posted by James Reel
No time or money for a trip to Rome this summer? Here’s a consolation: a virtual tour of ancient Rome, as it looked around A.D. 300. The site is called “Rome Reborn,” and it’s part of a big project undertaken by the Insitute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia. The four 3-D videos are accompanied by music, including pieces by Vivaldi and Mendelssohn (his “Italian” Symphony). You’ll have to provide your own soundtrack while perusing the stills; what better time to hear Respighi’s Pines of Rome? Actually, you won’t see any trees or people in the renderings, because the focus is on architecture (so why is the interior of the Basilica Maxentius so murky—verisimilitude?). Somehow the images, so barren of life, remind me of certain paintings by Giorgio de Chirco.
quodlibet,
June 13th 2007 at 7:20 —
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posted by James Reel
Salon.com’s tech blogger, Farhad Manjoo, has an interesting article on ratings bias, and why all those user-driven Web sites featuring one- to five-star reviews aren’t reliable. The story contains a nugget that applies to professional criticism as well as amateur contributions; referring to the head of one popular review site, Manjoo says, "Stoppelman and others at Yelp also have another bit of advice about star ratings—that it's wise to look past them and to judge a product or a place according to the people reviewing it, not how many stars it gets. It's the people, not the stars, who shine on Yelp.” Ditto for the professional critics in newspapers and magazines; you should always consider the credibility and peculiar personal tastes of any critic when you read a review. And never, ever look only at how many stars are awarded; the written reviews are far more informative and important than some silly graphic device.
quodlibet,
June 13th 2007 at 7:18 —
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