The perceived difference between "art" and "high art" is probably why the Hockney & Falco thesis -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockney%E2 ... lco_thesis -- upsets some people. The idea of "high art" (especially its popularity) is relatively new. I do wonder whether people like Vermeer considered themselves to be creators of high art. I rather think they thought of themselves more as masters of their craft. These days, many fine artists perceive their work to be in a realm transcending mere "craft". It is this kind of pretension that turns many people away from art (and attracts a minority of others).
TO THE MOST *HIGH AND MIGHTIE* Prince IAMES
BY THE GRACE OF GOD KING OF
GREAT BRITAIN, {F R A N C}E, AND IRELA[N]D,
DEFENDER [O]F THE FAITH, &[c].
The Transl[a]tors of the [B]ible, wish Grace,....
___ <= 10 =>
. G r e a t B r(I) t a
. i n e{F R A N C} e a
. n d I r e l a[N] d,D
. e f e n d e r[O] f t
. h e F a i t h[c].T H
. E T R A N S L[A] T O
. R S O F T H E[B] I B
. (L E,W I S)h G r a c e,
[BaCON] -10 (Prob. ~ 1 in 750)
The Case against Copernicus [Preview]
By Dennis Danielson and Christopher M. Graney
<<In 2011 a team of researchers at CERN near Geneva sent a beam of neutrinos on a 730-kilometer journey to Gran Sasso National Laboratory in L'Aquila, Italy. When the researchers clocked that trip, it appeared as though the neutrinos had somehow surpassed the speed of light in a vacuum. How did the scientific community respond to this surprising result? Almost everyone, rather than abandoning the well-established teachings of Albert Einstein—who said that nothing travels faster than light—argued that the researchers' measurements had to be wrong (as, indeed, they turned out to be).
Now imagine ourselves four centuries from now, in a future in which Einstein's ideas have been supplanted; scientists have long ago experimentally confirmed that neutrinos really can travel faster than light. How would we then, looking back on physicists today, construe their reluctance to accept the evidence? Would we conclude that 21st-century physicists were just set in their ways? Unreceptive to new ideas? Maybe motivated by nonscientific considerations—a bunch of closed-minded Einsteinians toeing a line dictated by tradition and authority?>>
<<Sir Karl Popper: The Tradition of Bold Conjecture and Free Criticism
First published in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society NS 59, 1958-9.
"In all or almost all civilizations we find something like religious and cosmological teaching, and in many societies we find schools. Now schools, especially primitive schools, all have, it appears, a characteristic structure and function. Far from being places of critical discussion they make it their task to impart a definite doctrine, and to preserve it, pure and unchanged. It is the task of a school to hand on the tradition, the doctrine of its founder, its first master, to the next generation, and to this end the most important thing is to keep the doctrine inviolate. A school of this kind never admits a new idea. New ideas are heresies, and lead to schisms; should a member of the school try to change the doctrine, then he is expelled as a heretic. But the heretic claims, as a rule, that his is the true doctrine of the founder. Thus not even the inventor admits that he has introduced an invention; he believes, rather, that he is returning to the true orthodoxy which has somehow been perverted.
In this way all changes of doctrine – if any – are surreptitious changes. They are all presented as re-statements of the true sayings of the master, of his own words, his own meaning, his own intentions.
It is clear that in a school of this kind we cannot expect to find a history of ideas, or even the material for such a history. For new ideas are not admitted to be new. Everything is ascribed to the master. All we might reconstruct is a history of schisms, and perhaps a history of the defence of certain doctrines against the heretics.
There cannot, of course, be any rational discussion in a school of this kind. There may be arguments against dissenters and heretics, or against some competing schools. But in the main it is with assertion and dogma and condemnation rather than argument that the doctrine is defended.
The great example of a school of this kind among the Greek philosophical schools is the Italian School founded by Pythagoras. Compared with the Ionian school, or with that of Elea, it had the character of a religious order, with a characteristic way of life and a secret doctrine. The story that a member, Hippasus of Metapontum, was drowned at sea because he revealed the secret of the irrationality of certain square roots, is characteristic of the atmosphere surrounding the Pythagorean school, whether or not there is any truth in this story.
