Digging the world's artifacts
No, this is not an article from The Onion.
To mark Spain’s lifting of lockdown restrictions, Barcelona’s Liceu Opera House reopened for the first time in three months with a performance to 2,292 potted plants.
The three classical musicians performed Puccini’s “Crisantemi” to “reaffirm the value of art, music and nature” after Covid-19 lockdowns.
Even more, the plants will be donated to the city’s healthcare workers.
You love to see it! Watch the full performance below.
Knitting is a popular hobby in Finland. But 30-year-old artist Liisa Hietnanen takes the practice to a whole new level.
She uses wool to create life-size crocheted sculptures of the neighbors in her village.
“The slow handcraft techniques work as a counterforce to the accelerating pace in different areas of life,” says the artist, who uses photographs and face-to-face meetings to help create these fiber people.
“To me the more important values in my works are not likeness or resemblance.
“The works are rather about encountering someone very concretely, seeing the other for real and getting to know them slowly. I see these as relevant values and balancing actions especially in contrast to quick stirs and thin encounters in social media.”
Check out more of Hietanen’s creative vision below.
A report issued in Nature reveals that staying inside is the leading cause of myopia.
The finding refutes the myth that nearsightedness is the result of intense reading sessions and screen activity.
Myopia is prevalent in East Asian countries, where the focus on studying means staying indoors rather than benefiting from the outside environment.
According to another study in journal Lancet, 90% of young adults in China, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea are nearsighted compared to 30% in Britain.
Outdoor light is beneficial to the eyes because it triggers the release of dopamine in the retina.
One myopia researcher recommends spending at least three hours a day in natural light, even if means sitting under a tree.
But what scientists really needed was a mechanism: something to explain how bright light could prevent myopia. The leading hypothesis is that light stimulates the release of dopamine in the retina, and this neurotransmitter in turn blocks the elongation of the eye during development. The best evidence for the ‘light–dopamine’ hypothesis comes — again — from chicks. In 2010, Ashby and Schaeffel showed that injecting a dopamine-inhibiting drug called spiperone into chicks’ eyes could abolish the protective effect of bright light 11 .
Neanderthals were great hunters but poor artists.
According to a study done by UC Davis psychology professor Richard Coss, Neanderthals used basic spear hunting techniques to capture tame prey.
Meanwhile, Homo Sapiens developed the ability to throw spears as a result of chasing more elusive game in the open grasslands of Africa.
Homo Sapiens were also careful planners, sharpening their hand-eye coordination by drawing out hunting scenes on cave walls.
Such artistry not only made modern humans better visualizers and hunters, but it also helped them develop smarter brains.
Historian and author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind Yuval Noah Harari also argued that while Neanderthals might have had larger brains and finer tools than their fellow Homo Sapiens, they lacked the cognitive abilities for language.
Homo Sapiens developed rounder skulls and bigger parietal cortexes that allowed them not only to translate visual images but share stories through word of mouth.
In 1911, Swedish film company Svenska Biografteatern recorded its trip to New York.
Fortunately, the footage survived and most recently was speed-corrected (slowed down) and reproduced with the ambient audio of street sounds of car horns, horses, and police whistles to give us a sense of the environment back then.
There’s also a color version of the 8-minute long video restored via neural networks, featuring 60 frames per second and 4k image resolution.
This might be the closest we get to time travel.
Treadmills were originally torture devices, meant to break the mind, body, and spirit of English prisoners.
Two hundred years ago, the treadmill was invented in England as a prison rehabilitation device. It was meant to cause the incarcerated to suffer and learn from their sweat.
Groups of prisoners were forced to walk 6 hours a day, pumping out water, milling corn powering the mills, thus the term “tread-mill.”
Treadmills evolved into a mechanism for punishment to prevent poor people from committing crimes to take advantage of the necessities in jail.
Britain banned treadmills in 1989, seeing their punishment no longer useful.
An 1885 British Medical Journal article called “Death on the Treadmill,” chastized Durham Prison for the treadmill-induced death of a prisoner with heart disease. Its overall high death rate—one fatality a week—prompted the conclusion that “[t]he ‘mill’ is not useful, and has proved itself occasionally injurious.”
Having banned treadmills in 1828 to adopt a “collective industry” where prisoners became factory workers, America revamped the treadmill as an exercise machine.
It resurfaced in 1913 with a U.S. patent for a “training-machine.” In the 1960s, the American mechanical engineer William Staub created a home fitness machine called the PaceMaster 600. He began manufacturing home treadmills in New Jersey. (He used it often himself, right up until the months before his death at the age of 96.)
As this article points out, treadmills are the top-selling training equipment in the US but still come with all the baggage (injuries and boredom) that prisoners endured in England.
There is a bizarre-looking church in the Indonesian jungle that’s shaped like a giant chicken.
Located in the forests of Magelang, Central Java (here it is on Google Maps, Gereja Ayam or “Chicken Church” was built in 1992 by Daniel Alamsjah.
He foresaw the structure in the late 80s when he received a spiritual message from God telling him to construct a prayer house for all religions in the shape of a dove. However, given the small beak and fluffy feathers, it appears to look more like a chicken.
Closed temporarily in 2000 for renovation — the second-floor walls have since been repainted with scenes from Indonesian mythology — the church has since been reopened as a tourist attraction but still offers a religious tour.
You can learn more about the church on its official tourism website.
In this video, the late Christopher Reeves who played Superman explains what the fictional superhero represents.
In a world of selfishness ushered in by smart devices and social media, Superman as a friend metaphor is a subtle reminder of the power of relationships.
It’s nice to know that there’s someone out there who’s willing to offer a hand and be a friend regardless of supposed differences, whether that be in race or politics.
Big thinking, small fragile world — such prescient words from Superman in the tribal world that is today.
Today may be Super Bowl Sunday and Groundhog Dog, but it’s also a day that celebrates the rare 8-digit palindrome — 02/02/2020 — the only one this century.
The eight digit palindrome reads the same forward, and backward in both the American and British formats. The last one occurred 909 years ago on 11-11-1111 and the next one won’t happen until 12/02/2121, 101 years from now.
It’s also worth mentioning that it’s also day 33 of this year, with 333 days remaining.
This is neat. The calendar from 1895 and 2019 share the same dates. Mind the prescient quote.
Everything comes in circles…The old wheel turns and the same spoke comes up. It has all been done before and will be again…
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,The Valley of Fear
Margaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist who famously journeyed to American Samoa in 1925 to study adolescent behavior among the nonliterate peoples of Oceania.
Her book Coming of Age of Samoa is the result of her fieldwork.
Mead was also widely known for her progressive views on sex, providing a key spark on what would become the Sexual Revolution in the 1960s.
Below is a comprehensive list of her sources of insight for her social anthropology studies.
Always remember you’re unique. Just like everybody else.
There is no greater insight into the future than recognizing…when we save our children, we save ourselves”
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed. It is the only thing that ever has.
Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.
Margaret Mead