up a few coins in thanks, without pawning your watch or cutting your hair.
Read O. Henry’s short story “The Gift of the Magi” here.
Here’s the gist: If you buy an All-Access pass to their 45 courses, you will receive another All-Access Pass to give to someone else at no additional charge. An All-Access pass costs $180, and lasts one year. For that fee, you–and a family member or friend–can watch courses created by Annie Leibovitz, Werner Herzog, Martin Scorsese, David Mamet, Jane Goodall, Margaret Atwood, Helen Mirren, Martin Scorsese, Herbie Hancock, Alice Waters and so many more. If you’re thinking this sounds like a pretty good holiday present, I’d have to agree.
Note: If you sign up for a MasterClass course by clicking on the affiliate links in this post, Open Culture will receive a small fee that helps support our operation.
They may not surprise the average market analyst, but the gaming industry’s figures tell a pretty compelling story. Newzoo estimates that “2.3 billion gamers across the globe will spend $137. 9 billion on games in 2018.” VentureBeat reports that mobile games account for over 50 percent of the total. Currently, “about 91 percent of the global market is digital, meaning that $125.3 billion worth of games flows through digitally connected channels as opposed to physical retail.”
That’s a lot of virtual dough floating around in virtual worlds. But this vast and rapid growth in digital gaming does not mean physical games are going away anytime soon—and that includes cards, board games, and other tabletop games, a market that has “surged as players have grown jaded with the digital screens they toil over during the work day,” wrote Joon Ian Wong in 2016.
Venture capital is flowing into board game development. Tabletop bars and cafes are popping up all over the world, encouraging people to mingle over Scrabble and Cards Against Humanity. It seems the time is just right to revive the oldest playable board game in the world. If someone hasn’t already launched a Kickstarter to bankroll a new Royal Game of Ur, I suspect we’ll see one any day now. At least four-and-a-half-thousand years old, according to British Museum Curator Irving Finkel, the Royal Game of Ur was probably invented by the Sumerians. And it seems like it might still be a blast, and a considerable challenge, to play.
“You might think it’s so old that it’s irretrievable to us, that we’ve got no idea what it was like playing, what the rules were like,” Finkel says in the video at the top, “but all sorts of evidence has come to light so that we know how this game was played.” He promises, in no uncertain terms, to wipe the floor with YouTuber Tom Scott in a Royal Game of Ur showdown, and Scott, who has never played the game before, seems at a decided disadvantage. But watch their contest to see how the game is played and whether Finkel makes good on his threat. Along the way, he liberally shares his knowledge.
For a shorter course on the Royal Game of Ur, see Finkel’s video above. It takes him a couple minutes to get around to introducing his subject, the discovery and deciphering of the “world’s oldest rule book.” A consummate ancient history detective, Finkel describes how he decoded an ancient tablet that explained a game, but which game, no one knew. So, the dedicated curator tried the rules on every mysterious ancient game he could find, till he landed on the “game of twenty squares” from Mesopotamia. “It fitted perfectly,” he says with relish. See the original board, pieces, and dice from about 2500 BC, and learn how Finkel had been searching for its rules of play since he was 9 years old.
For more of Finkel’s passionate public scholarship, see him demonstrate how to write in cuneiform and read about how his work on cuneiform tablets led to him discovering the oldest reference to the Noah’s Ark myth.
How to describe the magnitude of the loss when Brazil’s Museu Nacional caught fire in September? TheNew Yorker’s Alejandro Chacoff ventured an analogy that would resonate with readers of that magazine: “It’s as if, in New York, the American Museum of Natural History and the New School, or a part of the Columbia campus, had been built on the same spot, and then was reduced to ashes.” The 200-year-old museum lost an estimated 92.5 percent of its 20-million-item archive, one of the largest collections of natural history and anthropological artifacts in the world — but not before Google Arts & Culture digitized enough to recreate the experience of visiting the Museu Nacional virtually.
“Now for the first time ever, you can virtually step inside the museum and learn about its lost collection through Street View imagery and online exhibits.” In this way you can still experience a portion of “the incredible diversity of artifacts in Brazil’s National Museum” that “reflected centuries of Brazil’s culture and natural history, from the Amazon’s endangered butterflies to beautifully-crafted indigenous masks and decorated pottery.”
You can take a virtual tour of the highlights of the Museu Nacional as it was here, a tour that of course includes a visit with the museum’s prized possession: the 12,000-year old Luzia, the oldest skeleton found in the Americas, whom you can see just as she stood on display in museum view. Miraculously, Luzia counts as one of the artifacts mostly recovered from the aftermath of the conflagration, and the museum has announced an ambitious restoration plan that will cost R$10 million, an amount provided as emergency funds by the Brazilian Government — and an amount much greater than the Museu Nacional, which by its 200th anniversary had reached a state of not just serious neglect but near-complete abandonment, was ever able to get while still intact. Even in the case of vast repositories of a nation’s cultural heritage, you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.
