The 36 Views of Mount Fuji is a series of woodblock prints created between 1826 and 1833 by Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai. Popular in the West, it’s one of the most well known Japanese art works due the widespread pop-culture reproduction of The Great Wave of Kanagawa (the first picture in the series) into posters, t-shirts and postcards.

On Ukiyo-e - Japanese Woodblock Prints

The term Ukiyo-e refers to ‘pictures of the floating world‘, a blossoming urban culture embodied by the lifestyles of the cultural bourgeoisie. The novelist Asai Ryoi provided a definition of the ‘floating life’ in his 1661 novel Tales of the Floating World (Ukiyo-monogatari):

“Living only for the moment, savoring the moon, the snow, the cherry blossoms and the maple leaves, singing songs, loving sake, women and poetry, letting oneself drift, buoyant and carefree, like a gourd carried along with the river current.”

Woodblock prints became popular in the Edo period during the second half of the 17th century. Mass produced for townsmen and common folk, its subject matter originally began with city life and culture before evolving into the topic of landscapes. Like almost all mediums, ukiyo-e was also used to produce sexually explicit images (shunga) and satire.

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In case you’re flying, know the safest place to sit in case of a plane crash.

Passengers sitting in the aisle seats near the front of an airliner and within five rows of the emergency exit are more likely to survive a crash or a fire, new research claims.

The discovery was made after an exhaustive study of 105 accidents including personal accounts from almost 2,000 survivors of how they managed to escape from crash landings and on-board fires.

Predictably the safest seats are in the emergency exit rows themselves with those afforded the quickest exit being in the aisle seats.

But it also discovered that sitting at the front of the aircraft had a 65 per cent chance of survival during a fire compared with 58 per cent for other passengers.

Today I read about Lebbus Woods, an architect whom the New York Times called an artist unshackled by limits of the real world. My interest in him was kindled by the fact that he was portrayed as an anti-commercial outcast in the architecture world, someone who was more interested in theory and the fantastical. The aggressive manga-like image (see above) of a proposal for an abandoned Berlin building, also gave him some dystopian cred. This guy is interesting.

This particular quote from his Wikipedia page gives some insight into his method:

Architecture and war are not incompatible. Architecture is war. War is architecture. I am at war with my time, with history, with all authority that resides in fixed and frightened forms. I am one of millions who do not fit in, who have no home, no family, no doctrine, no firm place to call my own, no known beginning or end, no “sacred and primordial site.”

I declare war on all icons and finalities, on all histories that would chain me with my own falseness, my own pitiful fears. I know only moments, and lifetimes that are as moments, and forms that appear with infinite strength, then “melt into air.” I am an architect, a constructor of worlds, a sensualist who worships the flesh, the melody, a silhouette against the darkening sky. I cannot know your name. Nor you can know mine. Tomorrow, we begin together the construction of a city.

Woods also maintains a blog, where I found some thought-provoking posts on architecture and the human condition. This one titled ‘Dumb Boxes‘ is one of my favorites:

Anyone familiar with my work knows that I reserve a special place in my feelings and thoughts for what I call ‘dumb boxes.’ These are buildings that are often little more than rectilinear solids of brick or stone facing with holes punched in them for windows and doors. Sometimes they are all glass, with no holes at all.

Most architects today consider them the antithesis of creative design, but I believe they are essential to it. The worst thing I can imagine is an urban world of idiosyncratic buildings that jostle each other for attention with no reference to any deeper form of order.

The next worst thing I can imagine, though, is a world of dumb boxes embellished by architects determined to disguise their dumbness with all manner of distracting shapes, colors, materials, or tectonic doodads. I say, a box is inherently dumb, so let it be dumb, by which I mean, let it be what it is.

I’ll end this with an interesting anecdote here about how one of Wood’s design was stolen and reproduced without credit by Terry Gilliam for the film ‘12 Monkeys’.

One main benefit of technological evolution: we have more tools to rediscover our cultural roots.

In a crowded laboratory painted in gray and cooled like a cave, half a dozen specialists embarked this week on a historic undertaking: digitally photographing every one of the thousands of fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls with the aim of making the entire file among the most sought-after and examined documents on earth available to all on the Internet.

The scrolls’ contemporary history has been something of a tortured one because they are among the most important sources of information on Jewish and early Christian life. After their initial discovery they were tightly held by a small circle of scholars. In the last 20 years access has improved significantly, and in 2001 they were published in their entirety.

Israel to Display the Dead Sea Scrolls on the Internet

Source:colodio

Let’s face it. English as you know it is going to change. It’s inevitable. We don’t speak Shakespearean anymore. The transcripts you read from early medieval times are even a little difficult to understand at times. But is this linguistic evolution mostly the impact of culture (nurture)?

