The position of restaurant critic, is one fraught with danger. Since William Grimes left the job at the New York Times, the paper has used interim critics, but the restaurant industry is angry at the results. “Mr. Grimes wasn’t exactly beloved by the city’s restaurant industry—many considered him sensationalist, too transfixed by his fine-tuned prose to appreciate or even understand the joys of the table—but now his controversial tenure seems like the good old days.”
Tag: 04.06.04
Greek Court Gives Go Ahead To Acropolis Museum Construction
Greece’s highest court has ruled that work can proceed on a museum at the Acropolis. “Court sources said the Council of State dismissed arguments that construction work would damage ancient building remains found on the plot earmarked for the 94-million-euro museum.”
Chess: Measuring Artificial Intelligence
“Chess has long served as a touchstone for the progress of artificial intelligence. For years, the best human players retained a clear edge over chess-playing computers. Computers appeared to gain the advantage with the 1997 defeat of the reigning world champion, Gary Kasparov, by IBM’s Deep Blue. But since then, the top ranks of chess have settled into an unexpected equilibrium between humans and computers. The computers and grandmasters are both getting better (and the grandmasters are getting better at playing computers). This is a disappointing state of affairs for enthusiasts of artificial intelligence.”
The Death Of American Arts Education
Arts education is quickly disappearing from schools across America. “Art and music classes have become secondary to more traditional subjects such as math and science, which means that when budgets are tight, the arts are among the first to be cut from curriculums.”
Stone Cold Movies
In the Norwegian arctic, residents have built a unique drive-in movie theatre. But instead of watching in your car, patrons come in snow mobiles. And “the entire cinema is made from snow. We’ve built a snow amphitheatre, with reindeer skins to sit on, and the actual screen is also made from snow.”
Indian Movie Theatre Strike Ends
A thousand movie theatres in India have been on strike for three weeks. Now the strike has ended after “cinema bosses said the state government had accepted their demand for a 10% cut in tax levied on tickets. But they said other demands including permission to convert failing cinemas into other businesses had not been met. During the shutdown cinemas lost an estimated 10m rupees (£130,000) per day – twice as much as the government.”
Ruling: US Publishers Can Edit Foreign Manuscripts
New US regulations might have prevented American publishers from editing manuscripts from countries such as Iran. But the policy has been reconsidered. “U.S. publishers would be free to edit scholarly manuscripts from Iran and some other off-limit countries without fear of running afoul of economic sanctions, the Bush administration has determined.”
It’s An Aesthetic Aesthetic World
What do academics interested in aesthetics do when they get together? They talk about ideas. “One of the things that I really love about the American Society for Aesthetics is that it’s quite balanced… . There’s serious scholarly work that’s pursued on major texts in the history of aesthetics… . At the same time, there’s not a condescending attitude to the emergence of cultural forms.”
Passion Of The Christ On Its Way To Best-selling Movie Of All Time?
“The Passion of the Christ has already earned $330 million in U.S. and Canadian ticket sales since it opened six weeks ago, breaking all sorts of box-office records along the way.” Now there’s even speculation that it could ultimately displace Titanic as the highest grossing movie of all time.
Study: TV At Young Age Harms Children
A new study says that young children exposed to television are at risk of developing attention deficit disorder. Scientists found that “every hour of TV toddlers watch per day increases by 10 percent the chance they will develop concentration problems and other symptoms of attention-deficit disorders by age 7.”