Here's a handy link to sixty two of the world's most beautiful libraries. Imagine, thousands of books in soaring gorgeous architecture. My idea of heaven! When I have spare time and money and the children are grown, I'd like to visit them one by one, my places of pilgrimage. Well, almost all of them, because I find the modern interiors grotesque- ( Read more... )

Mysterious underground goings-on behind seemingly ordinary NYC townhomes. Take #58 Joralemon Street in Brooklyn. On the surface, it's a Greek Revival brownstone, however, no one has been at home for more than 100 years. In fact, it's a secret subway exit and ventilation point. The house stands directly nine stories above the New York City subway ( Read more... )

Two weeks ago, I attended an event at the Asian Art Museum where local Indian writers interviewed notable writers from India.

First up were Nayanjot Lahiri, Professor of History at the University of Delhi and author of The Decline and Fall of the Indus Civilization and Finding Forgotten Cities, and Vikram Prakash, Professor of Architecture at the ( Read more... )

An ingenious architect from Hong Kong has configured his 300-sq-meter apartment into 24 configurable rooms by pioneering the concept of movable walls with ceiling tracks and wheels on the ground. Here's the video that takes a look inside his marvel.

Ex-Afghanistan soldier breaks the code of silence to tell how the situation on the ground really was. He sent a detailed report to his superiors and made a generalized one public. "As part of his job he had criss-crossed the country, travelling 9,000 miles and talking to more than 250 people. He had built up a picture of a hopeless cause; a country ( Read more... )

This is seriously cool: One of Hollywood's most beautiful woman was an inventor in secret. Actress Hedy Lamarr is now credited with having developed spread-spectrum radio or frequency-hopping in the 1940s. It's currently used in Bluetooth, CDMA, among others. In the late 1990s when she was in her early 80s, one bright bulb in the field of wireless ( Read more... )

Since today's Bilbo's and Frodo's birthdays (according to the Shire Calendar), here are a couple pictures of a real hobbit house. (Thanks rimrunner for the link.)


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A relative of mine works for the World Bank in Dhaka. As a result, any time Dhaka's in the news, I'm interested ( Read more... )

The tourist brochure for St. Paul's Cathedral, that I picked up last summer, claims that there has been a cathedral on the same site dedicated to St. Paul for almost 1400 years. Some scholars share this view, while others put forth an alternate theory. Ludenwic was an Anglo Saxon settlement, currently The Strand, well outside the inner Roman ( Read more... )

He wants to sue for how much money? One Yotta! To be more precise: 1,784,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That's $1.784 billion trillion for poor customer service-more money than's available on this planet at least.

Rich Germans are demanding that their government tax them more to help the economy recover and also put into place funding for ecology, ( Read more... )