The Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada convention will be held on March 2-5, 2008, in Toronto + it will include an update on the Canadian diamond industry (Snap Lake + Victor) + diamond prospecting roundup.
Useful link:
www.pdac.ca
Tuesday, February 05, 2008
The Brain That Changes Itself
The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge is a fascinating book + the concept of neuroplasticity intrigues me + it's an absorbing subject.
Here is what the description of The Brain That Changes Itself says (via Amazon):
An astonishing new science called neuroplasticity is overthrowing the centuries-old notion that the human brain is immutable. Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Norman Doidge, M.D., traveled the country to meet both the brilliant scientists championing neuroplasticity and the people whose lives they’ve transformed—people whose mental limitations or brain damage were seen as unalterable. We see a woman born with half a brain that rewired itself to work as a whole, blind people who learn to see, learning disorders cured, IQs raised, aging brains rejuvenated, stroke patients learning to speak, children with cerebral palsy learning to move with more grace, depression and anxiety disorders successfully treated, and lifelong character traits changed. Using these marvelous stories to probe mysteries of the body, emotion, love, sex, culture, and education, Dr. Doidge has written an immensely moving, inspiring book that will permanently alter the way we look at our brains, human nature, and human potential.
Here is what the description of The Brain That Changes Itself says (via Amazon):
An astonishing new science called neuroplasticity is overthrowing the centuries-old notion that the human brain is immutable. Psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Norman Doidge, M.D., traveled the country to meet both the brilliant scientists championing neuroplasticity and the people whose lives they’ve transformed—people whose mental limitations or brain damage were seen as unalterable. We see a woman born with half a brain that rewired itself to work as a whole, blind people who learn to see, learning disorders cured, IQs raised, aging brains rejuvenated, stroke patients learning to speak, children with cerebral palsy learning to move with more grace, depression and anxiety disorders successfully treated, and lifelong character traits changed. Using these marvelous stories to probe mysteries of the body, emotion, love, sex, culture, and education, Dr. Doidge has written an immensely moving, inspiring book that will permanently alter the way we look at our brains, human nature, and human potential.
Shark Behavior
According to Jim Sogi (via dailyspeculations) sharks have a simple system + they constantly cruise around and eat the weak or struggling fish, they never pick fights with the strong + they go check it, they give it a test, and then they eat it + if there is any problem, they are gone + they are really tough skinned and lack any emotion whatsoever + smaller fish are dominated by fear + the small sharks hunt in packs + the big ones travel the globe + there are always going to be dead, dying or injured or weak struggling fish around.
The shark pattern (s) reminds me of the trading systems, including commodities + the key players and their peculiar methodology + the fate of the small players + the end game.
The shark pattern (s) reminds me of the trading systems, including commodities + the key players and their peculiar methodology + the fate of the small players + the end game.
German Expressionist Works
The Economist writes about German Expressionist works and paintings from the Viennese Secession, a movement inspired by art nouveau + the steady rise in prices + other viewpoints @ http://www.economist.com/daily/columns/artview/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10610995
Jewelers Of Renaissance
(via 5000 Years of Gems and Jewelry) Frances Rogers and Alice Beard writes:
2. The Goldsmith-Jeweler Of Italy
The custom of training all potential artists in the workshop of the goldsmith forged a link between the jeweler’s field and that of the decorator and painter. Jewel forms were extensively used in the illumination of manuscripts and in the painted jewel-like designs which ornamented church missals, choir books, and Bibles.
Conspicuous among the names of painters who began their careers as apprentices to goldsmiths is that of Botticelli (1444-1510). Every once in a while throughout history there lives some man who likes to write down what he sees and hears and finds out about the daily lives of the people around him. Such men write with a zest and a keeness of observations that necessarily elude the serious historian who must spread his record like a great panorama over long periods of time. The writer who tells us what is happening to himself and to the man with whom he is at the moment rubbing elbows, gives us candid-camera pictures. Such a man was Pliny. When we walk the street of ancient Rome with Pliny it is not the architecture that is being pointed out for our edification. More likely our attention is being directed to the outrageous number of rings on the fingers of the elegant young Roman dandy whom we have just passed on the way. Again, at a later date, there was the good and garrulous old monk, Theophilus, who not content merely to practise the various crafts for himself, was bent also on telling in great detail just how he did it. It was that very anxiety of his to tell all about it which is responsible for giving us so accurate a record of Medieval craftsmanship. A like service was performed for posterity during the sixteenth century by that flamboyant teller of tall tales, Benvenuto Cellini (1500-71).