But among Greek philosophic schools the early Pythagoreans were an exception. Leaving them aside, we could say that the character of Greek Philosophy, and of the philosophical schools, is strikingly different from the dogmatic type of school here described. I have shown this by an example: the story of the problem of change which I have told is the story of a critical debate, of a rational discussion. New ideas are propounded as such, and arise as the result of open criticism. There are few, if any, surreptitious changes. Instead of anonymity we find a history of ideas and of their originators.
Here is a unique phenomenon, and it is closely connected with the astonishing freedom and creativeness of Greek philosophy. How can we explain this phenomenon? What we have to explain is the rise of a tradition. It is a tradition that allows or encourages critical discussions between various schools and, more surprisingly still, within one and the same school. For nowhere outside the Pythagorean school do we find a school devoted to the preservation of a doctrine. Instead we find changes, new ideas, modifications, and outright criticism of the master.
(In Parmenides we even find, at an early date, a most remarkable phenomenon – that of a philosopher who propounds two doctrines, one which he says is true, and one which he himself describes as false. Yet he makes the false doctrine not simply an object of condemnation or of criticism; rather he presents it as the best possible account of the delusive opinion of mortal men, and of the world of mere appearance – the best account which a mortal man can give.)
How and where was this critical tradition founded? This is a problem deserving serious thought. This much is certain: Xenophanes who brought the Ionian tradition to Elea was fully conscious of the fact that his own teaching was purely conjectural, and that others might come who would know better. I shall come back to this point again in my next and last section.
If we look for the first signs of this new critical attitude, this new freedom of thought, we are led back to Anaximander’s criticism of Thales. Here is a most striking fact: Anaximander criticizes his master and kinsman, one of the Seven Sages, the founder of the Ionian school. He was, according to tradition, only about fourteen years younger than Thales, and he must have developed his criticism and his new ideas while his master was alive. (They seem to have died within a few years of each other.) But there is no trace in the sources of a story of dissent, of any quarrel, or of any schism.
This suggests, I think, that it was Thales who founded the new tradition of freedom-based upon a new relation between master and pupil and who thus created a new type of school, utterly different from the Pythagorean school. He seems to have been able to tolerate criticism. And what is more, he seems to have created the tradition that one ought to tolerate criticism.
Yet I like to think that he did even more than this. I can hardly imagine a relationship between master and pupil in which the master merely tolerates criticism without actively encouraging it. It does not seem to me possible that a pupil who is being trained in the dogmatic attitude would ever dare to criticize the dogma (least of all that of a famous sage) and to voice his criticism. And it seems to me an easier and simpler explanation to assume that the master encouraged a critical attitude – possibly not from the outset, but only after he was struck by the pertinence of some questions asked, by the pupils perhaps, without any critical intention.
However this may be, the conjecture that Thales actively encouraged criticism in his pupils would explain the fact that the critical attitude towards the master’s doctrine became part of the Ionian school tradition. I like to think that Thales was the first teacher who said to his pupils: ‘This is how I see things-how I believe that things are. Try to improve upon my teaching’ (Those who believe that it is ‘unhistorical’ to attribute this undogmatic attitude to Thales may again be reminded of the fact that only two generations later we find a similar attitude consciously and clearly formulated in the fragments of Xenophanes.). At any rate, there is the historical fact that the Ionian school was the first in which pupils criticized their masters, in one generation after the other. There can be little doubt that the Greek tradition of philosophical criticism had its main source in Ionia.
It was a momentous innovation. It meant a break with the dogmatic tradition which permits only one school doctrine, and the introduction in its place of a tradition that admits a plurality of doctrines which all try to approach the truth by means of critical discussion.
It thus leads, almost by necessity, to the realization that our attempts to see and to find the truth are not final, but open to improvement; that our knowledge, our doctrine, is conjectural; that it consists of guesses, of hypotheses, rather than of final and certain truths; and that criticism and critical discussion are our only means of getting nearer to the truth. It thus leads to the tradition of bold conjectures and of free criticism, the tradition which created the rational or scientific attitude, and with it our Western civilization, the only civilization which is based upon science (though of course not upon science alone).
