About

Why Does This Blog Exist?

This blog owes its existence to La Fée Culturelle. After leaving a few rather lengthy comments, I wrote down what I was trying to say as separate blog posts. Then, despite my best intentions, the blog started to grow.

What Is It About?

Museum Art

Many posts are about Museum Art. I am not interested in ‘Look to your right. Artist A created this object in year Y. It is considered a typical example of style S, …’ Instead, I attempt to find links between the art objects, what inspired them, and what these objects have inspired, then link them to a broader context. This approach is akin to the deduction method of Sherlock Holmes but applied to art rather than crime-solving. And this is about putting together facts-based stories and trying to make sense of them rather than just listing the facts. Inevitably, the stories are about the past, but, as per the only episode of the Game of Thrones that I liked, it takes to know the stories of the past to see the way into a better future.

The most well-known real-life advocate of the stories is Professor Yuval Noah Harari. In chapter 2 of his best-selling book Sapiens, Professor Harari writes: “In the wake of the Cognitive Revolution, gossip helped Homo sapiens to form larger and more stable bands. But even gossip has its limits. Sociological research has shown that the maximum ‘natural’ size of a group bonded by gossip is about 150 individuals. Most people can neither intimately know nor gossip effectively about more than 150 human beings.
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How did Homo sapiens manage to cross this critical threshold, eventually founding cities comprising tens of thousands of inhabitants and empires ruling hundreds of millions? The secret was probably the appearance of fiction. Large numbers of strangers can cooperate successfully by believing in common myths.
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It all revolved around telling stories, and convincing people to believe them.
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Telling effective stories is not easy. The difficulty lies not in telling the story, but in convincing everyone else to believe it.”

Social Science

Patrick Winston, a prominent MIT professor, defined intelligence as the ability to tell, understand and recombine stories in the paper “The Right Way”. This definition is mentioned in a post on this blog that belongs to the Social Science category. The posts in this category have an extensive range of subjects – finance, diversity, intelligence, dating – but I try to make them all entertaining, facts-based and, hopefully, occasionally enlightening.

Shakespeare

The third category concerns the works of one of the greatest storytellers of all time, William Shakespeare. I am a big fan of the Bard because of the universality of his works and the vast range of insightfully crafted human behaviour patterns they contain. I struggle with the Olde English language (No Fear Shakespeare is very helpful). But these struggles are worthwhile because his way of conveying the finest details of the meaning by skillfully using the broadest possible range of verbal techniques is exquisite.

Food

Last but not least, I publish some Recipes because it is an easy way to remember how I adjust the original recipes (e.g. by changing the units or using different ingredients), share them with friends and balance the abstract nature of the rest of the blog!

Disclaimer

I have no professional knowledge of the subjects I write about, and English is my third language, so please doubt, correct me if I need to be corrected, and leave your comments!

Images

The image sources I use most frequently are:

• Wikimedia Commons – it’s the biggest and the easiest-to-use image source.
• Digital collections of prominent museums, such as The British Museum, The Royal Collection, The Victoria and Albert Museum, The J. Paul Getty Museum etc.
• Art databases Artcyclopedia, Europeana collections, Réunion des Musées Nationaux – Grand Palais (in French), La Red Digital de Colecciones de Museos de España (in Spanish) and Bildindex (in German).
• Clipart comes from Pixabay, Kisspng and Freepik.

Images-related tools I use are:

• 1001 fonts and 1001 free fonts: both these websites allow you to try fonts online;
• Pixlr Editor: my favourite image editor;
• Pic Monkey: this image editor can rotate an image at an arbitrary angle.

Website image credits:

• My favicon is based on Cup of Coffee by Filip Nohe via Wikimedia Commons.

WordPress Setup

This WordPress website is hosted at Hostinger. I use:

• Pinboard as a base theme; see onedesigns.com for further details. I wanted to customise Pinboard a little, so I have created a child theme using this tutorial;
• Google Analytics; to enable it, I have installed this WordPress plugin.

This is how I debug my WordPress site: in public_html/wp-config.php, I set define('WP_DEBUG', true);, define('WP_DEBUG_LOG', true); and define('WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY', false);. This allows to write to /wp-content/debug.log using PHP’s built-in error_log() function, e.g. error_log( print_r($multidimensionalarray, TRUE) );. More details here.

Text Tools I Use

• Grammarly is great for spelling, grammar and punctuation checks;
• English @ StackExchange.com: the English language forum;
• BrokenLinkCheck.com: the name of this website is self-explanatory! It is easy and free to use.