Cellini is considered the master of master goldsmith of his period. But if this great craftsman himself had not so impressively told us how surpassingly wonderful an artist he was, perhaps we could not be so sure about it. In any case, the very exaggerations of his gorgeous imagination give the colorful essense of his time as no mountainous accumulation of prosaic facts ever could.
Even as an apprentice Cellini was entrusted with important commissions. He tells of working on a silver salt-cellar for a cardinal. Now salt-cellars in those days were not the negligible little pieces of tableware they are at present. They were enormous in size—a foot or more in height—often made of gold and set with gems. Salt was a precious things, and the great salt-cellars of the age held about the most important place among the rich plate that set the banquet table of an illustrious person.
Although Cellini was commissioned to make a fine salt-cellar for the cardinal, he was not expected to design it himself, only to copy an antique piece of silverware. Cellini, however, was no dull apprentice who would slavishly copy the work of others. He would borrow as much as he saw fit and then allow full play to his fancy. He tells us what happened:
Besides what I copied, I enriched it with so many elegant masks of my inventions, that my master went about....boasting that so good a piece of work had been turned out from his shop.
To Cellini is often attributed the making of quantities of the fine jewels of his time. And we may be sure that so creative a craftsman did produce much work, but the eminent authority, H Clifford Smith, says: ‘Despite all that has been said respecting such jewels as the Leda and the Swan at Vienna, the Chariot of Apollo at Chantilly, and the mountings of the two cameos, the Four Cæsars and the Centaur and the Bacchic Genii in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris, which have, with some degree of likelihood, been attributed to Cellini, the only quite authenticated example of his work as a goldsmith is the famous gold salt-cellar at Vienna. This object when looked at from the goldsmith’s point of view, in the matter of fineness of workmanship and skill in execution, is seen to possess particular characteristics which should be sufficient to prevent the attribution to Cellini of other contemporary work, created by jewelers who clearly drew their inspiration from entirely different sources.’
Jewelers Of Renaissance (continued)
2. The Goldsmith-Jeweler Of Italy
The custom of training all potential artists in the workshop of the goldsmith forged a link between the jeweler’s field and that of the decorator and painter. Jewel forms were extensively used in the illumination of manuscripts and in the painted jewel-like designs which ornamented church missals, choir books, and Bibles.
Conspicuous among the names of painters who began their careers as apprentices to goldsmiths is that of Botticelli (1444-1510). Every once in a while throughout history there lives some man who likes to write down what he sees and hears and finds out about the daily lives of the people around him. Such men write with a zest and a keeness of observations that necessarily elude the serious historian who must spread his record like a great panorama over long periods of time. The writer who tells us what is happening to himself and to the man with whom he is at the moment rubbing elbows, gives us candid-camera pictures. Such a man was Pliny. When we walk the street of ancient Rome with Pliny it is not the architecture that is being pointed out for our edification. More likely our attention is being directed to the outrageous number of rings on the fingers of the elegant young Roman dandy whom we have just passed on the way. Again, at a later date, there was the good and garrulous old monk, Theophilus, who not content merely to practise the various crafts for himself, was bent also on telling in great detail just how he did it. It was that very anxiety of his to tell all about it which is responsible for giving us so accurate a record of Medieval craftsmanship. A like service was performed for posterity during the sixteenth century by that flamboyant teller of tall tales, Benvenuto Cellini (1500-71).
Cellini is considered the master of master goldsmith of his period. But if this great craftsman himself had not so impressively told us how surpassingly wonderful an artist he was, perhaps we could not be so sure about it. In any case, the very exaggerations of his gorgeous imagination give the colorful essense of his time as no mountainous accumulation of prosaic facts ever could.
Even as an apprentice Cellini was entrusted with important commissions. He tells of working on a silver salt-cellar for a cardinal. Now salt-cellars in those days were not the negligible little pieces of tableware they are at present. They were enormous in size—a foot or more in height—often made of gold and set with gems. Salt was a precious things, and the great salt-cellars of the age held about the most important place among the rich plate that set the banquet table of an illustrious person.
Although Cellini was commissioned to make a fine salt-cellar for the cardinal, he was not expected to design it himself, only to copy an antique piece of silverware. Cellini, however, was no dull apprentice who would slavishly copy the work of others. He would borrow as much as he saw fit and then allow full play to his fancy. He tells us what happened:
Besides what I copied, I enriched it with so many elegant masks of my inventions, that my master went about....boasting that so good a piece of work had been turned out from his shop.
