Random knowledge

What did we put in our herb garden today ?

• Chives: Allium schoenoprasum
• Rosemary: Rosmarinus officinalis
• Thyme: Thymus
• Oregano: Origanum vulgare
• Basil: Ocimum basilicum
• Parsley: Petroselinum crispum
• Mint: Mentha

A small step for …, but a giant leap for us! Suggestions for other herbs we could grow are welcome and links to good resources on the net would also help.

Added to my movies list. Extraordinary film.

The Lives of Others (original title in German: Das Leben der Anderen) is an Academy Award-winning German movie, marking the feature film debut of writer and director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. It won the 2007 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, along with seven Deutscher Filmpreis awards including best film, best director, best screenplay, best actor and best supporting actor, after having set a new record with 11 nominations. It was also nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 64th Golden Globe Awards.

The thriller/drama is about the cultural scene of East Berlin, monitored by secret agents of the Stasi, the GDR’s secret police. It stars Ulrich Mühe as Stasi agent Gerd Wiesler, Ulrich Tukur as his chief officer Anton Grubitz, Sebastian Koch as the playwright Georg Dreyman, and Martina Gedeck as his lover Christa-Maria Sieland.

External resources:

• The Lives of Others at the Internet Movie Database
• Review in Variety
• Review from the BBC
• Review from Rolling Stone
• Article about the film’s political impact in Germany in the Boston Globe
• US Official website by Sony Pictures Classics
• UK Official website by Lions Gate Entertainment
• Reviews on Rotten Tomatoes
• Interview in indieWIRE: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck about the film
• NPR interview

Carl Zimmer on Scienceblogs:

You may perhaps recall a lot of attention paid to methane from plants back in January 2006. A team of scientists from the Max Planck Institute reported in Nature that they had found evidence that plants release huge amounts of the gas–perhaps accounting for ten to thirty percent of all the methane found in the atmosphere.

The result was big news for several reasons. It was a surprise just in terms of basic biology–scientists have been studying the gases released by plants for a long time, and so it was surprising that they could have missed such a giant belch. Making the matter of pressing interest was methane’s ability to trap heat in the atmosphere. Suddenly plants became a much bigger player in the global warming game.

More here. As always, interesting stuff on this blog.

Selected Cartoon Introductions from the 1980s

Via MF

Red Holloway (Arkansas, 1927), one of the founders of souljazz, plays At The Bebob (Leuven, Belgium), monday 14 May.

The Hering illusion is an optical illusion due to the physiologist Ewald Hering (1861). The two horizontal lines are both straight, but they look as if they were bowed outwards. The distortion is produced by the lined pattern on the background, that simulates a perspective design, and creates a false impression of depth.

The Orbison illusion is one of its variants,

while the Wundt illusion produces a similar, but inverted effect.

The Orbison illusion is an optical illusion that was first described by the psychologist William Orbison in 1939. The bounding rectangle and inner square both appear distorted in the presence of the radiating lines. The background gives us the impression there is some sort of perspective. As a result, our brain sees the shape distorted.

The Wundt illusion is an optical illusion that was first described by the German psychologist Wilhelm Wundt in the 19th century. The two red horizontal lines are both straight, but they look as if they are bowed inwards. The distortion is induced by the crooked lines on the background, as in Orbison’s illusion. (In some illustrations the Wundt illusion uses two vertical lines, but the inverted effect compared to the Hering illusion is more obvious with horizontal lines)

More of this in The Nature of Visual Illusion by Mark Fineman.

Mstislav Rostropovich, a cellist and conductor who was renowned not only as one of the great instrumentalists of the 20th century, but also as an outspoken champion of artistic freedom in Russia during the final decades of the Cold War, died in Moscow today aged 80.

Obituary at BBC News - Announcement at BBC News (source picture right) and in the NYT (source picture left) - web site of the home-museum of Leopold and Mstislav Rostropovich in Baku

Wet-nursing (hiring a woman to breast-feed your baby), which most of the Western world abandoned in the 19th century, is making a minor comeback among young moms. So is cross-nursing, in which mothers breast-feed one another’s babies.

The story about freewheeling baby feeding and milk banks continues here.

The Children of Húrin (link to theDe Luxe edition)(2007) is a newly released completion of a tale by J. R. R. Tolkien. Begun in 1918 and revised several times, the tale was never completed by Tolkien before his death. Tolkien’s son, Christopher Tolkien, has now completed the tale for publication for the first time as an independent work.

Review at USA Today and the Sunday Times.

Detailed info at the Tolkien Gateway

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,
Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown–

A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,
Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves.
Memory by memory the mind–

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.

A poem should be equal to:
Not true.
For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea–

A poem should not mean
But be.

