Our cities are full of majestic monuments, stunning sculptures and artistic statues, each having a story to tell, Bored Panda says and offers us 25 of them.
Image credits: Bruno Catalano
Les Voyageurs, Marseilles, France
Image credits: Patche99z
Hippo Sculptures, Taipei, Taiwan
Image credits: Dan Dima
Mihai Eminescu, Onesti, Romania
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How big is a book?
Vincze Miklós at io9 invites us to “just imagine burying your nose between the pages of these beauties, massive atlases, photobooks, and tributes to the written word.”
(via Erik Kwakkel and AP Photo/Sang Tan)
The Klencke Atlas, presented by a group of Dutch sugar merchants, led by Johannes Klencke, to King Charles of England II in 1660.
(via Millennium House)
Earth Platinum, a 6 by 4.5-ft, 128-page atlas by the Sydney-based Millennium House. 31 copies were produced and sold for $100,000 each in 2012.
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Who else do my readers read?
There is a fun site that produces a cloud showing relationships among authors. I plugged in my name and got this: What else do readers of Alma Alexander read? The closer two writers are, the more likely someone will like both of them. Click on any name to travel along.
That’s me in the center even if the image is not super. I’ve written historical fantasy as do Judith Tarr and Guy Gavriel Kay. Charles de Lint I can see being in the same camp although it’s a slightly different animal. I’ve been compared to Gail Tsukiyama before.
But why on earth are Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman grouped together out there at the periphery? OK, I can see an overlap with at least SOME of Gaiman, but Pratchett writes funny, and I rarely write humor. While I deeply admire the man and do enjoy his work I don’t know that I would expect an overlap of readers who might profess to enjoy us both?
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When truth and fiction collide
“This reminds me of “The Secrets of Jin Shei. You’ll know why!” my German translator, Christiane Bergfeld, said in sending me a link.
I do know why. And it’s amazing.
There is a limit to how much actual research you can do on ANYTHING – and at some point you just have to trust to what you have already learned, and then after that to luck. Such was the case when I posited a race of red-headed gypsies who lived in the mountains of Syai, of my mythical not-quite-China where the world of “The Secrets of Jin Shei” is set. But then… oh, SO many years later… it turns out I knew more than I knew.
THE UYGHURS: THE MYSTERY OF THE CHINESE CELTS
The boy in this photograph is officially Chinese, being from the Uyghur people, a mixed Caucasian-Asian Muslim ethnic group that primarily live in Xinjiang (aka East Turkestan) in the People’s Republic of China.
A meeting of civilizations: The mystery of China’s Celtic mummies. The discovery of European corpses thousands of miles away suggests a hitherto unknown connection between East and West in the Bronze Age. Clifford Coonan reports for The Independent.
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Iridescent Clouds over Thamserku
Image Credit & Copyright: Oleg Bartunov
NASA offers a daily photo of the universe – stars, galaxies, nebulae — and sometimes an image from earth like this stunning cloud formation. NASA explains how it came about.
Why would a cloud appear to be different colors? A relatively rare phenomenon known as iridescent clouds can show unusual colors vividly or a whole spectrum of colors simultaneously. These clouds are formed of small water droplets of nearly uniform size. When the Sun is in the right position and mostly hidden by thick clouds, these thinner clouds significantly diffract sunlight in a nearly coherent manner, with different colors being deflected by different amounts. Therefore, different colors will come to the observer from slightly different directions. The above iridescent cloud was photographed in 2009 from the Himalayan Mountains in Nepal, behind the 6,600-meter peak named Thamserku.
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Read these, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar says
“I’ve always loved YA novels. The ones I read growing up include “The Three Musketeers,” “Lord of the Flies,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Huckleberry Finn” and “The Catcher in the Rye,” among many others. Those works inspired and shaped me as the man I would become, and they continue to remind me of the values of compassion and courage I still embrace.”
He picks five contemporary young adult novels that he thinks adults should read.
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Quote of the Day
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Alma Alexander
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