In this rationalist tradition bold changes of doctrine are not forbidden. On the contrary, innovation is encouraged, and is regarded as success, as improvement, if it is based on the result of a critical discussion of its predecessors. The very boldness of an innovation is admired; for it can be controlled by the severity of its critical examination. This is why changes of doctrine, far from being made surreptitiously, are traditionally handed down together with the older doctrines and the names of the innovators. And the material for a history of ideas becomes part of the school tradition.
To my knowledge the critical or rationalist tradition was invented only once. It was lost after two or three centuries, perhaps owing to the rise of the Aristotelian doctrine of epistémé, of certain and demonstrable knowledge (a development of the Eleatic and Heraclitean distinction between certain truth and mere guesswork). It was rediscovered and consciously revived in the Renaissance, especially by Galileo Galilei.">>
LAFEU: I have seen a medicine
That's able to breathe life into a stone,
Quicken a rock, and make you dance canary
With spritely fire and motion;
<<There are Shakespearean references to dances such as the galliard or sinkapace, lavolta, coranto, pavane, and canary, and stage directions indicate dancing in many plays including Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night, or What You Will, Macbeth, and As You Like It. Terms like 'measure' and 'foot it' can also refer to dancing, and dance is often woven into the plot as part of a masque or masquerade ball.
Jig – Love's Labour's Lost (Act III, scene 1)
Galliard, cinquepace, or sinkapace—Twelfth Night (Act I, scene 3), Much Ado About Nothing (Act II, scene 1), Henry V (Act I, scene 2)
Volta, volte, lavolt or lavolta – Troilus and Cressida (Act IV, scene 4), Henry V (Act III, scene 5)
Coranto – All's Well That Ends Well (Act II, scene 3), Twelfth Night (Act I, scene 3)
Measure, measures, or old measures – As You Like It (Act V, scene 4), Richard II (Act III, scene 4), Richard)>>
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexuality_of_William_Shakespeare wrote:
<<John Manningham wrote in his diary that Shakespeare had a brief affair with a woman during a performance of Richard III: Upon a time when Burbage played Richard the Third there was a citizen grew so far in liking with him, that before she went from the play she appointed him to come that night unto her by the name of Richard the Third. Shakespeare, overhearing their conclusion, went before, was entertained and at his game ere Burbage came. Then, message being brought that Richard the Third was at the door, Shakespeare caused return to be made that William the Conqueror was before Richard the Third.
Presented at the fifteenth annual meeting of the National Science Teachers Association, 1966 in New York City, and reprinted from The Physics Teacher Vol. 7, issue 6, 1969, pp. 313-320 by permission of the editor and the author [Richard Feynman].
<<...What science is, I think, may be something like this: There was on this planet an evolution of life to a stage that there were evolved animals, which are intelligent. I don't mean just human beings, but animals which play and which can learn something from experience--like cats. But at this stage each animal would have to learn from its own experience. They gradually develop, until some animal could learn from experience more rapidly and could even learn from another’s experience by watching, or one could show the other, or he saw what the other one did. So there came a possibility that all might learn it, but the transmission was inefficient and they would die, and maybe the one who learned it died, too, before he could pass it on to others.
The question is: is it possible to learn more rapidly what somebody learned from some accident than the rate at which the thing is being forgotten, either because of bad memory or because of the death of the learner or inventors?
So there came a time, perhaps, when for some species the rate at which learning was increased, reached such a pitch that suddenly a completely new thing happened: things could be learned by one individual animal, passed on to another, and another fast enough that it was not lost to the race. Thus became possible an accumulation of knowledge of the race.
This has been called time-binding. I don't know who first called it this. At any rate, we have here some samples of those animals, sitting here trying to bind one experience to another, each one trying to learn from the other.
This phenomenon of having a memory for the race, of having an accumulated knowledge passable from one generation to another, was new in the world--but it had a disease in it: it was possible to pass on ideas which were not profitable for the race. The race has ideas, but they are not necessarily profitable.
So there came a time in which the ideas, although accumulated very slowly, were all accumulations not only of practical and useful things, but great accumulations of all types of prejudices, and strange and odd beliefs.
