badesaba:
A Tehran Art University student looks at a painting by 20th century U.S. artist Jackson Pollock at Tehran’s Museum of Contemporary Art on June 19, 2010.
Artists like Monet, Picasso and Warhol’s works not much appreciated by the leaders of Iran’s Islamic revolution were kept out of view for decades. Now, one of the greatest collections of contemporary Western art — put together under a Western-leaning monarchy in pre-revolutionary Iran — is open to the public, with some works on display for the first time in more than 30 years.
Morteza Nikoubazl / Reuters
(via mohandasgandhi)
Some people think that you can’t let same-sex couples get married without changing the definition of the word “marriage.” When we let openly gay people join the army, did we have to change the definition of the word “Army”? Did Rosa Parks make us change the definition of the word “bus”?
It’s one thing to blame the Bible for your bigotry, but don’t blame the dictionary.
California attorney and semi-professional cynic Bill Smith on today’s Ninth Circuit decision regarding Proposition 8. Read the full decision
here. (via
cognitivedissonance)
(via attackships)
latimes:
In Alabama, a church sees its Latino brethren vanish: Since the state passed its tough immigration law, many are moving elsewhere. At one Southern Baptist church, white members struggle to reconcile their support for the measure with compassion for their fellow Christians.
In an hour, the sanctuary would fill with the church’s white members, nearly all of them conservatives and most supporters of Republican Gov. Robert J. Bentley, the Southern Baptist deacon who championed the law as the nation’s toughest after signing it in September.
For more than a decade, however, the white Southern Baptists in this small country church have opened their doors, wallets and hearts to a group of Latino strangers who appeared among them suddenly one Sunday, desperate for a place to pray.
They hired a bilingual pastor, launched a countywide “Hispanic mission,” and let their children play side by side with the newcomers’ kids on field trips and in summer camps. They knew or suspected that many of them were here illegally.
This is fascinating.
Photo: Pastor Randy Billingsley sits with children for a short story as part of the English service at Riverside Heights Baptist Church in Tallassee, Ala. Latino families attend a Spanish-language service in another room. Credit: Don Bartletti / Los Angeles Times
israelfacts:
Professional Torah restorer Mehrdad Sassany works on the restoration of a 100 to 120-year-old Torah, first hand written in Baghdad on cow leather, at Iran’s Jewish Association in Tehran, March 1, 2012. Iran’s 25,000 strong Jewish community is represented by one member of parliament as guaranteed by the constitution. The country’s parliamentary elections will take place on Friday. (Reuters)
israelfacts:
On This Day in 2009: When Palestinian children returned to school for the first day of classes since Israel’s deadly assault on Gaza ended, not all pupils showed up. Some students had to be excused for not attending after being killed by the Israeli army during its three-week bombing campaign of the besieged strip.
Over 300 Palestinian children were killed in ‘Operation Cast Lead’ — between 27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009 — which took the lives of over 1,400 Palestinians in total.
Signs replaced the once-occupied seats at al-Fakhura School in the Jabaliya refugee camp in Gaza; names of victims written under the word in red: ‘Martyr’, 24 January, 2009.
(Photo: Anja Niedringhaus / AP)
(via therecipe)
mohandasgandhi:
washingtonpoststyle:
The United States has fallen 27 places in the Press Freedom Index. The reason? The many arrests of journalists covering Occupy protests.
El Salvador, which is tragically plagued with horrific violence, and Japan, guilty of censoring the press over Fukushima, placed well above the United States. Incredible.
miu-sherandhiscollar:
A 40-year-old puzzle of superstring theory solved by supercomputer
A group of three researchers from KEK, Shizuoka University and Osaka University has for the first time revealed the way our universe was born with 3 spatial dimensions from 10-dimensional superstring theory in which spacetime has 9 spatial directions and 1 temporal direction. This result was obtained by numerical simulation on a supercomputer.
“According to Big Bang cosmology, the universe originated in an explosion from an invisibly tiny point. This theory is strongly supported by observation of the cosmic microwave background and the relative abundance of elements. However, a situation in which the whole universe is a tiny point exceeds the reach of Einstein’s general theory of relativity, and for that reason it has not been possible to clarify how the universe actually originated.
In superstring theory, which is considered to be the “theory of everything”, all the elementary particles are represented as various oscillation modes of very tiny strings. Among those oscillation modes, there is one that corresponds to a particle that mediates gravity, and thus the general theory of relativity can be naturally extended to the scale of elementary particles. Therefore, it is expected that superstring theory allows the investigation of the birth of the universe. However, actual calculation has been intractable because the interaction between strings is strong, so all investigation thus far has been restricted to discussing various models or scenarios.
Superstring theory predicts a space with 9 dimensions, which poses the big puzzle of how this can be consistent with the 3-dimensional space that we live in.
A group of 3 researchers, Jun Nishimura (associate professor at KEK), Asato Tsuchiya (associate professor at Shizuoka University) and Sang-Woo Kim (project researcher at Osaka University) has succeeded in simulating the birth of the universe, using a supercomputer for calculations based on superstring theory. This showed that the universe had 9 spatial dimensions at the beginning, but only 3 of these underwent expansion at some point in time…”
(via abokononist)
