Jacques-Louis David painted ‘Oath of the Horatii’ in 1784, before the French Revolution, depicting the Roman salute. It was commissioned by the Administrator of Royal Residences in 1784 and exhibited at the 1785 Salon.
French governmental structure was previously an absolute monarchy with feudal privileges for the aristocracy. During this time it underwent radical change, following [...]
It suddenly struck me as I was lying on top of the bed and gazing out of the window, listening to the thunder in the distance, that both gambling and astrology are actually quite closely related. Memory is the thread that binds these two aspects of human culture together, or more precisely selective memory.
Let’s take [...]
Or why IE centric designers better learn to love the bombshell:
1 out of every 4 users use another browser
Most designers spend a lot of time getting their design right so that it works in all browsers (although getting it to look the exact same in all browsers may not be possible). If [...]
Or more accurately the milky way is twice as thick as we previously supposed, 12,000 light years thick, rather than 6,000 light years. A light year is the distance it takes like to travel in a year. By comparison light can travel around the earth 7 times in one second. The galaxy is 100,000 light [...]
I think when it comes to KDE openSUSE 10.3 is my favorite distribution. Certainly it’s the one that I keep coming back to. I went through a spate of trying all the different distributions and yet here I am back at openSUSE. Of course, a Linux master might prefer something like slackware which is fast [...]
On the seashore
On the seashore of endless worlds children meet.
The infinite sky is motionless overhead and the restless water is boisterous. On the seashore of endless worlds the children meet with shouts and dances.
They build their houses with sand, and they play with empty shells. With withered leaves they weave their boats and smilingly float [...]
Kakistocracy is an interesting word. It means a government ruled by the least qualified, most stupid members of society. I think if you happen to live in a kakistocracy then you’re in deep trouble. The word comes from Greek kakisto, which means worst: + crasy, which we all know means government.
In the wonderfully messed up [...]
Ludwik Leibler and his colleagues at the Ecole Supérieure de Physique et Chimie Industrielles (ESPCI/CNRS) in Paris have created a new kind of rubber which has self healing properties. It consists of “fatty acids” — short chains of carbon atoms — linked together via hydrogen bonds which form a network. The material behaves just [...]
A long time ago I started up my own website. It was a philosophy website and featured sky background with marble plinths in the foreground upon which the text, usually gold, was written - and it looked not bad at a time (1998) when most ‘user made’ websites featured black background, centered text (and a [...]
I have to confess to having something of a fascination with the 1800s. Here’s a painting from 1886 entitled ‘Storm in the rocky mountains’ (I love the use of light). It’s quite an interesting year, 1886 (MDCCCLXXXVI), was the year that Karl Benz patented the first successful gasoline-driven automobile. It’s also the year that [...]
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