Then a way of avoiding the disease was discovered. This is to doubt that what is being passed from the past is in fact true, and to try to find out ab initio again from experience what the situation is, rather than trusting the experience of the past in the form in which it is passed down. And that is what science is: the result of the discovery that it is worthwhile rechecking by new direct experience, and not necessarily trusting the [human] race['s] experience from the past. I see it that way. That is my best definition.
...................................................
[Science] teaches the value of rational thought as well as the importance of freedom of thought; the positive results that come from doubting that the lessons are all true. You must here distinguish--especially in teaching--the science from the forms or procedures that are sometimes used in developing science. It is easy to say, "We write, experiment, and observe, and do this or that." You can copy that form exactly. But great religions are dissipated by following form without remembering the direct content of the teaching of the great leaders. In the same way, it is possible to follow form and call it science, but that is pseudo-science. In this way, we all suffer from the kind of tyranny we have today in the many institutions that have come under the influence of pseudoscientific advisers.
...................................................
Finally, with regard to this time-binding, a man cannot live beyond the grave. Each generation that discovers something from its experience must pass that on, but it must pass that on with a delicate balance of respect and disrespect, so that the [human] race--now that it is aware of the disease to which it is liable--does not inflict its errors too rigidly on its youth, but it does pass on the accumulated wisdom, plus the wisdom that it may not be wisdom.
It is necessary to teach both to accept and to reject the past with a kind of balance that takes considerable skill. Science alone of all the subjects contains within itself the lesson of the danger of belief in the infallibility of the greatest teachers of the preceding generation.
So carry on. Thank you.>>
Re: 10 reasons
Posted: Thu Feb 27, 2014 10:33 pm
by geckzilla
Somehow I decided to actually click that link and forgo the abridged, emphasized and colored version offered and ended up reading all about Feynman's ridiculous discovery that women have brains, too.
A Noether view
Posted: Fri Feb 28, 2014 1:25 am
by neufer
geckzilla wrote:
Somehow I decided to actually click that link and forgo the abridged, emphasized and colored version offered and ended up reading all about Feynman's ridiculous discovery that women have brains, too.
<<Emmy Noether (23 March 1882 – 14 April 1935), was an influential German mathematician known for her groundbreaking contributions to abstract algebra and theoretical physics. Described by Pavel Alexandrov, Albert Einstein, Jean Dieudonné, Hermann Weyl, Norbert Wiener and others as the most important woman in the history of mathematics, she revolutionized the theories of rings, fields, and algebras. In physics, Noether's theorem explains the fundamental connection between symmetry and conservation laws.
She was born to a Jewish family in the Bavarian town of Erlangen; her father was mathematician Max Noether. Emmy originally planned to teach French and English after passing the required examinations, but instead studied mathematics at the University of Erlangen, where her father lectured. After completing her dissertation in 1907 under the supervision of Paul Gordan, she worked at the Mathematical Institute of Erlangen without pay for seven years (at the time women were largely excluded from academic positions). In 1915, she was invited by David Hilbert and Felix Klein to join the mathematics department at the University of Göttingen, a world-renowned center of mathematical research. The philosophical faculty objected, however, and she spent four years lecturing under Hilbert's name. Her habilitation was approved in 1919, allowing her to obtain the rank of Privatdozent.
Noether remained a leading member of the Göttingen mathematics department until 1933; her students were sometimes called the "Noether boys". In 1924, Dutch mathematician B. L. van der Waerden joined her circle and soon became the leading expositor of Noether's ideas: her work was the foundation for the second volume of his influential 1931 textbook, Moderne Algebra. By the time of her plenary address at the 1932 International Congress of Mathematicians in Zürich, her algebraic acumen was recognized around the world. The following year, Germany's Nazi government dismissed Jews from university positions, and Noether moved to the United States to take up a position at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. In 1935 she underwent surgery for an ovarian cyst and, despite signs of a recovery, died four days later at the age of 53.>>
<<Although we do not know who owned our First Folio in the 17th century, we can generalise about the sort of person who might have first purchased it. Originally priced at £1, this book was something of a luxury item, and it is in fact said that the English aristocracy owned most of the copies for the first 200 years. Certainly, the book was in the hands of the aristocracy by the eighteenth century. The volume still bears the armorial bookplate of the 5th Earl of Inchiquin of Taplow Court, Buckinghamshire (1726-1808) who apparently acquired the book c.1780.