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.
Look, I’ve never been a fan of Kevin Smith’s ooooooov-rah, per se, but I will never criticize his ability to spin a bloody good yarn. He’s funny, engaging, charming, and knows his pop culture. WIRED also knows this, so when on the eve of the (apparently very good) Spider-verse movie, they called on Smith to sit down and run through every Spider-man Movie and TV Show and opinionate all over that mess. (And because Sony’s contract with the Marvel superhero is up, this might be a nice demarcation line.)
I stepped on board the Spidey-train when he appeared as a character on PBS’ The Electric Company, the educational kids show that would screen after Sesame Street. As Smith points out, this Spidey was mute, a red and blue mime who only spoke in thought balloons, some of which others could literally read as they hung above his head.
Around the same time the ‘60s cartoon was also screening, copying the rogue’s gallery of villains well known from the Steve Ditko-Stan Lee comic book. Both this and the Electric Company Spideys had the best theme songs, and they still haven’t been topped. (If you’re a Gen‑X’er, you can drop the lyrics on request, anytime).
Now, before this, there had been a few live action attempts to bring the wall-crawler to the big screen but, well, they’re as cheesy and not-good as you might expect, so for the period during the ‘90s, Spider-man stayed an animated concern. The highlight of the ’94-’98 animated series, according to Smith, is the final meta episode, where Spider-man crosses over into “our” reality and meets Stan Lee, while Lee’s wife Joan played Madame Web.
Interestingly, Smith glosses over the three other animated series that have run since then because of the beginning of live-action Spider-man films made with the power and money of the modern blockbuster. (Interesting, I say, because critics are now declaring the new animated film the best of the bunch).
Smith isn’t wild about the first Sam Raimi film in 2002. He questions the decision to cover up emotive actor Willem Dafoe with a Green Goblin mask for the final battle. However, he not only likes the sequel, but calls it “one of the greatest superhero films ever made” because it never loses sight of the man behind the Spidey mask.
He chastises Sony for the needless 2012 reboot, just five years from the final film in the Raimi trilogy. His problem: Garfield’s Spider-man is great, his Peter Parker is not. The opposite is true with McGuire.
Finally, they got it right with Tom Holland’s version in Avengers: Civil War, that mix of geeky student by day, cocky quipster by night. Plus, as Smith points out, they gave him his Queens accent back. (Marvel comics, at least the first couple of years, was always entrenched in a real New York City as background.)
“The real charm of that character…is that he’s covered from head-to-toe,” Kevin says, paraphrasing Stan Lee. “You don’t know who he is or what he is. You don’t know if he’s a boy, a girl, you don’t know what he is, what race, creed, color, anything. So any kid reading that book can see themselves as the character.”
And that leads us to the current film, which Smith can tell you about himself. It follows that universality of the character and explodes it out to a bunch of alternative universe versions of all races, genders, and genus.
“We live in such a golden era (for comic book movies),” Smith declares and even in a world of Marvel burnout, you want to believe him. Maybe the new film is the way forward: more diversity, more fun, more talking animals.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
Quick way to date yourself: name the first Beastie Boys album you bought (or heard). If you somehow got your hands on an original pressing of their first single “Cooky Puss”—released in 1981 when the then-foursome was a New York hardcore band—congratulations, you’re a legend. If you first bought 1986’s Licensed to Ill—their major label debut and coming-out as a crude rap-rock parody threesome (minus fired drummer Kate Schellenbach), precision-engineered to freak your parents out—congrats, you’re old.
In whatever era you discovered them—Paul’s Boutique, Check Your Head, Ill Communication… maybe even their last album, 2011’s Hot Sauce Committee Part Two—you discovered a different Beasties than the previous generation did. Over the course of their 30-year career, the trio evolved and matured, grew up and got down with new grooves to suit new audiences. That’s always been a very good thing.
As Mike D, Ad-Rock, and MCA—three personalities as distinctive as the three Stooges—got better at what they did, they transcended the misogynist, meatheaded mid-eighties incarnation they came to look back on with embarrassment and apology. “We got so caught up with making fun of that rock-star persona,” writes Adam Horowitz (Ad-Rock) in the huge new Beasties memoir, “that we became that persona. Became what we hated.”
Rob Harvilla calls these very genuine moments of self-reflection the best parts of the book. But with so many stories over so many years, so much brilliant writing, and so many guest appearances from celebrity Beastie Boy fans, that’s a tough call. “Part memoir, part photo-heavy zine, part fan-appreciation testimonial… and part sincere apology,” the book seems both fresh and made to order and a veritable buffet table of nostalgia. Or, as Amy Poehler puts it in her intro to a section on their videos: “These days, their music makes me feel young and old at the same time.”
