Natalie Angier, inspired by Kandinsky, celebrates the circle, I also learned of Kandinsky’s growing love affair with the circle. The circle, he wrote, is “the most modest form, but asserts itself unconditionally.” It is “simultaneously stable and unstable,” “loud and soft,” “a single tension that carries countless tensions within it.” Kandinsky loved the circle so much that it finally supplanted in his visual imagination the primacy long claimed by an emblem of his Russian boyhood, the horse. Quirkily enough, the artist’s life followed a circular form: He was born in December 1866, and he died the same month in 1944. …
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Canada is about to be roundly shamed at the Copenhagen summit, and it can’t happen swiftly enough or with enough emphasis for me. Our government is showing itself to be a dinosaur when it comes to tackling climate change. Here is Stephen Harper touting a total myth: “Without the wealth that comes from growth, the environmental threats, the developmental challenges and the peace and security issues facing the world will be exponentially more difficult to deal with,” Harper said in an address to South Korea’s National Assembly. via Harper Says Global Recovery Must Precede Environment (Update1) – Bloomberg.com. The …
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Comfort Oh, the comfort– the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person– having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all right out, just as they are, chaff and grain together; certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away. –Dinah Maria Mulock Craik (1826-1887) Sweet to find that faithful hand in the space between me and the other. via easily amazed.
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December 6, 1989 Twenty years on, and I still remember them. Geneviève Bergeron (b. 1968), civil engineering student. Hélène Colgan (b. 1966), mechanical engineering student. Nathalie Croteau (b. 1966), mechanical engineering student. Barbara Daigneault (b. 1967) mechanical engineering student. Anne-Marie Edward (b. 1968), chemical engineering student. Maud Haviernick (b. 1960), materials engineering student. Maryse Laganière (b. 1964), budget clerk in the École Polytechnique’s finance department. Maryse Leclair (b. 1966), materials engineering student. Anne-Marie Lemay (b. 1967), mechanical engineering student. Sonia Pelletier (b. 1961), mechanical engineering student. Michèle Richard (b. 1968), materials engineering student. Annie St-Arneault (b. 1966), mechanical engineering student. …
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My friend Robert Oetjen was a key member of our hosting team at Altmoisa. He brings a lovely capacity to the work, being the head of an environmental learning centre in southern Estonia, he understands the deep connection between human and world, and is a practitioner of the most ancient arts of human kind: tracking and fire building. He is a man who is a beautiful learner from his environment. Born in New Haven, Connecticut, USA, he moved here in the early 1990s as a Peace Corps worker, teaching English in the days in which Estonia was hungry to claim …