In common with most other surviving First Folios, the book shows considerable signs of wear and use, and many of its pages are stained and dirt engrained. However, evidence of heavy use by previous owners can offer us historical insights into earlier reading habits, and our copy is made particularly interesting for its annotations. Although anonymous, the marginalia are of importance since they suggest that the annotator actually saw the plays being acted contemporaneously; and while many of Shakespeare's plays had been first enacted some twenty five years before the production of the First Folio, this may still be regarded as a fairly immediate reaction to the works of one of the greatest playwrights.
The comments accompanying the names of the principal actors, for instance, would seem to suggest that the annotator knew or at least had seen some of the actors. For example, 'know' is written in by the name of Robert Benfield, 'by eyewittnesse' by that of John Lowine, and 'by report' underneath Richard Burbadge. The name of William Shakespeare, which heads the list, is accompanied by the intriguing comment 'Leass for making'.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/leas wrote:
Leas, n. [Old English from: lēasian "to lie"; lēasettan "to pretend"; lēascræft "deceit, art of lying"]
[list]1) falsehood, lie
2) mistake[/list]
Re: APOD: Fresh Tiger Stripes on Saturns Enceladus (2014 Apr
Posted: Mon Apr 07, 2014 8:32 pm
by Anthony Barreiro
neufer wrote:
DavidLeodis wrote:
The image was brought up through the "Pictured above" link where in its caption it stated the image was "a full-disk view of the anti-Saturn hemisphere on Enceladus". I take the "anti-Saturn" to mean the image shows a side of Enceladus that is not facing Saturn but does it also mean that side never shows its face to Saturn (like the far side of our Moon never faces the Earth).
Yes,
Art Neuendorffer ("anti-Satur(atfordia)n"
Okay Art. What's the connection between Saturn and whether or not the writings of Shakespeare were written by William Shakespeare of Stratford? What do you have up your sleeve?
Re: APOD: Fresh Tiger Stripes on Saturns Enceladus (2014 Apr
Posted: Mon Apr 07, 2014 9:34 pm
by geckzilla
Anthony Barreiro wrote:Okay Art. What's the connection between Saturn and whether or not the writings of Shakespeare were written by William Shakespeare of Stratford? What do you have up your sleeve?
Don't feed the monkeys. They bite.
Re: APOD: Fresh Tiger Stripes on Saturns Enceladus (2014 Apr
Posted: Tue Apr 08, 2014 1:36 am
by neufer
Anthony Barreiro wrote:
neufer wrote:
Art Neuendorffer ("anti-Satur(atfordia)n")
Okay Art. What's the connection between Saturn and whether or not the writings of Shakespeare were written by William Shakespeare of Stratford? What do you have up your sleeve?
--------------------------------------------------------------
__ 2 Henry 4 (Quarto 1, 1598) Act 2, Scene 4
Prince Henry: SATURNe and VENUS this yeere
in coniunction? what saies th'Almanacke to that?
.............................................
At about 1 PM on May 30, 1593
London experienced a partial eclipse of the sun http://asterisk.apod.com/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=22385
while VENUS was in conjunction with SATURN.
. About the same time Marlowe
was murdered on May 30, 1593
---------------------------------------------------
Re: APOD: Fresh Tiger Stripes on Saturns Enceladus (2014 Apr
Posted: Tue Apr 08, 2014 4:18 pm
by Anthony Barreiro
neufer wrote:
Anthony Barreiro wrote:
neufer wrote:
Art Neuendorffer ("anti-Satur(atfordia)n")
Okay Art. What's the connection between Saturn and whether or not the writings of Shakespeare were written by William Shakespeare of Stratford? What do you have up your sleeve?
--------------------------------------------------------------
__ 2 Henry 4 (Quarto 1, 1598) Act 2, Scene 4
Prince Henry: SATURNe and VENUS this yeere
in coniunction? what saies th'Almanacke to that?
.............................................