Behind the silliness and sincerity there is mourning for third Beastie Adam Yauch (MCA), who died of cancer in 2012 and whose voice is conspicuously absent from the book. Yet the two remaining members choose not to dwell. “You brace for the heartbreaking account of Yauch’s diagnosis and death,” Harvilla writes, “but those details go undiscussed. ‘Too fucking sad to writing about’ is all Horovitz has to say.’” The prevailing atmosphere is celebratory, like any good Beastie Boys album—this one a party full of adult peers looking back, laughing, and wincing at their younger selves.
The voices on the page are so vivid you can squint and almost hear them (at one point Horovitz describes unwinding a cassette tape as “pulling 60 minutes of wet fettuccine out of a dog’s mouth”). But we don’t have to imagine what they sound like. Along with the 571-page hardbound cinderblock of a book, the band has released what Rolling Stone hails as the “audiobook of the year,” a “brilliant 13-hour radio play” in which Mike D and Ad-Rock are joined by a majorly star-studded cast of guest readers including Snoop Dogg, Kim Gordon, Steve Buscemi, Chloë Sevigny, Wanda Sykes, Jon Stewart, Ben Stiller, and Bette Midler (that’s just the very short list).
New York hip hop legends LL Cool J, Chuck D, and Rev Run (of Run DMC) show up, as does Brooklyn acting legend Rosie Perez and non-New Yorkers Exene Cervenka and Elvis Costello. (See the full cast list at Audible.) It’s not a memoir, it’s a mixtape. Hear excerpts from the audio book in the SoundCloud clips above and buy it online, or download it for free through Audible.com’s 30-day free trial program. Guaranteed, no matter what age you are, to make you feel young and old at the same time.
Donovan’s “Hurdy Gurdy Man” may be the creepiest song ever written about an obscure medieval instrument (made all the more so by its use in David Fincher’s Zodiac), but the Hurdy Gurdy did not give his recording its ominous sound. Those droning notes come from an Indian tanpura. Yet they evoke the title instrument, an ingenious musical invention “set up primarily for the purpose of making drones,” Case Western Reserve’s College of Art and Sciences explains. “In the Middle Ages, it was known in Latin as the organistrum and the symphonia, and in French as the vielle à roue (the vielle with the wheel).”
With a sound produced by a “rosined wooden wheel, turned by a crank” that set “a number of strings in continuous droning vibration,” the hurdy gurdy can, it’s true, give off a bit of a folk horror vibe. From its very early, maybe 10th or 11th century origins in liturgical music, hurdy gurdy expert Jim Kendros tells us in the video above, the instrument became associated with European folk music, shrinking from a beast played by two people to more portable dimensions, about the size of a large guitar and resembling a hand-cranked violin with keys for playing melodies on certain strings.
Though it grew smaller and more maneuverable, however, the instrument grew no less complicated. Kendros calls it “the equivalent of a medieval spaceship,” with its more than 80 moving parts.
The hurdy gurdy, or “wheel fiddle,” played in the TED Talk above by Caroline Phillips looks less like a fiddle, or a spaceship, and more like a medieval keytar—just one of the many shapes the instrument could take. All of them, however, had one important feature in common: the hurdy gurdy is “the only musical instrument that uses a crank to turn a wheel to rub strings like the bow of a violin to produce music.” Historically, it was used in medieval dance music “because of the uniqueness of the melody combined with the acoustic boom box” of its large body. Try not to shake your body, or to shiver, when Phillips plays a haunting, droning Basque folk song.
The Hurdy Gurdy spread all over Europe, from Britain to France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Hungary, and Sweden, where stringed-instrument enthusiasts The Stringdom caught up with virtuoso Hurdy Gurdy player Johannes Geworkian Hellman. He tells us how the hurdy gurdy and its droning sonic cousin, the bagpipes, set off “an early folk revival” as composers took inspiration from peasant music. The interest from medieval upper classes meant better luthiers and higher-quality hurdy gurdies. Now modern interest in the Hurdy Gurdy is growing. While it may take two to three years to handcraft one, “a lot of new instruments are getting made,” says Hellman.
Should you doubt that the 1000-year old hurdy gurdy can still sound hip, listen to Hellman play an electrified version in his hurdy gurdy/accordion duo, Symbio, or hurdy gurdy/dulcimer two-piece, Maija & Johannes. He coaxes from the instrument such a range of rhythms and timbres that it’s easy to see why it was so immensely popular for so long. Yet for all its musical appeal, it is a complex machine, difficult to tune and subject to any number of mechanical problems. Not for the casual amateur, the instrument still requires a dedicated Hurdy Gurdy man or woman to make it sing—a much more common sight than in Donovan’s day but an exceedingly rare one compared to the many centuries of the hurdy gurdy’s heyday. See more hurdy gurdies at the Vintage News.
