If you don’t much care for modern medicine, entire industries have arisen to provide you with more “alternative” or “natural” varieties of remedies, mostly involving the consumption of plants. Publishers have put out guides to their use by the dozens. In a way, those books have a place in a long tradition, stretching back to a time well before modern medicine existed as something to be an alternative to. Just recently, the British Library digitized the oldest such volume, a thousand-year-old illuminated manuscript known as the Cotton MS Vitellius C III. The book, writes the British Library’s Alison Hudson, “is the only surviving illustrated Old English herbal, or book describing plants and their uses.” (The sole condition note: “leaves damaged by fire in 1731.”)
The manuscript’s Old English is actually the translation of “a text which used to be attributed to a 4th-century writer known as Pseudo-Apuleius, now recognized as several different Late Antique authors whose texts were subsequently combined.” It also includes “translations of Late Antique texts on the medicinal properties of badgers” and another text “on medicines derived from parts of four-legged animals.”
(Somehow one doesn’t imagine those latter sections playing quite as well with today’s alternative-medicine market.) Each entry about a plant or animal features “its name in various languages; descriptions of ailments it can be used to treat; and instructions for finding and preparing it.”
Quite a few of the species with which the guide deals would have been directly known to few or no Anglo-Saxons in those days, and some of the entries, such as the one describing dragonswort as ideally “grown in dragon’s blood,” seem more fanciful than others. As with many a Medieval work, the book freely mixes fact and lore: to pick the mandrake root (pictured at the top of the post), “said to shine at night and to flee from impure persons,” the guide recommends “an iron tool (to dig around it), an ivory staff (to dig the plant itself up), a dog (to help you pull it out), and quick reflexes.” You can behold these and other pages of the Cotton MS Vitellius C III in zoomable high resolution at the British Library’s online manuscript viewer. While the remedies themselves might never have been particularly effective, their accompanying illustrations do remain strange and amusing even a millennium later — and isn’t laughter supposed to be the best medicine?
There are bands one casually encounters through greatest hits or breakthrough albums, on which they sound exactly like themselves and no one else. It’s impossible to imagine anyone but Fleetwood Mac making Rumors or Tusk. Or anyone but Pink Floyd recording Wish You Were Here or Dark Side of the Moon. But just like Fleetwood Mac, when we look back before Floyd’s best-known work, we find, as Mark Blake writes at Team Rock, that “they were a very different proposition.”
And yet it wasn’t that Pink Floyd radically shuffled the lineup—though they had, since their first album, lost founding singer and guitarist Syd Barrett to mental illness and taken on David Gilmour to replace him. It’s that the same four musicians who re-invented psych-rock in the early 70s with “Money,” “Time,” and “Great Gig in the Sky,” sounded nothing like that blues/funk/disco/prog hybrid in the late 60s. Some of the same elements were there—the sardonic sense of humor, love for sound effects and extended jam sessions—but they cohered in much more alien and experimental shapes.
The title track of 1968’s Saucerful of Secrets, for example, opens with four minutes of dissonant horror-movie organ drones, which give way to primal drumming around which piano chords and sci-fi noises fall haphazardly, then resolve in a closing wordless choral passage. Not a single, cynical lyric about the pains of modern life to be found. The following year’s Ummagumma continued to build the band’s experimental foundations, and in-between these projects, they recorded film soundtracks that, again, do not make one think of laser-lit arena rock shows.
But there is plenty of connective tissue between the various phases of Floyd, much of it, like the bulk of their 1970 soundtrack for Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, officially unreleased. We can add to that list an attempted album called Household Objects, which they began in 1970 and abandoned in ’74. The project, drummer Nick Mason admitted, represents the then-largely-instrumental band “still looking for a coherent direction,” and in so doing, abandoning instruments altogether. On Household Objects, they made serendipitous discoveries using—as the title clearly stated—found sounds, in the vein of John Cage or the avant-garde composers of musique concrete.
In 1971, Abbey Road studios tape operator John Leckie, who went on to produce the heavily Floyd-influenced Muse, remembers the band “making chords up from the tapping of beer bottles, tearing newspapers for rhythm, and letting off aerosol cans to get a hi-hat sound.” Keyboardist Richard Wright recalls spending “days getting a pencil and a rubber band till it sounded like a bass.” The idea began two years earlier when the band performed a composition called Work that “involved,” writes Blake, “sawing wood and boiling kettles on stage.”
