A team of researchers in Vancouver and Berkeley “posits that dead languages could be reconstructed by feeding modern successors into computer programs configured to build extinct languages word by word.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
What Richard III Can Teach Us Today
“If there is a lesson from the 1485 fall of Richard’s House of York, it’s that there are worse things than judicious appeasement.”
Padlocks Over The Seine (Lots Of Them)
“Paris’s picturesque bridges … are heaving with padlocks, bike locks, handcuffs and other talismans of amour. Enamored visitors write their names on a lock, attach it to a bridge and throw the key into the river. … The public displays of affection have unchained loathing among coldhearted locals.”
Missing Top Half Of Courbet’s Origin Of The World Found, Claims Collector
“Art expert Jean-Jacques Fernier, who has studied the works of Gustave Courbet for years, told Reuters he believed an unsigned painting of a woman’s head, featured in this week’s Paris Match magazine, had been cut off” of the painting, notorious for 147 years for its portrayal of a nude female model with legs splayed.
Amazon Patents Protocol For Lending Digital Content
“Amazon.com has been awarded what appears to be a broad patent on a ‘secondary market for digital objects’ – a system for users to sell, trade and loan digital objects including audio files, eBooks, movies, apps, and pretty much anything else.”
Why We’re Living In A Golden Age Of Television
“As Hollywood has gone global and mass-mass-market, different incentives for select television networks have helped to fill the void in quality entertainment. … Thus, television has seen a race to the top while Hollywood has experienced an ostensible race to the middle-bottom.”
Nikolai Tsiskaridze Accuses Bolshoi Bosses Of Stalin-Style Witch Hunt
The outspoken-to-a-fault, controversy-prone principal dancer, a big media star in Russia, says that his enemies are persecuting him with methods reminiscent of Stalinism – including spreading rumors that he’s behind the acid attack on Sergei Filin. He is demanding that the Kremlin replace the theater’s top management (and he’ll be happy to step in for them).
Sergei Filin On The Bolshoi’s Poisonous Atmosphere
“From the second day I joined the Bolshoi in 2011 as ballet director I felt that something awkward was happening inside the Bolshoi, and in its closest orbit – all sorts of dirty intrigues, leaks of compromising materials into mass media and into the Internet, as if somebody in the highest echelons of Bolshoi’s management had an agenda to give us blows and destroy us.”
A Business Columnist Looks At The Bolshoi Brouhaha
“All this is gripping stuff, but what does any of it have to do with business? Why is Schumpeter, whose subject is people in suits, fussing about people in tights? One answer is that peculiar institutions can tell us a lot about more run-of-the-mill ones. And dysfunction is more common in the business world than you might think.”
Former Gergiev Foundation Chief Indicted For Embezzling €6 Million
Igor Zotov, a former director of the foundation created by conductor and Mariinsky Theater head Valery Gergiev to fund the Moscow Easter Festival and St. Petersburg’s White Nights Festival, has been charged with stealing 245 million rubles ($8 million) to buy six luxury apartments in Moscow.