At about 1 PM on May 30, 1593
London experienced a partial eclipse of the sun http://asterisk.apod.com/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=22385
while VENUS was in conjunction with SATURN.
. About the same time Marlowe
was murdered on May 30, 1593
---------------------------------------------------
Fascinating. Wikipedia says that Henry IV Part 2 was probably written between 1596 and 1599. I would guess that the Marlowe camp believe that Marlowe wrote it before he was murdered. So did Marlowe hide a prediction of his own murder in 2 Henry IV? Why would he do that? And why would somebody want to murder him during a partial eclipse when Venus was conjunct Saturn?
So... it was Shakespeare's 450th birthday just the other day, wasn't it?
Assuming Shakespeare was Will. Assuming he was the glover's son. Assuming he was the man from Stratford. And assuming he, Will, the glover's son from Stratford, was the one who, presumably with a bit of help, actually wrote all those amazing plays and sonnets that are usually attributed to him.
The blogs and chronicles and other texts that I have read about good ol' Shaxper lately all root for the man from Stratford.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jude-morgan/shakespeare-facts_b_5113326.html wrote:
6. Shakespeare's daughter was illiterate: Of William and Anne Shakespeare's three children, two daughters survived: Susannah and Judith. While Susannah seems to have been able to sign her name, Judith could only make her mark. But in this period, literacy was a skill, useful in certain trades and professions, mainly male. Shakespeare was a man of his time, and his time didn't value literacy in women.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_Shakespeare%27s_works wrote:
<<Early criticism of female characters in Shakespeare's drama focused on the positive attributes the dramatist bestows on them and often claimed that Shakespeare realistically captured the "essence" of femininity. Helen Zimmern argued in 1895 that "of Shakespeare's dramatis personae, his women are perhaps the most attractive, and also, in a sense, his most original creations, so different are they, as a whole, from the ideals of the feminine type prevalent in the literature of his day." The editors of a [modern] 1983 collection called The Woman's Part conclude that these early critics are "uneasy" when Shakespeare's heroines behave "unwomanly".
Notable Shakespeare female characters:
Beatrice, in Much Ado About Nothing
Bianca, in "The Taming of the Shrew"
Cleopatra, in Antony and Cleopatra
Cordelia, in King Lear
Cressida, in Troilus and Cressida
Desdemona, in Othello
Hermia, in A Midsummer Night's Dream
Hero, in Much Ado About Nothing
Hermione, in A Winter's Tale
Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night's Dream
Imogen, in Cymbeline
Isabella, in Measure for Measure
Julia, in The Two Gentlemen of Verona
Juliet, in Romeo and Juliet
Katherina, in The Taming of the Shrew
Miranda, in The Tempest
Olivia, in Twelfth Night
Ophelia, in Hamlet
Portia, in The Merchant of Venice
The Princess of France, in Love's Labour's Lost
Rosalind, in As You Like It
Tamora in Titus Andronicus
Titania, in A Midsummer Night's Dream
Viola,in Twelfth Night
Volumnia, in Coriolanus
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jude-morgan/shakespeare-facts_b_5113326.html wrote:
7. Shakespeare didn't care about posterity: At least, as far as his plays went. He took care to supervise the printing of his two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, because these were prestige projects for influential patrons. But it was not until seven years after his death that his theatrical associates put together the First Folio edition of his plays. In his lifetime, Shakespeare doesn't seem to have cared whether his plays survived or not.
O! lest the world should task you to recite
What merit lived in me, that you should love
After my death,--dear love, forget me quite,
For you in me can nothing worthy prove.
Unless you would devise some virtuous lie,
To do more for me than mine own desert,
And hang more praise upon deceased I
Than niggard truth would willingly impart:
O! lest your true love may seem false in this
That you for love speak well of me untrue,
My name be buried where my body is,
And live no more to shame nor me nor you.
For I am shamed by that which I bring forth,
And so should you, to love things nothing worth.
The writer himself declares that he is unworthy of a memorial or a loving remembrance. Far better that he be buried and his name be buried with him. The poem contradicts its own message, for it is itself a memorial, even though it flatly refutes the need for any such testimony.>>
How computerish 
About the same time Marlowe
(Or... rest in peace, maybe.)