Opus sectile floor on display

Italian restorers have brought to light unique, bright, multicolored marble decorations that even contemporary Romans never got to admire.

The marbles crafted in a technique known as opus sectile, were designed to decorate the floor and walls of an ancient Roman palace more than 1,600 years ago. However, the roof of the palace collapsed during construction and the mosaics remained buried for centuries. . .

Visitors at Rome's Museo dell'Alto Medioevo (Museum of the High Middle Ages) are able to admire the newly restored spendid decorations in a room which recreates the original hall of the palace. The floor and three walls out of four are covered by the marbles.

The marbles represent the only example of an almost totally restored, Roman version of opus sectile.

From Discovery News. The floor was discovered nearly 50 years ago, but recomposing it has taken decades. The Museo dell'Alto Medioevo isn't much visited, as it is situated far from the city center out in the new city of EUR. Incidentally, while the literal translation of "alto medioevo" as "High Middle Ages" is correct, the Italian term denotes what in English is usually called the early middle ages, while the English term denotes what might be called the middle middle ages.

Grading rant

I've been a bit busier than usual lately. This may have gotten in the way of posting, but it won't hold me back from a good rant.

This one's about grading, of a sort. I recently had a CT scan, and the imaging group subsequently sent me a survey form. So far, so good. But the choices for each question were only three -- and in any sensible tripartite grading scheme, the choices should be good, bad, and OK. This one had instead Unsatisfactory, Average, and Exceptional -- which, overuse of euphemism aside, doesn't really track. My experience at the place was actually quite good, but I balk at calling it "exceptional".

Don't get me started with what Starbucks et al have done with plain old small, medium, and large . . . .

Leading British Stalinist cashes in

In the last few months, unbeknown to friends and colleagues, Ms Halpin [chair of the Communist Party of Britain]. . . inherited one of the most important expressionist German paintings. Yesterday, it was sold for £20.5m.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's Berlin Street Scene, a vivid vision of the claustrophobic, anxiety-inducing ebb and flow of urban life in 1913, was bought . . . by art consultant Daniella Luxembourg on behalf of the Neue Galerie, New York.

Full article here.

Record auction in New York

A sale of Impressionist and 20th century art in New York has made more than $491m (£255m), breaking the record for an art auction. . .

Paul Gauguin's Man with an Axe fetched $40.3m (£21m) - a record for the French master, while a work by Austrian expressionist Egon Schiele went for $22.4m (£11.6m).

But it was four works by Klimt that dominated the sale, doubling their estimates by fetching a total of $192m (£99.8m).

From the BBC.

I like Klimt, but it is certainly interesting to see how interest in his work has increased so dramatically in recent years. What other artists may come to the fore for future generations?

Don't call them figure skates

When I was a kid, figure skates were for girls -- boys wore hockey skates. And for those boys whose parents insisted on figure skates, it was like being signed up for ballet instead of baseball.

Talking to the boys in our neighborhood, it seems that things haven't changed that much -- even though there's much more convergence elsewhere, with hockey players seeking out figure skating coaches to refine their edge control and a whole class of hybrid recreational skates combining features of figure skates and hockey skates.

Perhaps it will take a bit of creative renaming: how about "trick skates" instead of "figure skates"? In pretty much every other activity I can think of, doing stunts is the height of boyhood cool -- inline skating, skateboarding, skiing and snowboarding, BMX, etc. I guess it's still difficult to get over all those years of TV coverage of ice dancers in Liberace-esque outfits, though.

Mutant dolphins!

But no random mutation, it seems:

A DOLPHIN has been discovered with an extra set of fins that could be the remains of back legs, providing further evidence that ocean-dwelling mammals once lived on land.

The bottlenose dolphin was caught by fishermen off the western coast of Japan last month and has been examined by researchers who yesterday made their findings public. . .

The five-year-old dolphin, about nine feet long, is believed to be the first found with such well-developed and symmetrical secondary fins though others have had partial protrusions. . .

Dr Ian Jackson, of Edinburgh University's Human Genetics Unit, said the discovery was significant and surprising. "You get cases of gene mutation that have given rise to things like extra fingers and toes in mammals," he said. "But this is more pronounced. The Japanese are right - this is probably the mutation of a gene that was important in the evolution of the dolphin."

Full article here.