Household Objects recording sessions, writes Rolling Stone, “consisted of Pink Floyd playing songs on hand mixers, light bulbs, wood saws, hammers, brooms and other home appliances. Recording in this manner was excruciating.” Wright and Gilmour grew exasperated and the band moved on to other things, namely Wish You Were Here. All that seemingly remains of Household Objects are the two tracks here, “The Hard Way” (an instance where rubber bands sound like a bass) and “Wine Glasses,” the latter employing, you guessed it, wine glasses. But like so much of Floyd’s lesser-known or forgotten experimental work, these sessions created the backdrop for their more accessible hits. “Wine Glasses” survived in “Shine on You Crazy Diamond.” In the video just above, you can see David Gilmour work out the glass arrangements for his performance of the song in the 2006 Royal Albert Hall concert film Remember That Night.
Earlier this summer, artists painted a 10-story high mural of Muddy Waters in the heart of Chicago. Now, Philadelphia answered with a mural of its own, right at the corner of 29th and Diamond. There, you’ll find a giant painting of John Coltrane by artist Ernel Martinez, which takes visual cues from another Coltrane mural that graced the side of a Philly building from 2002 until 2014.
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When you think of the accomplishments of the Islamic world, what comes to mind? For most of this century so far, at least in the West, the very notion has had associations in many minds with not creation but destruction. In 2002, mathematician Keith Devlin lamented how “the word Islam conjures up images of fanatical terrorists flying jet airplanes full of people into buildings full of even more people” and “the word Baghdad brings to mind the unscrupulous and decidedly evil dictator Saddam Hussein.” Ironically, writes Devlin, “the culture that these fanatics claim to represent when they set about trying to destroy the modern world of science and technology was in fact the cradle in which that tradition was nurtured. As mathematicians, we are all children of Islam.”
You don’t have to dig deep into history to discover the connection between Islam and mathematics; you can simply see it. “In Islamic culture, geometry is everywhere,” says the narrator of the brief TED-Ed lesson above. “You can find it in mosques, madrasas, palaces, and private homes.”
Scripted by writer and consultant on Islamic design Eric Broug, the video breaks down the complex, abstract geometric patterns found everywhere in Islamic art and design, from its “intricate floral motifs adorning carpets and textiles to patterns of tilework that seem to repeat infinitely, inspiring wonder and contemplation of eternal order.”
And the tools used to render these visions of eternity? Nothing more advanced than a compass and a ruler, Broug explains, used to first draw a circle, divide that circle up, draw lines to construct repeating shapes like petals or stars, and keep intact the grid underlying the whole pattern. The process of repeating a geometric pattern on a grid, called tessellation, may seen familiar indeed to fans of the mathematically minded artist M.C. Escher, who used the very same process to demonstrate what wondrous artistic results can emerge from the use of simple basic patterns. In fact, Escher’s Dutch countryman Broug once wrote an essay on the connections between his art and that of the Islamic world for the exhibit Escher Meets Islamic Art at Amsterdam’s Tropenmuseum.
Escher first encountered tessellations on a trip to the Islamic world himself, in the “colorful abstract decorations in the 14th century Alhambra, the well-known palace and fortress complex in Southern Spain,” writes Al.Arte’s Aya Johanna Daniëlle Dürst Britt. “Although he visited the Alhambra in 1922 after his graduation as a graphic artist, he was already interested in geometry, symmetry and tessellations for some years.” His fascinations included “the effect of color on the visual perspective, causing some motifs to seem infinite — an effect partly caused by symmetry.” His second visit to Alhambra, in 1936, solidified his understanding of the principles of tessellation, and he would go on to base about a hundred of his own pieces on the patterns he saw there. Those who seek the door to infinity understand that any tradition may hold the keys.
The phone gives us a lot but it takes away three key elements of discovery: loneliness, uncertainty and boredom. Those have always been where creative ideas come from. — Lynda Barry
She demanded that all participating staff members surrender their phones and other such personal devices.
Her victims were as jangled by this prospect as your average iPhone-addicted teen, but surrendered, agreeing to write by hand, another antiquated notion Barry subscribes to:
The delete button makes it so that anything you’re unsure of you can get rid of, so nothing new has a chance. Writing by hand is a revelation for people. Maybe that’s why they asked me to NASA – I still know how to use my hands… there is a different way of thinking that goes along with them.
