Omidă Cariatidă

A medieval woman’s work left blue pigment on her teeth →

Archaeologists recently unearthed the skeleton of a woman they say was probably a skilled artist who helped produce the richly illustrated religious texts of medieval Europe. The woman lived sometime between 997 and 1162 CE, according to radiocarbon dating of her teeth, at a small women’s monastery called Dalheim in Lichtenau, Germany. And she died with tiny flecks of expensive lapis lazuli pigment still caught in her teeth, probably from licking the tip of her paintbrush to make a finer point.

10th Jan 2019

mentalisttraceur:

mentalisttraceur:
Being right, being happy, and being effective, require different thoughts, and even temporarily different truths. What works best at one will not always work best for the other two.
A key example:
Reaching the right conclusions and reasoning requires a vicious, unrelenting “I must always try to prove myself wrong” mentality: I can never be certain I am right. There is no such thing as just “being right”, in an absolute sense. We can only keep finding how we are wrong and fixing it.
But that’s an awful mindset for happiness, because if your mind makes that as a truth about you, rather than a truth about the endeavor of finding truth, it’ll eat away at your self-esteem. “I am capable of being right” has a very different meaning in the context of feelings about yourself than in the context of a philosophical truth claim.
And it’s bad for effective action because sometimes you need to act decisively, and that involves, in part, certainty. Certainty in an philosophical sense is about how likely something is to be true, but certainty in a cognition sense is about how little you are willing to question it (how much you protect the cognemes comprising it from extinction). And extinguishing your own motivation or sense of justification for doing something while you really do need to be doing it can be fatal.

(via di--es---can-ic-ul-ar--es)

8th Jan 2019 15 notes

Salvador Dalí - L'homme ressuscité par l'holographie de l’écureuil - 1973

6th Jan 2019

43nils:

Sami Uçan

(via russiacore)

4th Jan 2019 2,365 notes

31st Dec 2018

mirrormaskcamera:

Remedios Varo’s Papilla Estelar (1958) detail

(Source: immortalmortal, via othersystems)

30th Dec 2018 11,390 notes

(Source: 5hading, via sandra-afrika)

30th Dec 2018 2,032 notes

babelziggurat:

Andrey Zakirzyanov. The Tower ~ 2012 Bibliothèque Infernale on FB

(via mamarenegade)

28th Dec 2018 1,533 notes

The sky over New York turned bright blue just a few hours ago after an explosion at the Con Ed power plant in Astoria, Queens. It’s strange to see Twitter blow up so quickly with alien invasion and superhero movie jokes, the gap between initial panic and shared collective exhilaration so…rapid. Unsettling I guess, since ~~I live near the plant~~ I’m reading Svetlana Alexievich’s book Voices from Chernobyl, and one of the oral histories includes this one woman musing that she had never seen anything like it in the movies. I guess when New York really does see the apocalypse, everyone will have already seen that movie.

It happened late Friday night. That morning no one suspected anything. I sent my son to school, my husband went to the barber’s. I’m preparing lunch when my husband comes back. “There’s some sort of fire at the nuclear plant,” he says. “They’re saying we are not to turn off the radio.” I forgot to say that we lived in Pripyat, near the reactor. I can still see the bright-crimson glow, it was like the reactor was glowing. This wasn’t any ordinary fire, it was some kind of emanation.
It was pretty. I’d never seen anything like it in the movies. That evening
everyone spilled out onto their balconies, and those who didn’t have them went to friends’ houses. We were on the ninth floor, we had a great view. People brought their kids out, picked them up, said, “Look! Remember! ” And these were people who worked at the reactor-engineers, workers, physics instructors.
They stood in the black dust, talking, breathing, wondering at it. People came from all around on their cars and their bikes to have a look. We didn’t know that death could be so beautiful. Though I wouldn’t say that it had no smell-it wasn’t a spring or an autumn smell, but something else, and it wasn’t the smell of earth. My throat tickled, and my eyes watered.

27th Dec 2018 1 note

furtho:

Newspaper headline, Rochester, New York, 1908 (via here)

(via anthropolos)

27th Dec 2018 1,591 notes