№ 560. The House of Wisdom

 

№ 505. Lunate Sigma

 So in 2000, he created three-dimensional computer models of the pages of a damaged manuscript, Otho B.x (an 11th-century collection of saints’ lives), then developed an algorithm to stretch them, producing an artificial “flat” version that didn’t exist in reality. When that worked, he wondered if he could go even further, and use digital imaging not just to flatten crinkled pages but to “virtually unwrap” unopened scrolls—and reveal texts that hadn’t been read since antiquity. “I realized that no one else was doing this,” he says.

№ 448. A Bucket List for an Extended Lockdown

The plague has the real world on lockdown. Thankfully, not the "Westworld."

Whittier Daily News

Here's a list of things to do during our extended free time:

1. Get involved in the community. Red Cross.

2. Visit museums.

3. Tour libraries, borrow and read books.

4. Plan the next trip. Pre-Visit or travel to countries and cities: Moscow Metro; Along Dusty Roads; and, Cool Hunting.

5. There's still free television, cable TV, Netflix, Amazon, Apple TV and other streaming services.

6. Brush up on or, at least, keep up with the unfolding current events. The pandemic will pass sooner or later. But we need to hit the ground running. We lost an entire month already. Ah yes, I faintly remember the concept of deadlines and conferences. Yup.

7. Keep in touch, stroll, curate the world, troll and stalk on social media. We could do this so well before the plague. There's so much more time to waste now.

8. House chores, laundry and sundry. Clean out the ref., that butter looks green.

№ 254. The Reading Club

Here's a good Friday find:

If you put all the books you own on the street outside your house, you might expect them to disappear in a trice. But one man in Manila tried it - and found that his collection grew.

№ 243. Bento Box: Kiwix

Monday's Bento Box: Kiwix

Kiwix is a free and open-source offline web browser created by Emmanuel Engelhart and Renaud Gaudin in 2007. It was first launched to allow offline access to Wikipedia, but has since expanded to include other projects from the Wikimedia foundation as well as public domain texts such as Project Gutenberg.

Kiwix

№ 47. A Missing Piece of Alexandria

from doctorbulldog:  The great Library of Alexandria,
established by Ptolemy II (circa 280 BC),
has come to symbolize the receptacle of knowledge of Classical civilization.
This great repository was barbarously razed in the Middle Ages.

I bought a hardbound copy of the book, "The Man Who Walked Between the Towers", at Book Sale. For P120, it was a steal!

The narrator spoke of the high adventure of a tightrope artist but with a quiet remembrance of the Twin Towers, at the very end.

As books exist to be told and retold, and to survive the many retelling, our copy was meant to bear battle scars and dog ears. I think I read it for my nephews a number of times.

Then Ondoy belched into our walled urban lives.