That's Interesting

  • Download Great Works of Art from 40+ Museums Worldwide: Explore Artvee, the New Art Search Engine

    Artvee, a new search engine for downloadable high-resolution, public domain artworks has made collections accessible from the Smithsonian’s impressive online collections as well as collections of more than 40 other international institutions, from the New York Public Library and the Art Institute of Chicago to the Rijksmuseum and Paris Musées, many of which had little or no online presence back in the early 1990s.

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  • How Leonardo da Vinci Made His Magnificent Drawings Using Only a Metal Stylus, Pen & Ink, and Chalk

    The modern artist has what can seem like an unlimited range of materials from which to choose, a variety completely unknown to great Renaissance masters like Leonardo da Vinci. Few, if any, can say, however, that they have anything like the raw talent, ingenuity, and discipline that drove Leonardo to draw incessantly, constantly honing his techniques and exploiting every use of the tools and techniques available to him.

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  • Experience Footage of Roaring 1920s Berlin, Restored & Colorized with Artificial Intelligence

    Offered the chance to travel back in time to any city in any period, surely more than a few would choose Berlin in the 1920s. Ideally it would be Berlin in the mid-1920s: after much of the social and economic damage of the Great War had been repaired, but before the Great Depression reached Germany at the end of the decade, doing its part to enable the rise of Hitler. The closest experience to stepping in that time machine yet developed is a series of clips from Walther Ruttmann’s 1927 documentary Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis, but smoothed out, scaled up, and colorized with the aid of applications powered by artificial intelligence.

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  • The Mathematics Behind Origami, the Ancient Japanese Art of Paper Folding

    The two characters at the core of origami (折り紙), one of the best-known Japanese words around the world, mean “folding” and “paper.” Given the variety and elaborateness of the constructions produced by origami masters over the past few centuries, the simplicity of the practice’s basic nature bears repeating. Those masters must develop no slight degree of manual dexterity, it goes without saying, but also a formidable mathematical understanding of their medium.

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  • The heavens underground: the Soviet Union’s opulent metro stations, from Belarus to Uzbekistan

    Decorated with chandeliers, mosaics, and Lenin busts, the Soviet Union produced the most photographed transport system in the world. In this excerpt from Fuel’s latest book, Soviet Metro Stations, writer Owen Hatherley and photographer Christopher Herwig celebrate the metro’s expansive architectural legacy, travelling as far as Tashkent and Baku.

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  • The Complete Works of Hilma af Klint Will Get Published for the First Time in a Beautiful, Seven-Volume Collection

    The seven-volume series, published by Bokförlaget Stolpe, “is organized both chronologically and by theme, beginning with the spiritual sketches af Klint made in conjunction with The Five, a group of women who attended séances in hopes of obtaining messages from the dead.”

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  • Inside Rome’s Secure Vault for Stolen Art

    Some of the art is real, some fake, but it’s all had a brush with the criminal underworld.

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  • The unique world of North Korea’s kids TV

    North Korean children get 30 minutes of dedicated programming every day, but it’s all carefully crafted to suit the country’s defiant, military-first philosophy.  BBC Monitoring’s North Korea expert Alistair Coleman takes a look.

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  • How one man spent 600 days walking the Silk Road to see the Caucasus and Central Asia by foot

    In August 2018, anthropology graduate Daniele Ventola left Italy to embark on the biggest adventure of his life — a journey to China along the Silk Road — on foot.

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  • 10,000 Vintage Recipe Books Are Now Digitized in The Internet Archive’s Cookbook & Home Economics Collection

    Cookbooks are windows into history—markers of class and caste, documents of daily life, and snapshots of regional and cultural identity at particular moments in time.

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