Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Potpourri

This is not a post about Schopenhauer -- well, it's only a bit about Schopy. I just love the photos of him. He always looks like he's on the verge of hurling a string of obscenities.

I've fixed up some old posts, esp. the ones on Vienna, mainly by replacing or deleting broken links. I've also added these blog scans in the right margin. What a neat tool!

Here are a few interesting web catches of late:

A tribute site for 20th-Century neo-Platonist stalwart, J. N. Findlay;

Marco Roth on (and against) the rise of the neuro-novel;

Pierce & Bekoff on something like morality in beasts;

An interview with Amartya Sen;

A review of a translation of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky's book (I had to copy & paste that name);
Top ten ghostwritten books;

An old Guardian list of best authors (they shouldn't have believed the hype -- or maybe it's we who shouldn't);

A 1917 German propaganda film about a U-boat mission -- they sink ships, always evacuating the crews first, and take five British captains as POW's; shortly after the 30-minute mark: "Filming interrupted by the appearance of an English destroyer";

Wow! Olivia Newton John is Max Born's granddaughter (Born was a Nobel laureate);

Interesting new activity -- reading police blogs, some with disturbing titles, some quite thoughtful and into theory, some about life on the job, some about life on and off the job, some that had to be shut down due to pressure from on high, etc. etc.

Monday, October 26, 2009

Macabre photo

Life.com has put on-line the photos from the Life and Getty Archives. It's a nice collection through which to browse, but I've stumbled across one macabre, disturbing image, a photo of the bodies of Stefan Zweig and his wife, Charlotte Zweig, after they took their own lives. The picture is pathos incarnate.