i was asked by the russian edition of interview magazine to interpret a few paintings. check ‘em out here. 

peashooter85:

The Unfinished Egyptian Obelisk of Aswan,

Lying at the Ancient Egyptian quarries of Aswan is a giant obelisk that, unfortunately, was never erected.  This is a shame because had it been erected, it would have been the largest Egyptian obelisk in the world, with a height of 137 feet while weighing over 1,200 tons.  Fortunately today, the Ancient Egyptian’s loss is our gain.  For historians and archaeologists the unfinished obelisk is a treasure trove of information on how the Egyptians not only built their obelisks, but how they quarried granite, and what tools they used.  When the Egyptians abandoned the obelisk, they left it behind complete with tool marks, markings left by engineers and architects, as well as a number of stone and copper tools.  

Incredibly the Egyptians quarried the obelisk directly out of the granite bedrock.  To accomplish this a team of around 130 workers carved trenches in the rough outline of the obelisk.  Carving was achieved by a pounding ball ( about the size of a grapefruit) made of a hard rock called diorite.  The workers would have spent perhaps a year or more pounding on the granite until slowly a trench was formed.  Once the trench was deep enough, the workers would have carved inwards as far as possible.  Finally the obelisk would have been  separated from the bedrock by driving copper spikes into it.  Once removed the obelisk would have been trimmed using a copper saw, and other finishing touches would have occured.

The difficulty and repetitiveness of obelisk quarrying must have been unimaginable.  Imagine pounding away at the rock, day after day for over a year, perhaps more.  It would have been incredibly backbreaking and tedious work to an unimaginable decree.  The tools used would have made the work much harder, as copper would have worn down quickly.  One thing that is certainly guaranteed; Ancient Egyptian workers would have been extremely tough, rugged, and more importantly, patient.

So after all that hard labor why did the Egyptians never finish the Aswan Obelisk?  As they neared the end stages of quarrying one of two things occurred.  Either the stone developed flaws, or the act of quarrying released tension withing the stone slab.  The result was that the obelisk developed a series of large cracks, three running in a lateral direction with one running lengthwise.  This made the obelisk utterly unusable.

After more than a year of blood, sweat, and tears, the failure of the Aswan Obelisk must have been heartbreaking.

womeninspace:

Tam O’Shaughnessy, life partner of Sally Ride, moments before she accepts the Presidential Medal of Freedom on behalf of the first female American astronaut. Yesterday (20 Nov.) the medal was posthumously awarded to Ride for her work in science and education. Sally Ride is the first female NASA individual to be awarded this medal*.

* The Apollo 13 Mission Operations Team as a whole was also rewarded this medal, their award was presented as a group award. I have not been able to find out who the women on this team were.

Soon-to-be-Official Map: Tram Network of Dnipropetrovsk, Ukraine

Submitted by Alexander Zaytsev, who says:

Hey Cameron and Transit Maps readers! I’d like to show you the first transit map that in my portfolio. Here are the tram routes of one of the largest Ukrainian cities — Dnipropetrovsk. This unofficial map is going to be official very soon :) What do you think?

——

Transit Maps says:

I like it! Clear and easy to follow a route line from one end to the other. The map retains enough information to relate to the city’s street grid, which is more important for trams than it might be for a subway or Metro. The little jogs in the red Line 1 are a good example: I’d hate that kind of fussy detail on a subway map, but here it tells the reader that the line briefly jumps across to another street on its way through the downtown area. The little dogleg that Lines 4 and 12 take is also a nice visualisation of the actual street layout.

Interestingly, while the map shows connections to main line railway stations (denoted by a steam train icon!), it doesn’t indicate the Dnipropetrovsk Metro in any way. While I understand that the Metro isn’t exactly anything to write home about with just six stations and declining ridership, I think that some sort of acknowledgement of it of this map would be useful.

Apart from that, the only thing I’m not too sure about is the thinning of the route lines as they approach the big loop in the centre of the map. While I can understand the desire to save a little bit of space where five lines run concurrently, I don’t think the result is worth the effort. The orange Line 17 looks particularly off-kilter as it approaches the loop from the south, very obviously leaning to the right.

Our rating: A solid, earnest effort that’s clear and easy to use — far better than many maps of similarly-sized tram systems. Three-and-a-half stars!

“According to their survey, men hate when women wear beanies, floppy hats, hair bows, open-side shirts, oversize sweaters, shoulder pads, peplums, bandeau bikinis (“they just make your shoulders look like a linebacker”), bright lipstick, heavy eye makeup, fake nails, bangles, pointy-toed shoes, wedge sneakers, ultra-high heels, fold-over ankle boots (“it looks like the shoes have foreskins”), high-waisted jeans, high-waisted shorts, high-waisted skirts (“it lacks a certain degree of subtlety”), pantsuits (“you’re a woman, not a man”), drop-crotch pants (“really, any loose fitting pants,) and mullet dresses (“I just don’t get it — where’s the fucking party??? You are covering the back!”). The question is how to wear all of these things at once.”

