Month: December 2011

Digitized art

this is an extremely impressive effort. over 100k paintings in the UK have been digitized, out of 200k total. you’d have to visit 1000s of museums to get similar breadth, and most of these paintings are not on display anyway.

The most ambitious digitization project I’ve ever heard of is halfway to its goal of putting every single publicly owned oil painting (plus tempera and acrylic) in the United Kingdom online. A joint effort of the Public Catalogue Foundation and the BBC, Your Paintings now has 104K artworks by the likes of Degas and Rubens uploaded to the website out of an estimated 200K. It’s the first national online art museum ever attempted. Just to give you a sense of the scale, there are only 3000 paintings in the immense National Gallery.

77 ka Mattresses

the bed bugs problem was taken care of by burning the place to the ground, for 44 ka.

A team of archaeologists has discovered 40 ka worth of mattresses stacked in South Africa’s Sibudu cave, 40 km north of Durban. Our Stone Age ancestors made bedding from leaves, seeds and stems of local rushes and grasses on the floor of the cave starting 77 ka ago. For the next 44 ka, nomadic Homo sapiens hunted and gathered in the area using Sibudu as their crash pad, compacting the plant material to create sleeping mats.

New York Songlines

To this end I offer these as the New York Songlines. An oral culture uses song as the most efficient way to remember and transmit large amounts of information; the Web is our technological society’s closest equivalent. NASDAQ Times Square by aa440, on FlickrEach Songline will follow a single pathway, whether it goes by one name or several; the streets go from river to river, while the avenues stop at 59th Street, which is my upper limit for the time being. I’ve long since gone beyond the parts of Manhattan with which I have any real personal knowledge, making tips from readers increasingly important.

creating reference points by telling stories.