Obsidian Wings

your ageism open friday thread

by liberal japonicus

I found this article incredibly interesting, but had to laugh when I read this

In an unusual collaboration, this year the team brought along an ancient DNA expert to sample for ancient pathogens.

As always, topics other than dissing elderly experts on DNA are always welcome.

 

The Long Winter

by Doctor Science (who can't seem to log in the usual way via Blogger, goshdurnit)

The polar vortex many Usans are experiencing reminds me of one of my favorite, formative books, The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I read the whole Little House series many times while I was growing up, and read it aloud twice, once for each Sprog, while *they* were growing up. I love the whole series, but The Long Winter was always my favorite.

In recent years, I've learned that the Little House books are considered libertarian manifestos, supposedly shaped by LIW's daughter Rose Wilder Lane to show the Ingalls family as icons of self-reliance. This boggles me, because when you actually read the Little House books carefully -- reading them aloud, for instance -- you can't help noticing that Laura's family was *never* self-reliant. They always depended on store-bought food, especially cornmeal, flour, and salt pork, and they got their land through the government's Homestead Act. One of their watchwords was "Free and Independent" -- but that was an aspiration (or a comforting platitude), not an accurate description of their lives.

The Long Winter, in particular, is about how individual self-reliance isn't enough. As a friend pointed out to me, it's essentially a post-apocalyptic story, about how people stay alive after the failure of a critical technology. In this case the technology is the railroad: when the train can't run, it cuts off the town of DeSmet, Dakota Territory, from its food supply -- because they were not self-reliant or independent.

Apocalyptic technology failure: train stuck in the snow, Minnesota, March 1881.

Return of the Sexuality of Christ

by Doctor Science

I was pleased to see Lee Siegal's article in the New Yorker, Pope Francis and the Naked Christ, because it's about one of my favorite books: Leo Steinberg's The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion. Coincidentally, one of my holiday presents the year was a copy of the second edition -- my copy of the first seems to have gone walkabout, and I've wanted to read Steinberg's expansion for many years.

I read the first edition (published in 1983) some time in the late 80s, IIRC, and was an instant fan. In a nutshell, Steinberg's thesis is that Renaissance artists created images of Christ's Infancy, Baptism, and Crucifixion that focused attention on his penis. They did this to demonstrate the completeness of Christ's Incarnation: that He became a human man in every respect, even those that to us fallen mortals seem shameful.

I gather that many art historians and other readers were shocked and resistant to Steinberg's argument, but my reaction was a relieved, "Aha! Explained at last! It wasn't just me!" Steinberg was discussing something that had been bothering me for decades -- since I was 8 years old, in fact.

Cut for images of Great Art of the Western World that may not be safe for your work and/or eyeballs, and for anatomical terminology.

Your donkey meat open friday thread

by liberal japonicus

This BBC story, about contaminated donkey meat in China, ends with this quote:

The chief executive of Wal-Mart's Chinese operations, Greg Foran, said: "It is a deep lesson (for us) that we need to continue to increase investment in supplier management."

Ya think?

The Case of the Perry Mason Genres

by Doctor Science

Atlantic reporter Alexis Madrigal wondered how Netflix comes up with their weirdly specific genres, so he (with the help of Atlantic contributor Ian Bogost) reverse-engineered Netflix's classification system, and how its 76,897 (!!) genres are put together.

Along the way, they discovered a strange pattern in the data: the footsteps of [dum dum dum dum-dum] Perry Mason. Madrigal thinks it's a glitch, a ghost in the machine, but I propose to connect all this up, Your Honor.
 
Direct YouTube Link

A modern re-mix of the "Perry Mason" musical theme. Yes, the title sequences really were that slow-moving, not to say ponderous. But the pacing of the actual scenes isn't too bad, and all the actors can actually *act*.

Beginning anew-ish

by Doctor Science

Happy New Year!

Wij komen er uit! by M. C. Escher. I'm not sure if it's a bookplate, a New Year's card for 1947, or both. The caption means "We're getting out!" and obviously refers to recovery from WWII.

There have been a bunch of changes for me in the past couple of months, and a whole multi-car trainload are heading my way for 2014.

This picture reminds me of one I've recently gotten back into: origami. By "back into" I mean I did a lot of origami when I was a child, but haven't really done much since then. Now looking around I see that we are in the Golden Age of Origami, with new designs and new types of designs burgeoning on every continent. The Origami Resource Center is an excellent place to start, I find.

One force driving this Golden Age is YouTube. Even the most careful diagrams can be difficult to follow, and creating diagrams is extremely time-consuming. A well-done video, though, is much easier to make and easier to follow. I learned how to make an origami Star of David from this video, for instance:
 
Direct YouTube link
without seeing any diagrams. Though there was a point where I had to go through it basically frame-by-frame to figure out exactly what he was doing. But success! And maybe someday soon I can post some pictures, if my ventures into newness include a point-and-shoot camera that actually works.

One reason I connect Escher and origami is that the current hot topic in origami are tesselations, or apparent tessellations: folding a single sheet so that it looks like a mosaic. I'm actually more interested in what are called origami quilts, but which I think of as origami tiles. I'm just starting to play with them, and wondering about origami Penrose tiling. I'm also looking at this origami version of an Escher, and wondering if it can be made a quilt -- i.e. where the units attach or lock into each other, not just sit next to each other.

What do you expect will be new or different for you about the coming year?