Tag Archives: culture

Art Project by Google

Now that Google has conquered a majority of the earth’s major streets with its Google Street View project, the company is starting to move inside. It’s creating the Google Art Project, a virtual equivalent of 17 major art museums[...]

Google Takes Street View Into Art Museums

After a long creative hiatus on the part of Google, this is the first real useful project in my opinion. Googles Art Project is a real pleasure for people, that are fed up with the usual gadget and Web 2.0 world in the net.

Egyptian Antiquities in danger

What is really beautiful is that not all Egyptians were involved in the looting of the museum. A very small number of people tried to break, steal and rob. Sadly, one criminal voice is louder than one hundred voices of peace. The Egyptian people are calling for freedom, not destruction. When I left the museum on Saturday, I was met outside by many Egyptians, who asked if the museum was safe and what they could do to help. The people were happy to see an Egyptian official leave his home and come to Tahrir Square without fear; they loved that I came to the museum.

Dr. Hawass, “The Situation in Egyptian Antiquities Today”

Some will say “who cares about it, it’s about the people” and that’s true to some degree. But those antiquities represent the identity of the Egyptian people, the very soul of this country. History of mankind has been written in this corner of the world and it would be a pity to lose the evidence of this cultural legacy.

Happy Halloween 2010

Oh!—fruit loved of boyhood!—the old days recalling,
When wood-grapes were purpling and brown nuts were falling!
When wild, ugly faces we carved in its skin,
Glaring out through the dark with a candle within!

–John Greenleaf Whittier, “The Pumpkin”

… see also F!XMBR :D

More Halloween:

Bild: Jack o’ Lantern, Wikipedia

Egyptian culture

Egyptian Lantern Slides – Places, Brooklyn Museum’s photostream, Flickr, public domain – from the pyramids of Gizah to the temple of Edfu.

In 1849, the Philadelphia daguerreotypists William and Frederick Langenheim introduced the lantern slide: a transparent image on glass that could be projected, in magnified form, onto a surface using a “magic lantern,” or sciopticon. This new technology expanded the uses of photography, allowing photographic images to be viewed by a large audience. With lantern slides, Museum curators and educators could illustrate their lectures, letting audience members see detailed studies of objects and sites from around the world.

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26c3: I, Internet

The actions of a highly-networked group of individuals cannot be explained as the sum of actions of individuals. Let’s explore how far we are along with evolving collective consciousnesses and what’s on their minds. With the Internet, the individual’s ability for inward and especially outward communication is unprecendented in history. Millions of individuals are sharing thoughts and observations through social networks. The faster and more efficient the information flows within such a network, the harder it becomes to distinguish these processes from the activity in a biological neural network (brain).

Christiane Ruetten, 26C3

sun is shining

Two opposed cuts along a roman wall to get an impression of the basement – eight hours work at temperatures as high as 30°C. On the second picture you can see two correspondent walls – at first sight. But doing a cut in the corner, reveals the real connection – there isn’t any, they don’t interlock together. Last not least there is a picture of my workplace together with my favorite utility: a sunshade ;-)

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call it a day

Ouch – my back is aching. We’ve done a lot of preparation for the sealing of some rooms of the villa. Among those necessary tasks, we’ve done a cut too – layer for layer – without destroying much of the roman floor of clay. It’s almost ready, Wednesday they will deliver the ballast chipping, afterwards we will fill up the rooms with a layer of mould. Now – preparation for dinner … yummy :-)

at least some pictures

As promised some pictures of the excavation mentioned some days ago. On the first four pictures you can see some of the walls we uncovered in two days. We call it cleaning, you have to be careful not to disturb some of the walls, but usually it’s a rather speedy procedure. Armed with a brush and a small spatula you’re digging through time. There isn’t much plastering left anymore, so some of the soil serves as backup for the stones. Here and there you’ll find some fragments of terra nigra, terra sigillata, coins or even whole pots. For real findings you have to make a cut in one of the rooms. At the moment it’s just the work essential for the documentation of the layout and some of the construction phases.

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where is the money and why are you doing this

Once in a while people ask me what I do for a living. After responding to this very question people are baffled most of the time. They don’t understand the fact, that someone doesn’t care about money. Well actually I do care about it – I have to sometimes, but it hasn’t got priority in my life. I need something to eat, I need a roof over my head, clothes, literature etc. pp. – nothing spectacular as you can see.

I’ve seen the ups and downs of life, however I wouldn’t trade humanities for economy or similar crap. Sometimes I have to do something I don’t like at all, just to pay the bills – but I wouldn’t do it for the whole life. I don’t need luxury, well the kind of luxury I like is my wife and the time to do things we want to do – up to a certain degree of course. One could call it modesty or better: we do set our own priorities in life. And those priorities are ruled mainly by humanities.

It would be nice to see more people doing what they want to do. To experience abandonment instead of opulence that leads to less fun in life due to the fact of the giant amount of money you need – an amount you can usually earn only while trading your life for it. Many people are believing we can afford such a life style due to great wealth, but the opposite is true – we can afford it due to proper priorities. We don’t need every junk the industry is selling and we don’t buy things crappy by nature, we keep looking for quality and are eager to pay for it. You know it isn’t that expensive if quality is your motivation not quantity. With quantity in mind you have to buy the same crap again and again due less to none quality. Sometimes it isn’t possible at all, in the end it’s a steady approach.

So if you think first it’s possible to actually save a lot of money. If literacy, culture, … is your motivation, then why should you miss something in life? It’s a broad spectrum, colorful, alive – no economy with its bare numbers and inhuman results, no spiritless short-lived junk – it is actually more human.

But nowadays economy rules. Economy dictates life, economy decides in terms of education, health, culture … who is worth to live? Basic economy is essential for daily life, the economy we’re seeing today is the nemesis for mankind – destroyer of culture, destroyer of humanity. We can make a difference if we don’t surrender. And you don’t have to yield a monochromatic perception, just be yourself! Variety rules and makes life more colorful or alive at all.

So this is some sort of a lengthy answer, why we do what we’re actually doing ;-)

Sun puts Internet Archive in a box …

If the only way to preserve data is to keep copying it to new media, then all that has to happen for my work to disappear is for someone at some point to just not copy it. And it seems certain that this will happen, eventually—there will be an upgrade, and a data migration, and someone just won’t copy the Ars back catalog, and then poof.

Sun puts Internet Archive in a box, but will it stay there?

I’m not confident either, in fact we will see a massive collateral damage.

excavation

Nothing much to tell today: uncovered maybe some platform in another villa – well field work is really slow by nature. The weather was lousy, really windy if not almost stormy – but then, it’s really fun to discover something step by step, really tiny steps of course. I hope the morrow won’t see (much) rain, rain is a real showstopper and a no-go for an excavation. At the moment it’s raining, so lets hope there isn’t much of it and it stops in some hours.