Archibald MacLeish, 1925

A German physicist at Procter & Gamble is working on a bizarre project — the gradual elimination of toilet paper as we know it. But first he would like to make the trip to the toilet a little more comfortable.

Interesting project. More here.

Consorti`s art is intoxicatingly sensuous and simulataneously on the cutting edge of contemporary art.
Through the influence of the late-mediaval paintings by Brughel and Dante`s “Divine Comedy”, Paolo Consorti attempts to find a contemporary analysis for the devilish, the sensuous and the absurd, themes often found in large cities, i.e. sado-masochistic clubs.

The artist is no less a painter than a director of his picture arrangements, which are fully staged. He photographs friends in odd suits and builds models that he later also photographs. In the end, he combines these images into one complete picture. Consorti tints the final colored print by hand, thus translates it into the medium of painting.

More of his work at the Über Gallery or at his web site. Read also this information file (pdf)

The Penrose triangle, also known as the tribar, is an impossible object. It was first created by the Swedish artist Oscar Reutersvärd in 1934. The mathematician Roger Penrose independently devised and popularised it in the 1950s, describing it as “impossibility in its purest form”. It is featured prominently in the works of artist M.C. Escher, whose earlier depictions of impossible objects partly inspired it.

Tomorrow is the fourth anniversary of Nina Simone’s death.

From Wikipedia:

Eunice Kathleen Waymon, better known as Nina Simone, (February 21, 1933 - April 21, 2003), was an American singer, songwriter, pianist, and civil rights activist.

Although she disliked being categorized, Simone is generally classified as a jazz musician. Her work covers an eclectic variety of musical styles, such as jazz, soul, folk, R&B, gospel, and even pop music. Her vocal style is characterized by passion, breathiness, and tremolo. Simone recorded over 40 live and studio albums, the biggest body of her work being released between 1958 (when she made her debut with Little Girl Blue) and 1974. Songs she is best known for include My Baby Just Cares for Me, I Put A Spell On You, I Loves You Porgy, Feeling Good, Sinnerman and Ain’t got no-I got life.

Nina SImone performing Sinnerman:

And I put a spell on you, recorded live in Montreal, ‘92:

Nina Simone - Official Site

Via

Today in 1812 Abraham “Bram” Stoker died. He was an Irish writer, best remembered as the author of the influential horror novel Dracula.

Excellent explanation of the notion crop factor. Alternatively have a look at wikipedia.

NASA scientists believe they have found a way to predict the color of plants on planets in other solar systems.

Green, yellow or even red-dominant plants may live on extra-solar planets, according to scientists whose two scientific papers appear in the March issue of the journal, Astrobiology. The scientists studied light absorbed and reflected by organisms on Earth, and determined that if astronomers were to look at the light given off by planets circling distant stars, they might predict that some planets have mostly non-green plants.

Interesting. No ?

The Friday Mosque in Djenne, Mali, is one of the most famous examples of butabu buildings. It is in fact the largest earthen building in the world. The process of moistening earth with water in preparation for building such a structure is described by the term butabu. Other examples are the towering Friday Mosque in Agadez, Niger, and the iconic Djinguereber Mosque in Timbuktu, Mali.

The Fowler Museum at UCLA has currently (from April 22 till July 15, 2007) photographs by James Morris of butabu buildings on view: ‘Butabu’ Adobe Architecture of West Africa.

BTW : Friday Mosque is the English translation of the Arabic term al-jum3a (Arabic: الجمعه ) al-masjid. This term is applied as a proper name to many mosques worldwide. Friday is the day for communal prayer in which all male muslims are called to pray communally for the noon-time prayer in Islam, the equivalent of the Jewish Sabbath prayers (which runs from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday) and the Christian church-going on Sundays. Each Islamic community has a mosque for this purpose as such Friday mosque is the most common name for a mosque worldwide.

Further resources:

• Djenné on World Heritage Sites website
• Great Mosque of Djenné at wikipedia
• The mosque at the Islamic Architecture site

Waterbus from Venice airport to St. Marks-Lido: 12 EUR one way. I wonder if other cities have a waterbus.
(Posted with Blackberry at Venice airport)

Caipirinha is Brazil’s national cocktail made with Cachaça. Cachaça is Brazil’s most common distilled alcoholic beverage. Like rum, it is made from sugarcane, however, cachaça is made from sugarcane juice whereas rum is made from molasses, a byproduct of the sugar refining process.

Recipe (from the International Bartender Association or IBA):

Ingredients : 5.0 cl.Cachaca - 1/2 Fresh Lime cut into 4 wedges - 2 teaspoons sugar
Preparation : Place lime and sugar into old fashioned glass & muddle. Fill glass with crushed ice and add Cachaça.

See also video on YouTube :

Cocktail to serve tonight before we go for dinner !