In 1896, Thomas Edison produced The Kiss. One of the first films ever commercially screened, it adapts the then-popular musical The Widow Jones — or at least it adapts about twenty seconds of it, a kiss that happens in the very last scene. Two years later came the equally short but differently groundbreaking Something Good – Negro Kiss, a version of The Kiss starring black actors instead of white ones. Only now, thanks in part to the efforts of University of Southern California archivist Dino Everett and University of Chicago Cinema and Media Studies professor Allyson Nadia Field, has it received proper recognition as the first such kiss on film.
“To uncover the origins of Everett’s footage, Field relied on inventory and distribution catalogs, tracing the film to Chicago,” writes UChicago News’ Jack Wang. “This was where William Selig —a vaudeville performer turned film producer — had shot it on his knockoff of a Lumière Cinématographe. That camera produced the telltale perforation marks which had tipped Everett off to the print’s age.”
With support from the Museum of Modern Art, writes Hyperallergic’s Jasmine Weber, “Field not only identified the filmmaker, but the performers: Saint Suttle and Gertie Brown. Suttle is dressed in a dapper suit and bowtie, while Brown dons an ornate dress — costumes that Field says were typical of minstrel performers.”
“What makes this film so remarkable is that if you look at films from this period that feature African-Americans, first of all, most of them are white actors in blackface,” says Field in the NPR segment above. “They are caricatures. They’re certainly racist. They feature racist tropes like watermelon-eating contests and things like that. The American screen was incredibly hostile to African-Americans for much of its history,” but Something Good — Negro Kiss “refutes those kind of caricatures and asserts an image of humanity and of love.”
That image has received quite a response on the internet as the clip has circulated in the week since its induction into the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry alongside the likes of The Shining, Monterey Pop, Brokeback Mountain, The Lady from Shanghai, and Jurassic Park. One lawyer-slash-critic even brought this piece of early cinema together with a piece of current cinema, mashing it up with the score of Barry Jenkins’ just-released James Baldwin adaptation If Beale Street Could Talk. Selig, Suttle, and Brown must have known full well that they were making something new. But did they know they were also making history?
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.
For two millennia, Euclid’s Elements, the foundational ancient work on geometry by the famed Greek mathematician, was required reading for educated people. (The “classically educated” read them in the original Greek.) The influence of the Elements in philosophy and mathematics cannot be overstated; so inspiring are Euclid’s proofs and axioms that Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote a sonnet in his honor. But over time, Euclid’s principles were streamlined into textbooks, and the Elements was read less and less.
In 1847, maybe sensing that the popularity of Euclid’s text was fading, Irish professor of mathematics Oliver Byrne worked with London publisher William Pickering to produce his own edition of the Elements, or half of it, with original illustrations that carefully explain the text.
“Byrne’s edition was one of the first multicolor printed books,” writes designer Nicholas Rougeux. “The precise use of colors and diagrams meant that the book was very challenging and expensive to reproduce.” It met with little notice at the time.
Byrne’s edition—The First Six Books of The Elements of Euclid in which Coloured Diagrams and Symbols are Used Instead of Letters for the Greater Ease of Learners—might have passed into obscurity had a reference to it in Edward Tufte’s Envisioning Informationnot sparked renewed interest. From there followed a beautiful new edition by TASCHEN and an article on Byrne’s diagrams in mathematics journal Convergence. Rougeux picked up the thread and decided to create an online version. “Like others,” he writes, “I was drawn to its beautiful diagrams and typography.” He has done both of those features ample justice.
As in another of Rougeux’s online reproductions—his Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours—the designer has taken a great deal of care to preserve the original intentions while adapting the book to the web. In this case, that means the spelling (including the use of the long s), typeface (Caslon), stylized initial capitals, and Byrne’s alternate designs for mathematical symbols have all been retained. But Rougeux has also made the diagrams interactive, “with clickable shapes to aid in understanding the shapes being referenced.”
He has also turned all of those lovely diagrams into an attractive poster you can hang on the wall for quick reference or as a conversation piece, though this semaphore-like arrangement of illustrations—like the simplified Euclid in modern textbooks—cannot replace or supplant the original text. You can read Euclid in ancient Greek (see a primer here), in Latin and Arabic, in English translations here, here, here, and many other places and languages as well.
For an experience that combines, however, the best of ancient wisdom and modern information technology—from both the 19th and the 21st centuries—Rougeux’s free, online edition of Byrne’s Euclid can’t be beat. Learn more about the meticulous process of recreating Byrne’s text and diagrams (illustrated above) here.
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