Europe

20 04, 2016

Critical reason and the life of the unconscious

By |2021-01-27T20:18:41-05:00April 20th, 2016|2016, April, Debate / dialogue, Europe, Everything Else, Language, Medicine, Philosophy, psychology, Quotes|0 Comments

Critical reason and the life of the unconscious: at what expense to our lives do we refine our reason, especially when it comes to understanding crucial matters of life and death? A man should be able to say he has done his best to form a conception of life after death, or to create some [...]

10 04, 2016

Where it’s at: the mystery and origins of the @ symbol (BBC News)

By |2016-04-10T16:45:14-04:00April 10th, 2016|2016, Economics, Employment, Europe, Everything Else, History, Language, Literature, News, Religion, Technology|0 Comments

Where it's at: or better, where "at" (@) has been. What is modern is ancient, if we should notice. From the article: "The earliest yet discovered reference to the @ symbol is a religious one. It features in a 1345 Bulgarian translation of a Greek chronicle. Held today in the Vatican Apostolic Library, it features the @ [...]

5 04, 2016

Computers transform our knowledge of the past (James O’Malley, Little Atoms)

By |2016-04-08T08:40:13-04:00April 5th, 2016|2016, Academia, April, Europe, History, Literature, News, Religion, Technology|0 Comments

Computers transform our knowledge of the past. According to the author, computerized quantitative analysis offers insights that traditional historical study cannot. From the article: Huge swathes of our past are slowly but surely getting digitised as old books and scanned and organised. It stands to reason that surely once the historians get to work it [...]

3 04, 2016

Judgments about the arts: mind what you put in!

By |2016-11-02T11:52:14-04:00April 3rd, 2016|2016, April, Arts, Debate / dialogue, Europe, Everything Else, History, Literature, Quotes, Theater, Writing|0 Comments

Judgments about the arts: mind what you put in! Ben Jonson tells his audience how much they may assess what they see, depending on their means: It is further agreed that every person here have his or their free-will of censure, to like or dislike at their own charge, the playwright having now departed with [...]

30 03, 2016

Gambling on the meaning of nothing

By |2016-03-30T08:47:55-04:00March 30th, 2016|2016, Debate / dialogue, Europe, Everything Else, Language, March, Philosophy, Quotes|0 Comments

Gambling on the meaning of nothing: how much do we really understand one another, even as friends? Minaccio, a witty man and a gambler, once lost his cash and his coat, too, playing at dice (he was truly poor), and sat weeping at the doorway of the tavern. A friend saw him distraught and in [...]

20 03, 2016

Historian uses new technology to uncover the layers of religious history (EurekAlert)

By |2016-11-02T11:52:14-04:00March 20th, 2016|2016, Academia, Europe, Everything Else, News, Politics, Religion, Technology|0 Comments

A 1535 Latin Bible, owned by Henry VIII, contains annotations from the "great" English Bible written between 1539 and 1549, and were discovered recently by Dr. Eyal Poleg, a historian at the University of London through 3-D X-Ray imaging.   "The book is a unique witness to the course of Henry's Reformation. Printed in 1535 by [...]

19 03, 2016

Edna St. Vincent Millay on human fallibility

By |2016-03-22T20:00:10-04:00March 19th, 2016|Academia, Europe, Everything Else, Literature, March, Philosophy, Quotes, U.S. / Canada|0 Comments

Her sonnet meditates on human degradation, and self-degradation, in the new Iron Age. From "Epitaph on the Race of Man" Here lies, and none to mourn him but the sea, That falls incessant on the empty shore, Most various Man, cut down to spring no more; Before his prime, even in his infancy Cut down, [...]

8 03, 2016

Obsessing about STEM (Fareed Zakaria, Washington Post)

By |2016-03-06T15:46:58-05:00March 8th, 2016|2016, Academia, Arts, Debate / dialogue, Employment, Europe, Everything Else, History, Language, Medicine, News, Philosophy, Politics, science, STEM, Technology, U.S. / Canada|0 Comments

Obsessing about STEM: America seems entranced by STEM education, at the expense of our future, which requires more agile ways of thinkings that the humanities and liberal arts provide. "The United States has led the world in economic dynamism, innovation and entrepreneurship thanks to exactly the kind of teaching we are now told to defenestrate. A [...]

8 03, 2016

Why read the classics

By |2016-11-02T11:52:14-04:00March 8th, 2016|2016, Academia, Arts, Europe, Everything Else, Italy, Literature, March, Quotes, Writing|0 Comments

Why read the classics: Italo Calvino (1923-1985) explains the nature of a classical literary composition, which has various means of speaking to us throughout the different times of our lives. If the books have remained the same (even though they too change in light of a different historical perspective), we ourselves have certainly changed, and the encounter [...]

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