For most of last week I was in Rome. This was the first time I have ever been to Italy. In spite of my love of everything ancient, the Romans have never been a culture that has appealed to me. Nevertheless, I am fully aware of just how much we are still in their shadow… and so it would be strange indeed not to wish to visit the Eternal City. What with global warming, never …
During a major upgrade to this Website, I took the opportunity to create a new, much more interactive, reader-focused SDC Companion
Information relevant to the 4th chapter of The Mirror Breaks
An argument for human lineages being illusory
An argument against skeumorphs
The graphic above (courtesy of my friend Keith Brunton) is considered by some to be possibly the best statistical graphic ever drawn. By Charles Joseph Minard (1781 – 1870), a French engineer, it shows the terrible fate of Napoleon’s army in Russia. Quoting from “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information” by Edward R. Tufte: “Described by E. J. Marey as seeming to defy the pen of the historian by its brutal eloquence, this combination of …
Well, predictably, the Copenhagen conference was a washout. I am not, however, ready to follow George Monbiot in declaring it a disaster. The way I see it is that Copenhagen is the first time we have got together as a species to tackle a common problem. That this happened at all is a clear admission that global warming is a threat that we all now recognize. That in itself is amazing progress. Further, there were …
Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds is currently showing at Tate Modern. A Chinese artist who has suffered severely for being politically outspoken, and who was the artistic consultant on the glorious Bird’s Nest Stadium at the recent Olympic Games, Ai Weiwei has produced a work that says much about China today and in the past. Consisting of 100 million sunflower seeds handmade from porcelain, fired at a high temperature, handpainted, then fired again. According to him: …
I wrote this on 19_11_11, but the internet went down at my hotel and, with the interminability of adding photos to this blog on a slow internet connection, I decided to finish this up at home. I nearly cried when I walked into the main hall of the Imam Mosque in Esfahan – overwhelmed by the beauty of that vast space. Perhaps the effect would have been almost as powerful had it merely been a …
There are many categories of military personnel maintained by the Masters throughout the Commonwealth, but all of them wear metal service collars that carry sliders. One of the functions of these sliders is to indicate rank. The second diagram shows some of the work that culminated in the tables displayed in the first diagram. These tables show the ranks and insignia for the Ichorians, for legionaries and auxiliaries. Those displayed cover ruhuimur (or dragon) crews …
