For most of human history our facsimiles of reality were very clearly man-made representations: no colour we could produce or use could compare in subtlety or vibrancy to those in nature; no fabric could approach the glossy texture of a rose petal; nothing, not even the finest acted mimicry, could hope to capture an animal in motion. Reality in all its splendour remained unassailably enthroned beyond our attempts to emulate it. This hierarchy has, more …
I’ve been hankering after a tablet computer for many years (I hope not as a result of having been brainwashed by Star Trek!?). Specifically I was wanting Apple to produce one. I have been using their computers since 1984 and supported them through the hard years before Steve Jobs returned – much in the way other people support a football team that keeps losing. Now that they are becoming masters of the galaxy I find …
Even in childhood I was baffled as to why oil paintings sold in auction houses for countless millions, while equally exquisite works of art from other cultures seemed lucky if they fetched thousands. One exception is the ubiquitous ‘Ming vase’… examples of which appear in everything from Tin Tin to baroque palaces across Europe. Another are ancient artefacts, though these again seem to be valued less for their aesthetic qualities than for how close they …
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 …
The first time we were able to see our planet from space – a single, blue jewel floating in the void – it changed how we saw Earth – how we saw ourselves – profoundly. We have now found other worlds circling other suns – hundreds (?) of them… At first we could only detect massive ones – bigger even than our Jupiter. But we have recently been able to detect planets just a few …
