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Mantegna's masterpiece in Mantua And here it is: the island with the labyrinth of water.  An unremarkable but inexplicable fresco.  The ...

This move from the Hollywood-style blockbusters to low-budget films made by new directors – often emerging from the world of YouTube – and n...

 Herod the Great, mongrel, Idumae -an, Nabatean, (possibly half-jew -ish, half-arab), plucked out for power by Cae -sar, polygamous, hated b...

The world of generative AI is so complex, and moving so quickly, that it is no wonder that even the relatively recent EU AI Act , which ente...

In a post on his blog, the security guru Bruce Schneier points out that if the ruling stands and is adopted elsewhere, it could have importa...

It is the usual one-sided justice that is typical when copyright is involved. It seems that LaLiga is being given carte blanche to do whatev...

“You fed me gobbets of data, titbits of del -icate information, laced with a gravy of lies, Rumours and nonsense.  This enticing fruit I did...

The proof uses “an infinite unramified tower Of real number fields with 3-power Galois groups of growing degree”, the ab -stract says of the...

With the latest incarnation of its search engine, Google is making the World Wide Web as we have known it for over 30 years invisible, and t...

Hadopi is not quite dead yet: the French government could try to solve the two problems pointed out by the CJEU and confirmed by the Conseil...

Tensors, statistics, and differential equations Predicting elections, wars, the decline and fall Of galactic empires: these extrapolations F...

In other words, today’s obsession with protecting intellectual monopolies above all else could one day prove a major obstacle to fighting   ...

Heads down, they tap, squeeze and slide Themselves through equally zombified crowds, thumb- Typing away, doomscrolling; some Just stop and s...

Once upon a time, I sang – yet Again – of word processors, spreadsheets, data- bases, comms (though not the Internet, A concept that emerged...

Just don't call him Alexander the Great The most amazing thing about this place is that it exists, a complete culture and nation that pr...

As some people may have noticed, there's a new entry in the pinned post above: Moody Sonnets .  As well as a few dozen things I wrote de...

Atmospheric corridors inside the Büyük Valide han It is dark, with few lights, and all kinds of junk piled in the corridors.  On each side t...

A perfectly-preserved Roman statue of Victory, found in Brescia To  Pinacoteca Martinengo .  We’re practically the only visitors, of course....

A river to ford, a blocked road to clear, a broken bridge to circumvent Journey from Quba was amazing, not least because it was in two disti...

The view from Canoe, book and cocktail to hand In  Canoe , on the 54th floor of the  Toronto-Dominion Bank tower  (a  Ludwig Mies van der Ro...

Looking towards the old town and the surrounding hills Up on the observation deck, a watery sun above me.  I can pick out landmarks of the o...

  Kvetera fortress church Sitting inside the  Kvetera fortress church .  What an astonishing masterpiece.  Its form, with the four main  aps...

High in the mountains, at the heart of Kyrgyzstan Thanks to the driver, we reach the pass at 3,400 metres - very cold, but we did arrive.  T...

The entrance to the Yaghnob valley At the last fork in the road for us: up to Margib, down to the Yaghnob valley.  Two huge peaks lour over ...

The Guggenheim Bilbao by night By the   cathedral   in the old town.  The smell of drains, and a light rain falling.  A characteristic featu...