Barry—who told the Onion’s AV Club that she crafted her book What It Is with an eye toward bored readers stuck in a Jiffy Lube oil-change waiting room—is also a big proponent of doodling, which she views as a creative neurological response to boredom:
Boring meeting, you have a pen, the usual clowns are yakking. Most people will draw something, even people who can’t draw. I say “If you’re bored, what do you draw?” And everybody has something they draw. Like “Oh yeah, my little guy, I draw him.” Or “I draw eyeballs, or palm trees.” … So I asked them “Why do you think you do that? Why do you think you doodle during those meetings?” I believe that it’s because it makes having to endure that particular situation more bearable, by changing our experience of time. It’s so slight. I always say it’s the difference between, if you’re not doodling, the minutes feel like a cheese grater on your face. But if you are doodling, it’s more like Brillo. It’s not much better, but there is a difference. You could handle Brillo a little longer than the cheese grater.
Meetings and classrooms are among the few remaining venues in which screen-addicted moths are expected to force themselves away from the phone’s inviting flame. Other settings—like the Jiffy Lube waiting room—require more initiative on the user’s part.
Once, we were keener students of minor changes to familiar environments, the books strangers were reading in the subway, and those strangers themselves. Our subsequent observations were known to spark conversation and sometimes ideas that led to creative projects.
Now, many of us let those opportunities slide by, as we fill up on such fleeting confections as Candy Crush, funny videos, and all-you-can-eat servings of social media.
It’s also tempting to use our phones as defacto shields any time social anxiety looms. This dodge may provide short term comfort, especially to younger people, but remember, Barry and many of her cartoonist peers, including Daniel Clowes, Simon Hanselmann, and Ariel Schrag, toughed it out by making art. That’s what got them through the loneliness, uncertainty, and boredom of their middle and high school years.
The book you hold in your hands would not exist had high school been a pleasant experience for me… It was on those quiet weekend nights when even my parents were out having fun that I began making serious attempts to make stories in comics form.
Barry is far from alone in encouraging adults to peel themselves away from their phone dependency for their creative good.
Photographer Eric Pickersgill’sRemoved imagines a series of everyday situations in which phones and other personal devices have been rendered invisible. (It’s worth noting that he removed the offending articles from the models’ hands, rather that Photoshopping them out later.)
Computer Science Professor Calvin Newport’s recent book, Deep Work, posits that all that shallow phone time is creating stress, anxiety, and lost creative opportunities, while also doing a number on our personal and professional lives.
Author Manoush Zomorodi’s recent TED Talk on how boredom can lead to brilliant ideas, below, details a weeklong experiment in battling smartphone habits, with lots of scientific evidence to back up her findings.
But what if you wipe the slate of digital distractions only to find that your brain’s just… empty? A once occupied room, now devoid of anything but dimly recalled memes, and generalized dread over the state of the world?
The aforementioned 2010 AV Club interview with Barry offers both encouragement and some useful suggestions that will get the temporarily paralyzed moving again:
I don’t know what the strip’s going to be about when I start. I never know. I oftentimes have—I call it the word-bag. Just a bag of words. I’ll just reach in there, and I’ll pull out a word, and it’ll say “ping-pong.” I’ll just have that in my head, and I’ll start drawing the pictures as if I can… I hear a sentence, I just hear it. As soon as I hear even the beginning of the first sentence, then I just… I write really slow. So I’ll be writing that, and I’ll know what’s going to go at the top of the panel. Then, when it gets to the end, usually I’ll know what the next one is. By three sentences or four in that first panel, I stop, and then I say “Now it’s time for the drawing.” Then I’ll draw. But then I’ll hear the next one over on another page! Or when I’m drawing Marlys and Arna, I might hear her say something, but then I’ll hear Marlys say something back. So once that first sentence is there, I have all kinds of choices as to where I put my brush. But if nothing is happening, then I just go over to what I call my decoy page. It’s like decoy ducks. I go over there and just start messing around.
Art, philosophy, literature and history–that’s mainly what we discuss around here. We’re about enriching the mind. But we’re not opposed to helping you enrich yourself in a more literal way too.
Recently, Business Insider Italy asked us to review our longer list of 1600 MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) and create a short list of 20 courses that can help you advance your career. And, with the help of Coursera and edX, the two top MOOC providers, we whittled things down to the following list.
Above, you’ll find the introductory video for Design Thinking for Innovation, a course from the University of Virginia. Other courses come from such top institutions as Yale, MIT, the University of Michigan and Columbia University. Topics include everything from business fundamentals, to negotiation and decision making, to corporate finance, strategy, marketing and accounting.
One tip to keep in mind. If you want to take a course for free, select the “Full Course, No Certificate” or “Audit” option when you enroll. If you would like an official certificate documenting that you have successfully completed the course, you will need to pay a fee. Here’s the list:
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It can seem that the writing of literature and the theory of literature occupy separate great houses, Game of Thrones-style, or even separate countries held apart by a great sea. Perhaps they war with each other, perhaps they studiously ignore each other or obliquely interact at tournaments with acronymic names like MLA and AWP. Like Thomas Pynchon’s characterization of the political right and left, scholars and writers represent opposing poles, the hothouse and the street. That rare beast, the academic poet, can seem like something of a unicorn, or dragon.
