Issue no.30

BOOKS worth reading
I have been recently hooked up to storytelling which will be featured next time but this time some nice stories about us.

1434: The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy and Ignited the Renaissance
http://www.amazon.com/1434-Magnificent-Chinese-Ignited-Renaissance/dp/0061492175
In Menzies's 1421, the amateur historian advanced a highly controversial hypothesis, that the Chinese discovered America; in this follow-up, he credits the Renaissance not to classical Greek and Roman ideals (a "Eurocentric view of history") but again to the Chinese. His thesis in both works is based on the seven (historically undisputed) voyages undertaken by a large Chinese sailing fleet between 1405 and 1433; while it is known that they traveled as far as east Africa, Menzies believes that they landed in Italy and sent a delegation to the Council of Venice, held in Florence in 1439. There, they provided the knowledge and technique-introducing the painter Alberti, for instance, to the methods of perspective drawing-that sparked the Renaissance. Menzies sets the stage by recapitulating arguments from his first book, including the ingenious method for calculating longitude that Chinese navigators may have used. Though Menzies writes engagingly, his assumption that the Chinese fleet landed a delegation in Florence is highly speculative, and hardly substantiated by any facts (Alberti could just have easily learned perspective from classical sources; the Greeks knew about the relationship between perception of length and distance in the 1st Century BCE).

Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Watching-English-Hidden-Rules-Behaviour/dp/0340818867
"I don't see why anthropologists feel they have to travel to remote corners of the world and get dysentery in order to study strange tribal cultures with bizarre beliefs and mysterious customs, when the weirdest, most puzzling tribe of all is right here on our doorstep."

The rules of weather-speak. The Importance of Not Being Earnest rule. The ironic-gnome rule. The reflex-apology rule. The paranoid-pantomime rule. Class indicators and class-anxiety tests. The money-talk taboo. Humour rules. Pub etiquette. Table manners. The rules of bogside reading. The dangers of excessive moderation. The eccentric-sheep rule. The English 'social dis-ease'.
http://www.sirc.org/news/watching_the_english.shtml

This week’s special

FLARToolKit is a Flash Actionscript port of ARToolKit, a software library for building Augmented Reality applications. Huh? Maybe you’ve seen some really cool Augmented Reality videos before. The FLARToolKit will bring all of this to your webbrowser when you have a webcam and a recent Flash Player.

See in action

Resources:

http://www.libspark.org/wiki/saqoosha/FLARToolKit

http://www.hitl.washington.edu/artoolkit/

Sahara Forest Project Converts Desert into Oasis

Recently a trio of entrepreneurs announced an incredible solution for the world’s resource problems: turn the Sahara desert into a source for food, water, and energy. The Sahara Forest Project (.PDF) is a solution that combines seemingly disparate technologies - Concentrated solar power and Seawater Greenhouses - and turns them into a mean, green super-massive biomachine. The elegant system could potentially produce enough energy for all of Africa and Europe while turning one of the world’s most inhospitable regions into a flourishing oasis.