NB! · Faith · Observations · Education
Stepped into church, and was invited to recall Slavonic numeration. Until the eighteenth century, numbers in Russia were written with letters bearing a small stroke, the "titlo", above them, and on a scheme similar to that of Roman notation
Faith · Cinema · Observations · Education · People
Watching Scorsese's "Silence", besides indignation and weariness I felt a sense of déjà vu. The film reminded me of a story that at school is usually recalled in the last days of September. There is a Catholic figure, Saint Vincent de Paul, whom some guides stubbornly
Coming Up · Archaeology · The East · Museums · Education · Saint Petersburg
The Hermitage Lecture Hall has launched a lecture series, “The Desert Castles of Khorezm”. Those of you in Saint Petersburg, do drop in for a cup of tea. Khorezm is a millennia-old Asian oasis, where excavations have uncovered settlements lost in the sands, irrigation works and necropolises. The next
Observations · Science · Education · Humour
You cannot simply glance into a microscope and cry "Eureka!" Most people will see nothing there but a colourless smudge. Recall how you gazed in vain at onion vacuoles in the school laboratory, slyly reporting that of course you had seen everything
NB! · The East · Books · Education
It is held that on 17 January 1492 the first textbook of modern grammar was presented to Isabella I. Yet the first such textbook, though Arabic rather than Spanish, had been written as early as the 8th century by the Persian Sibawayh
NB! · Coming Up · Archaeology · Science · Education
Applications and abstracts for the 4th Youth School of Geoarchaeology, organised by the Institute of Mineralogy of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, are accepted until 20 February. The website, however, seems to have trouble with its encoding: https://clck.ru/AT6Mx
Faith · Books · Observations · Education
Reading about intellectual life in sixteenth-century Russia, I am struck by how many of its heroes are people out of time. Archbishop Gennady, for one, can be pictured quite vividly among the public figures of today. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the so-called Book Correction (Knizhnaya sprava)
Archive · Science · Education · People · Humour
The greatest German historian Leopold von Ranke, who lived to be over ninety, was the author of a great many works: on the history of the papacy, the Reformation, modern history, the sovereigns of southern Europe, and so on. His approach was distinguished by the fact that Ranke did not
Moscow · Observations · Education
Listening to lads from Miass and Tyumen, I realise what a stroke of fortune it is to study in Moscow under the best professors and leading specialists. I do not always remember it. No offence to those who were not so lucky
NB! · Education · Pop Culture · Humour
NB! · Archaeology · The East · Education