Anniversaries: Lest We Forget

Office Workers fleeing spread of debris from falling Twin Towers on 9/11. © Jason Florio/Corbis

Time magazine has recently posted a NIST photo collection about 9/11 (here) and German researchers from the University of Mainz have conducted a minute-by-minute study of emotions during September 11 as the attack and tragedy unfolded, based on a study of text messages (here).  These sources were available on Wikileaks (here). Speculations on the Wikileaks source are at reddit.com here.

Gnostics, Gnostics Everywhere!

Ecclesia Gnostica in Nova Albion blog compares Gnosticism to Mahayana Buddhism.

Examiner.com has recently posted a list of questions you can ask yourself to see if you have succumbed to the mass resurgence of the Christian heresy of gnosticism, which has infected popular culture, academia and politics. Eric Voegelin believed that most 19th and 20th century ideologies were gnostic, from Marxism, to feminism, to postmodernism. The linguists, the semioticians, the cyberpunks, the quantum physicists are, in their course of thought, Christian heretics and Neoplatonists. We have a belief system rampant in our culture, with most people unaware of it, even as they subscribe to its values. The Examiner also has a list of the sexiest gnostics of all time, including Neo of The Matrix movies.

Retro-Futurism 6: Burning Man 2010

Megatropolis. Burning by Kiwi, Otto. Crew photo: Mattdork (2010).

The Nevada desert art festival Burning Man 2010 just finished last weekend.  A first-time visitor returned from it a couple of days ago, announcing that it changed his life!  This year's theme was Metropolis. There is a report on it here.  The Burning Blog on the official Burning Man site has several pictures.  Burning Man, named for its burning of a giant wooden effigy on the Saturday night of the event, began in 1986 as part of a summer solstice art happening.  Since then it's moved to Labour Day weekend and grown into a massive (and, critics argue, tacitly commercial) undertaking.  For the first time, attendance hit over the 50,000 mark this year. But enthusiasts swear by Burning Man as an experience that can't be explained unless you go there and see it for yourself. 

Statues in the Eyes of Ancients

I09 recently picked up on reports from Harvard University that German ultraviolet light scans of ancient Greek statues have revealed their true colours. 

Laugh of the Day

Image from: I Can Has Cheezburger.com.

Remembering Poet Edwin Morgan

Adaptation of Morgan's poem The First Men on Mercury by Metaphrog.

Neil Gaiman recently tweeted on a cool comics adaptation of The First Men on Mercury, by Scots poet Edwin Morgan that was circulated in the UK for 2009's National Poetry Day.  Morgan sadly died on 17 August.

Dark Matter at Work in a Galaxy Cluster

Galaxy Cluster Abell 1689. Photo © NASA Goddard Photo and Video (August 19, 2010). Credit: NASA, ESA, E. Jullo (JPL/LAM), P. Natarajan (Yale) and J-P. Kneib (LAM).

NASA's Goddard Center is reporting a significant breakthrough in the study of Dark Matter.  The purple halo you see in the centre of this image from late August is the distribution of Dark Matter in the cluster.  More precisely, it is "impression of the gravitational field created by the dark matter."

Shanghai Time Capsule

Nanjing Road – From Series of Views of Shanghai (post 1932).

Today, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco ends its exhibition entitled Shanghai. As part of the profile for the exhibition, one of the Museum's bloggers did a post Nanjing Road, Then and Now, juxtaposing identical views of the city's famous street from the 1930s and from 2009.  The clock tower and historical building opposite make up a time capsule around which everything else changed.  The 1930s picture was used for the exhibition catalogue.