I came across this interesting essay on what the english language may look like in 3000AD.

Predicting the future of the English language is rather easy, in the short term. The odds are, over the next few decades its New World dialects are going to gain increasing global dominance, accelerating the demise of thousands of less fortunate languages but at long last allowing a single advertisement to reach everybody in the world.

Then after a century or two of US dominance some other geopolitical grouping will gain the ascendancy, everyone will learn Chechen or Patagonian or whatever it is, and history will continue as usual. But apart from that… what might the language actually look like in a thousand years time?

Incidentally, the last article I read on this topic was Wired’s piece on How English is evolving into a language we may not understand.

Awesome movie poster for a 1953 c-grade horror movie

Scientists have recently concluded that Neanderthals were not less intelligent than our ancestors (Homo sapiens) because they developed tools that were as equally efficient. This is significant because it suggests that the lack of intelligence was not a definitive cause for Neanderthal extinction.

Blades were first produced by Homo sapiens during their colonization of Europe from Africa approximately 40,000 years ago. This has traditionally been thought to be a dramatic technological advance, helping Homo sapiens out-compete, and eventually eradicate, their Stone Age cousins. Yet when the research team analysed their data there was no statistical difference between the efficiency of the two technologies. In fact, their findings showed that in some respects the flakes favored by Neanderthals were more efficient than the blades adopted by Homo sapiens.

Some quick notes about Neanderthals, a species which inhabited Europe and parts of Western/Central Asia:

1. They had a larger cranial capacity - brains might be larger.
2. They were exclusively carnivorous
3. They co-existed with humans up to 15,000 years after Homo sapiens migrated into Europe.
4. Their overall population might not have exceeded over 10,000 individuals.

Some resources:

• Neanderthals - Ice people - 200,000 years ago
• Wikipedia Page (Neanderthal)
• Documentary on Youtube (link to 1st of 5 parts)

Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy album cover really left an impression on me the first time I saw it many years ago. It shows a group of children sprawled out on stone steps, reaching towards the horizon (see above). It has an other-worldly vibe and it was only many years after when I realized that the background in the picture was something that actually existed. I thought it was a painting. But it’s not.

The album cover featured the Giant’s Causeway, a UNESCO World Heritage site located in the northeast coast of Northern Ireland. It’s area is made up of 40,000 interlocking basalt columns… the steps you see are the result of an ancient volcanic eruption. Discovered in 1692 and announced to the world, it became a popular tourist attraction ever since the 19th century.
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The Guardian has a hilarious side-splitting review of The Incredible Hulk, done entirely in Hulk speak. Go read it.

Hulk. Smash!” Yes. Hulk. Smash. Yes. Smash. Big Hulk smash. Smash cars.
Buildings. Army tanks. Hulk not just smash. Hulk also go rarrr! Then
smash again. Smash important, obviously. Smash Hulk’s USP. What Hulk
smash most? Hulk smash all hope of interesting time in cinema. Hulk
take all effort of cinema, effort getting babysitter, effort finding
parking, and Hulk put great green fist right through it.

The NY Times has an interesting article on female sexuality, which one researcher refers to a continuum between heteosexuality and homosexuality:

Heterosexual women, Dr. Chivers and her colleagues found, were no more excited by athletic naked men doing yoga or tossing stones into the ocean than they were by the control footage: long pans of the snowcapped Himalayas. When straight women viewed a video of a naked woman doing calisthenics, on the other hand, their blood flow increased significantly.

What really matters to women, Dr. Chivers said, at least in the somewhat artificial setting of watching movies while intimately hooked up to a device called a photoplethysmograph, is not the gender of the actor, but the degree of sensuality.

Man: Where have you been all my life?
Woman: Hiding from you.

Man: Haven’t I seen you someplace before?
Woman: Yes, that’s why I don’t go there anymore.

Man: Is this seat empty?
Woman: Yes, and this one will be if you sit down.

Man: Your place or mine?
Woman: Both. You go to yours, and I’ll go to mine.

Man: So, what do you do for a living?
Woman: I’m a female impersonator.

Man: Hey baby, what’s your sign?
Woman: Do not enter.

Man: How do you like your eggs in the morning?
Woman: Unfertilized.

Man: Your body is like a temple.
Woman: Sorry, there are no services today

Man: I would go to the end of the world for you.
Woman: But would you stay there?

Man: If I could see you naked, I’d die happy.
Woman: If I saw you naked, I’d probably die laughing.

Man: If I could rearrange the alphabet I’d put u and i together
Woman: Really, I’d put f and u together