-

How to Dress So Basic Bros Leave You Alone - The Cut (via heylabodega)

Who among you will say CHALLENGE ACCEPTED?

(via maureenjohnsonbooks)

---

Link

---

After a Kickstarter campaign, Chatype by Robbie de Villiers and Jeremy Dooley becomes the official typeface of Chattanooga, TN.

cleowho:

"Perhaps it is in Ireland?"

The Hand of Fear   (1976)

The Invisible Enemy   (1977)

Human Nature   (2007)

That would explain a lot about this place, actually…

DON’T CLOSE THE TAVERNS AND BARS WHEN RED SONJA IS COMING THROUGH, DAMMIT.

laughterkey:

fuckyeahprettybooks:

I am sorry for the non-book related post but its been 10 minutes and I am still laughing.

Phenomenal.

Kombucha is the fermented tea which has been around forever, but which recently has started to pick up steam as a health food. It’s been around for as long as people have been letting food and liquid rot before they eat it, but the word kombucha has been used in English since 1995. It’s a “symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast”, abbreviated “SCOBY,” which looks like a pancake as it sits in the jar or jug of your choice, turning kombu (kelp) into mildly alcoholic mushroom-piss.

It’s known to have sickened a number of people, which purists insist is the result of incorrectly-prepared kombucha, but which might be the result of literally drinking a fucking yeast infection.

There’s no real evidence that kombucha does anything other than make your mouth stink, which this Kombucha seller (if none of the others) has acknowledged. Of course, he then goes on to say that it can cure chronic disease. You can’t win them all, but if you skip the rotting seaweed tea, you may smell better.

vanitybullet:

so in my spanish class the teacher sometimes puts up a sign that says “no ingles” and that means we can’t use any english that day in class and we have like the smartest kid who is class president and the teacher asked him something and he was about to talk in english before the teacher pointed at the sign so the guy busted out in full german and the whole class was in stunned silence and the teacher just gave a heavy sigh and left the room

An anonymous reader writes "Google's Chromium team never ceases to amaze. Its latest project is a Chrome app-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE) codenamed Spark. For those who don't know, Chrome packaged apps are written in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, but launch outside the browser, work offline by default, and access certain APIs not available to Web apps. In other words, they're Google's way of pushing the limits of the Web as a platform."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

karenhallion:

ferdalump:

There’s no crying in baseball!!!!

#dead  #thecuteness  #Ican’teven

linuxwrangler writes "San Francisco Bay Area commuters awoke this morning to the news that BART, the major regional transit system which carries hundreds of thousands of daily riders, was entirely shut down due to a computer failure. Commuters stood stranded at stations and traffic backed up as residents took to the roads. The system has returned to service and BART says the outage resulted from a botched software upgrade."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

~Erving Goffman

White House says 2015 enrollment for Obamacare pushed back one month Reuters WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Obama administration will push back the open enrollment season for Obamacare health insurance in 2015 by a month to give insurance companies more time to determine their rates, the White House said on Friday. (Reporting ... and more »

New York Daily News

Couric Is Said to Be Close to Leaving ABC News for Yahoo New York Times Katie Couric is “in the late stages” of a negotiation to leave her job as a special correspondent at ABC News for a new, as-yet-undefined role at Yahoo, an executive with knowledge of the talks said Friday evening. Katie Couric leaving ABC news, taking on new Yahoo roleChicago Tribune Couric's next move appears to be show for Yahoo!Washington Post Katie Couric 'finalizing' exit from ABC, near deal with Yahoo, report saysNewsday TIME -mediabistro.com -USA TODAY all 40 news articles »

The more we hate it, the more it agrees with us.

The yet-unnamed museum has just been announced, but already I'm planning how I can best sneak in when it opens in early 2017. Screw visiting. I want to live there.

Guys, it's almost time.  (via I Heart Chaos)

A historic home south of New Orleans went up in flames after allegedly being set on fire by people who were said to be looking for ghosts. The LeBeau Plantation, a house built in 1861 in Arabi, Louisiana, that had been used as a hotel, illegal casino and a private residence, was in need of repair and said to be haunted. But Friday morning around 2 a.m., the whole house went up in flames, causing a conflagration so hot the police could do nothing but put up a perimeter and wait for the fire to burn out. ... Seven people, who have not been identified, have been arrested for arson. "They had been looking for ghosts, trying to summon spirits, beating on the floors," said Col. John Doran of the sheriff's office, adding they suspects had been smoking and drinking.

Curious and curiouser. There are a lot of unanswered questions about the plane crash that killed Canadian pilot Michael Callan in Nashville three weeks ago, but the strangest by far is this: Why did Callan, 45, list country-pop superstar Taylor Swift as his next of kin?

You’d need to bring in at least $125,000 a year to purchase a home in notoriously expensive San Francisco, where houses sell for an average $705,000 in the Bay Area.

Read 20 remaining paragraphs | Comments

NEW YORK—Recent Wesleyan University graduate Zach Wallace confided to reporters Thursday that he has no clue how his parents are supposed to earn enough money to settle his $40,000 in student loan debt.