…Or like the ominous talking raven in Edgar Allan Poe’s most famous of poems.
The divide between theory and practice is a recent development, a product of state budgeting, political brinksmanship, the relentless publishing mills of academia that force scholars to find a pigeonhole and stay there.… In days past, poets and scholar/theorists frequently occupied the same place at the same time—Wallace Stevens, T.S. Eliot, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Shelley, and, of course, Poe, whose perennially popular “The Raven” serves as a point-by-point illustration for his theory of composition just as thoroughly as Eliot’s great works bear out his notion of the “objective correlative.”
Poe’s object, the titular creature, is an “archetypal symbol,” writes Dana Gioia, in a poem that aims for what its author calls a “unity of effect.” In his 1846 essay “The Philosophy of Composition,” Poe the poet/theorist tells us in great detail how “The Raven” satisfies all of his other criteria for literature as well, such as achieving its intent in a single sitting, using a repeated refrain, and so on.
Should we have any doubt about how much Poe wanted us to see the poem as the deliberate outcome of a conceptual scheme, we find him three years later, in 1849, the year of his death, delivering a lecture on the “Poetic Principle,” and concluding with a reading of “The Raven.”
John Moncure Daniel of the Richmond Semi-Weekly Examiner remarked after attending one of these talks that “the attention of many in this city is now directed to this singular performance.” At that point, Poe, who hardly made a dime from “The Raven,” had to suffer the indignity of having all of his work go out of print during his brief, unhappy lifetime. Moncure and the Examiner thereby furnished readers “with the only correct copy ever published,” previous appearances, it seems, having contained punctuation errors.
Nonetheless, for all of Poe’s pedantry and penury, “The Raven“ ‘s first appearances made him semi-famous. His readings were a sensation, and it’s a sure bet that his audiences came to hear him read the poem, not deliver a lecture on its principles. Oh, for some proto-Edison in the room with an early recording device. What would it be like to hear the mournful, grief-stricken, alcoholic genius—master of the macabre and inventor of the detective story—intone the raven’s enigmatic “Nevermore”?
While Poe’s speaking voice has receded irretrievably into history, his poetic voice may live close to forever. So mesmerizing are his meter and diction that many great actors known especially for their voices have become possessed by “The Raven.”
Finally, we would be remiss not to mention The Simpsons’ James Earl Jones-narrated parody, a worthy teaching tool for distracted young visual learners. Is it a shame that we now think of “The Raven” as a Halloween yarn fit for the Treehouse of Horror or any number of enjoyable exercises in spooky oratory—rather than the theoretical thought experiment its author seemed to intend? Does Poe rotisserie in his grave as Homer snores in a wingback chair? Probably. But as the author told us himself at length, the poem works! It still never fails to excite our morbid curiosity, enchant our gothic sensibility, and maybe send a chill or two down the spine. Maybe we never really needed Poe to explain it to us.
As curator David Gonzales explains above, he and the 54 Hemingway cats have no plans to evacuate. They’re going to ride out the storm and protect the novelist’s historic home. We wish them all the best. The same goes to all of our friends in Florida. We’ll see you when the storm passes.
Those of us who can’t study in person with an educator whose department chair called her “the best classroom teacher” that he’s ever seen can happily follow along online.
As always, her handwritten homework assignments will be posted to her Nearsighted Monkey tumblr account, along with in-class reflections and inspirational bits and bobs pulled off the Internet.
The first task, familiar to readers of her Syllabusworkbook, is to begin a daily diary practice, filling in a template frame of Barry’s own devising.
Begin by putting your phone on airplane mode. “The phone gives us a lot but it takes away three key elements of discovery: loneliness, uncertainty and boredom,” she stated last year, on a visit to NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. “Those have always been where creative ideas come from.”
Amen.
Any one of the exercises will renew your powers of observation and sense of connection with the world around you. Don’t be surprised if you find yourself getting up early or skipping some must-see TV in order to fully comply with Professor Skeletor’s feel-good assignments. There are no wrong answers, provided you go at the assignments with energy and a willingness to play. As Barry said in an interview:
Because we tend to give up on the arts so early in life, I became really interested in what would happen if we reintroduce the arts without the thought of ‘you’re going to do this to become a great writer or painter,’ but rather that it might help people with the other work in their field.
