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THE ARTIST, THE CONMAN AND THE $15 MILLION FRAUD
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Found
- Hits: 2146
The curious tale of a dysfunctional couple of British art forgers who managed to crank out a wide array of "antiquities" and and artworks and sell them on as original finds and treasures to prominent galleries both in Britain and abroad.
Link: http://narrative.ly/pulp-non-fiction/artist-conman-and-15-million-fraud/ (small link to skip registration.)
Raising the question, without the provenance or history, what is the value of art? Does it have value in it's own right?
A Map of US Consumer Obsessions
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Link of the day
- Hits: 2202
An interesting map of the US, based on what residents of each state are most likely to be searching for. In Alaska it's milk, in Tennessee it's a DNA test, in Florida it's an abortion...
View an embiggened version of the map and article here: http://www.fixr.com/blog/2015/02/27/cost-obsessions-us-map/
A pyramid of tools per square km in Africa?
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Found
- Hits: 2249
"Researchers used the new survey of the Messak Settafet to estimate that enough stone tools were discarded over the course of human evolution in Africa to build more than one Great Pyramid for every square kilometer of land on the continent."
Link: http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/saharan-carpet-of-tools-is-the-earliest-known-man-made-landscape
And I get discouraged because I can't find a single Arrowhead. No wonder.
Gladstone's Color Theory
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Ideas & Questions
- Hits: 3835
An interesting idea I stumbled upon first while listening to Radiolab, Gladstone's Color Theory, which suggests that language is directly correlated to our ability to experience certain stimuli...
For example, we've all heard the lie that the first nations who watched Columbus's ships break the horizon before arriving at the New World did not perceive them because they had no concept or understanding of ship. And Centaurs seem clearly to be a misreading of early accounts of people witnessing others on horseback, a concept they didn't have and so communicated through this hybridization of truth.
Gladstone analyzes the colors used in Homer's "The Odyssey" to argue that as the ancients didn't have a word for the color blue, to them it didn't exist. And there is surprising anthropological evidence to support his theory...
Read more here: (Daily Mail, Popular easy to read content): http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2976405/Could-ancestors-blue-Ancient-civilisations-didn-t-perceive-colour-didn-t-word-say-scientists.html
And listen to the original Radiolab Podcast here: http://www.radiolab.org/story/211213-sky-isnt-blue/
And, for the more literate and involved in this, try the Wikipedia article (*Warning: Lots of Jargon): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_color_naming_debate
In essence, how language both describes and limits our experience of the world, curious...
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