Category: ideas

Scotland’s storied (if bulkily named) Britannia Panopticon is a grand old venue in need of some serious TLC. Still, the imperfections of the place allow for some fascinating art installations and performances that just wouldn’t seem at home anywhere else. “The latest chapter of the Panopticon story comes courtesy of artist Minty Donald, whose Glimmers in Limbo project directly addresses the building’s past, present and future, examining and interpreting its varied uses, and the decaying fabric of the music hall, too.”

“Forty-thousand dollars in prizes, many expressions of warm fuzzy feelings for a city most Canadians profess to hate and an impromptu singing of O Canada marked the second annual Mayor’s Arts Awards lunch in Toronto yesterday… Artists are nominated by the public, and then juries choose the finalists in five categories.”

The city of Miami Beach, Florida has approved the creation of a housing district offering affordable living and studio space to artists. “Developers will be allowed to construct new buildings or rehabilitate existing ones with smaller units than typically permitted under city zoning laws, as long as they set aside a portion of the property to develop affordable housing… People who qualify for [the] housing must be artists or employees of cultural arts organizations.”

The weather in Scotland, let’s face it, is challenging. Some might call it dismal. But is it just possible that hard weather makes for hardier folk, that Scotland’s entire cultural and political heritage is bound up in its legacy of rain, wind, and gloom?

“Today, thanks to Hollywood’s crack-like obsession with gadgets, certain protocol persists when navigating our brave, new, cursor-blinking world. Consider yourself cc’d: Breaking rank is taboo, even over the Internet.”

“Much like the evolutionary theory of Darwin, who was himself intrigued by the concept of a linguistic family tree, the new findings show how individuals can unwittingly influence changes in the ‘species’ of their shared mother tongue. Like genes, words undergo ruthless survival-of-the-fittest pressure and those that are less central to daily life are subject to mutation, according to their study.”

“The new edition of The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary has done away with about 16,000 hyphens. The editors of the dictionary have decided, in an awesome display of ruthless language modification, that the conventions of hyphenation were arbitrary and needed simplification… There are many reasons for this, one of them being that the rules of hyphenation were just silly. The other is, of course, the slow elimination of punctuation that the digital age is necessitating.”

“From the mid-1990s onwards, brain-scanning techniques have revealed variable brain activity that appears unrelated to external stimuli and occurs even when a person is asleep or anaesthetized.” Now scientists say they have “the first direct evidence that internal instabilities – so-called ‘spontaneous brain activity’ – may play an important role in the variability of human behaviour.”

“Half of all adolescents get less than seven hours of sleep on weeknights. Using newly developed technological and statistical tools, sleep scientists have recently been able to isolate and measure the impact of this single lost hour. Because children’s brains are a work-in-progress until the age of 21, and because much of that work is done while a child is asleep, this lost hour appears to have an exponential impact on children that it simply doesn’t have on adults.”

In recent years, says Minette Marrin, “it was genuinely hard to point out that cultures that treat women as irresponsible inferiors, that hang young gay men, mutilate criminals and silence debate are not equal to ours. They are inferior and it is not self-evidently racist to say so… We have moved on since then, supposedly, and surprisingly suddenly. [But] there are still signs that many people are in the grip of the old orthodoxy; its hold on public institutions and the public mind seems to be remarkably persistent.”