sandr020

I normally think of the Edwardian era as time of culture, literature, science, medicine and peace. But 1905 began with a series of strikes and demonstrations in the Russian streets . In Jan a protest march in St Pet­ersburg was led by a workers’ organ­isation, the Assembly of Russian Factory and Plant Workers . c200,000 mar­chers moved to the Wint­er Palace to present pet­itions to the Tsar, but soon 1,000 protest­ors lay shot dead that Bloody Sunday. Anger spread throughout Russia with more strikes and mar­ches. In March the universities were shut down by radicals. In July, sailors on the battleship Potemkin mutinied in Odessa and avoided death only when the firing squad seized the ship instead. Odessa’s citizens turned out to support the sail­ors and many were massacred on the steps leading to the wharf. Albert Einstein 1905 In St Petersburg Leon Trotsky set up a Soviet Workers’ Council to organise opposition to the Tsar. But Trotsky and his supp­or­ters were soon imprisoned. A...

Leon Black, Chairman and chief executive of Apollo Global Man­agement, was apparently inspired in his love of art by his mother and his aunt, Manhattan art deal­er Grace Borgenicht Brandt. Leon’s purchase of Norwegian Edvard Munch ’s (1863-1944) painting called The Scream reached a record for an auctioned piece of art when it was sold at Soth­eby's New York in May 2012 for a world record $120 million. This ex­press­ion­ist piece was one of four vers­ions of The Scream created between 1893 and 1910, three of which are held in Oslo museums in Norway. The four known versions were 1] 1893 tempera paint on cardboard; 2] 1893 crayon on cardboard; e] 1895 pastel on cardboard that billionaire Leon Black bought at auction; and 4] tempera paint on hard cardboard, c1910. Edvard Munch’s 1895 version of The Scream of Nature Wikimedia Impressive, even though I know nothing about Scandinavian art and even less about meteorology.  But it was the sky and not the price that has been a bone of cont...

In Nov 2016, Animal Medicines Australia released its Pet Ownership in Australia Report, providing insight into the state of pet ownership in this country.  At 62%, Australia continues to have one of the highest household rates of pet ownership in the world with 5.7 million of Australia’s 9.2 million households home to a pet. Dogs remain the most popular type of pet. Melbourne's Royal Children's Hospital  in its report agreed that pets are an integral part of  our lives as Australians - some 80% of Australians have an animal companion at some time in their life. Sometimes pet relationships are ranked higher than certain kinds of human relationships for comfort, esteem, support and confidence, with benefits in areas of child development, family harmony and health. For a more detailed examination, let us go over to  Mat Coulton  of  Wileypup , with thanks for his text, photos and links. Recent scholarship has demonstrated the health benefits dogs offer...

I’ll soon be seeing Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story , directed by Alexandra Dean, at the Jewish Film Festival. The festival programme says: Known for her striking looks and electric onscreen persona, Lamarr’s fans never knew she possessed such a beautiful mind. An Aust­rian Jewish émigré who acted by day and drew mechanical and electronic inventions by night, Lam­arr came up with a secret communication system to help the Allies to beat the Naz­is. Bomb­shell is for lovers of history, film and science. But locating the truth about her life was tricky - thanks,  Encyclopaedia of World Biography . Hedwig Kiesler (1913–2000) was born in Vienna. Her parents were Jewish and cultivated; her father Emil Kiesler was a Bank of Vienna director and her mother Gertrud Lichtwitz a concert pianist from Budapest. Hedwig attended schools in Vienna then was sent to a Swiss finishing school. After an unsuccessful audition with her acting teacher and stage director, Max Rein­hardt , Hedwig moved i...

Australia invented surf life saving, pavlova, rotary clothes hoists, plastic bank notes,  black box flight recorders and WiFi. But now I want to concentrate on cochlear implants . How did the deaf communicate? Before the French priest Michel de l’Epée devised sign language in the C18th, the deaf were written off as useless citizens. For the first time, the priest had demonstrated that deaf people were no less intelligent than their peers. The C19th saw the creation of the world’s first hearing aids, based on Alex­ander Bell’s tele­phone. They were clumsy, and although there have been enormous improve­ments with time, hearing aids could not reproduce high frequencies - they could only amplify residual hearing. The result was that many deaf people cont­inued to use sign language, combined with lip reading. This was the situation until the early 1980s when Dr William Gibson became aware of the cochlear experiments. Now we need to read Bill Gibson: Pioneering Bionic Ear Sur...