For added value, complete your first daily diary frame to an audio recording of Barry’s timed instruction here. (Ignore the background noise of your teacher’s life—her sneezing cat, her happy pet birds—or better yet, let her household’s zesty energy seep into your work.)
Rebellious dwarfs, crazed conquistadors, delusional tycoons, wood-carving ski jumpers: Werner Herzog scholars who attempt to find a pattern in the filmmaker’s choices of subject matter are virtually guaranteed an interesting search, if an ultimately futile one. But they must all start in the same place: Herzog’s very first film Herakles, which mashes up the spectacles of body building, auto racing, and destruction. It does all that in nine minutes to a soundtrack of saxophone jazz, and with frequent references to the titular hero of myth, whom you may know better by his Roman name of Hercules.
“Would he clean the Augean stables?” ask Herakles’ subtitles over footage of one young German man showing off his well-shaped torso. “Would he dispose of the Lernaean Hydra?” they ask of another as he strikes a pose.
Between clips of these bodybuilders performing their labors and questions about whether they could perform those of Hercules, we see militaristic marches, falling bombs, heaps of rubble, and a 1955 racecar crash at Le Mans that killed 83 people. All this juxtaposition tempts us to ask what message the nineteen-year-old Herzog wanted to deliver, but, as in all his subsequent work, he surely wanted less to make an articulable point than to explore the possibilities of cinema itself.
More recently, in Paul Cronin’s interview book Herzog on Herzog, the filmmaker looks back on “my first blunder, Herakles” and finds it “rather stupid and pointless, though at the time it was an important test for me. It taught me about editing together very diverse material that would not normally sit comfortably as a whole,” and in a sense prepared him for an entire cinematic career of very diverse material that would not normally sit comfortably as a whole. “For me it was fascinating to edit material together that had such separate and individual lives. The film was some kind of an apprenticeship for me. I just felt it would be better to make a film than go to film school” — of the non-rogue variety, anyway.
I’ve never wanted to start a sentence with “I’m old enough to remember…” because, well, who does? But here we are. I remember the enormously successful Apple IIe and Commodore 64, and a world before Microsoft. Smart phones were science fiction. To do much more than word process or play games one had to learn a programming language. These ancient days seemed at the time—and in hindsight as well—to be the very dawn of computing. Before the personal computer, such devices were the size of kitchen appliances and were hidden away in military installations, universities, and NASA labs.
But of course we all know that the history of computing goes far beyond the early 80s: at least back to World War II, and perhaps even much farther. Do we begin with the abacus, the 2,200-Year-Old Antikythera Mechanism, the astrolabe, Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage? The question is maybe one of definitions. In the short, animated video above, physicist, science writer, and YouTube educator Dominic Walliman defines the computer according to its basic binary function of “just flipping zeros and ones,” and he begins his condensed history of computer science with tragic genius Alan Turing of Turing Test and Bletchley Park codebreaking fame.
Turing’s most significant contribution to computing came from his 1936 concept of the “Turing Machine,” a theoretical mechanism that could, writes the Cambridge Computer Laboratory “simulate ANY computer algorithm, no matter how complicated it is!” All other designs, says Walliman—apart from a quantum computer—are equivalent to the Turing Machine, “which makes it the foundation of computer science.” But since Turing’s time, the simple design has come to seem endlessly capable of adaptation and innovation.
Walliman illustrates the computer’s exponential growth by pointing out that a smart phone has more computing power than the entire world possessed in 1963, and that the computing capability that first landed astronauts on the moon is equal to “a couple of Nintendos” (first generation classic consoles, judging by the image). But despite the hubris of the computer age, Walliman points out that “there are some problems which, due to their very nature, can never be solved by a computer” either because of the degree of uncertainty involved or the degree of inherent complexity. This fascinating, yet abstract discussion is where Walliman’s “Map of Computer Science” begins, and for most of us this will probably be unfamiliar territory.
We’ll feel more at home once the map moves from the region of Computer Theory to that of Computer Engineering, but while Walliman covers familiar ground here, he does not dumb it down. Once we get to applications, we’re in the realm of big data, natural language processing, the internet of things, and “augmented reality.” From here on out, computer technology will only get faster, and weirder, despite the fact that the “underlying hardware is hitting some hard limits.” Certainly this very quick course in Computer Science only makes for an introductory survey of the discipline, but like Wallman’s other maps—of mathematics, physics, and chemistry—this one provides us with an impressive visual overview of the field that is both broad and specific, and that we likely wouldn’t encounter anywhere else.
As with his other maps, Walliman has made this the Map of Computer Science available as a poster, perfect for dorm rooms, living rooms, or wherever else you might need a reminder.
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