To Cellini is often attributed the making of quantities of the fine jewels of his time. And we may be sure that so creative a craftsman did produce much work, but the eminent authority, H Clifford Smith, says: ‘Despite all that has been said respecting such jewels as the Leda and the Swan at Vienna, the Chariot of Apollo at Chantilly, and the mountings of the two cameos, the Four Cæsars and the Centaur and the Bacchic Genii in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris, which have, with some degree of likelihood, been attributed to Cellini, the only quite authenticated example of his work as a goldsmith is the famous gold salt-cellar at Vienna. This object when looked at from the goldsmith’s point of view, in the matter of fineness of workmanship and skill in execution, is seen to possess particular characteristics which should be sufficient to prevent the attribution to Cellini of other contemporary work, created by jewelers who clearly drew their inspiration from entirely different sources.’
Jewelers Of Renaissance (continued)
The French Revolution And Its Influence On Art
(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:
Though he gained the prize in 1801, Ingres was not sent to Rome till 1806, and then he remained in Italy for nearly eighteen years. These were years of quiet, fruitful labor, during which the artist, in his own words, was ‘drawing to learn and painting to live,’ and by living abroad he escaped all that contemporary drama of victories and disasters, of changes of dynasties and changes of opinion, that was going on during this period in his own country. Nevertheless, they attracted attention in the Salons, though they were criticised by the followers of David. When he exhibited in 1819 his ‘Paola and Francesca di Rimini,’ the work was pronounced to be ‘Gothic’ in tendency, and in this small historical painting we can recognize the influence of the Primitives whom Ingres admired for the purity and precision of their drawing.
When Igres returned to Paris in 1824 the battle between the Classicists and the Romanticists was in full swing, and with Girodet dead, David in exile and dying, and Gros incompetent, the former were glad to welcome the support of Ingres, and soon made him the chief of their party. Ingres was amazed and enchanted at his sudden popularity and the honors now thrust upon him. He was speedily elected to Institute, and later was made a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor and a Senator. The full story of the war between the Classicists and Romanticists must be reserved for a later chapter, but it may be said at once that Ingres threw himself heart and soul into the championship of the classics by precepts and example.
But where Ingres differed from his predecessor David was, that with him it was the treatment rather than the subject which was all important. A fanatic for drawing from the first, he held strong and peculiar views on Color. ‘A thing well drawn is always well enough painted,’ he said; and his own use of color was merely to emphasize the drawing in his pictures. ‘Rubens and Vandyck,’ he argued, ‘may please the eye, but they deceive it—they belong to a bad school of Color, the School of Falsehood.’ From his early Roman days Ingres had shown himself to be faultless draughtsman of the human figure, and his drawings and paintings of nudes are the works on which his fame most surely rests today. The most celebrated, and perhaps the most beautiful, of his works, ‘La Source’, has an interesting history, for, though begun as a study in 1824, it was not till 1856, when the artist was seventy six, that he turned it into a picture. One of the most precious gems of painting in the Louvre, this picture preserves the freshness of a young man’s fancy while it is executed with the knowledge of a lifetime. ‘It is a fragment of Nature, and it is a vision,’ is the comment of a great French critic on this picture.
If Ingres was the greatest artist the classical movement produced in France, yet he belongs too much to the nineteenth century to be considered a true product of the revolutionary and Napoleonic period. Indeed, the greatest Continental artist of that period was not a Frenchman, and it is to Spain that we must turn to find a man of oustanding genius whose protean art fully expresses the surging thoughts and feelings of this time of changes.
The French Revolution And Its Influence On Art (continued)
Though he gained the prize in 1801, Ingres was not sent to Rome till 1806, and then he remained in Italy for nearly eighteen years. These were years of quiet, fruitful labor, during which the artist, in his own words, was ‘drawing to learn and painting to live,’ and by living abroad he escaped all that contemporary drama of victories and disasters, of changes of dynasties and changes of opinion, that was going on during this period in his own country. Nevertheless, they attracted attention in the Salons, though they were criticised by the followers of David. When he exhibited in 1819 his ‘Paola and Francesca di Rimini,’ the work was pronounced to be ‘Gothic’ in tendency, and in this small historical painting we can recognize the influence of the Primitives whom Ingres admired for the purity and precision of their drawing.
When Igres returned to Paris in 1824 the battle between the Classicists and the Romanticists was in full swing, and with Girodet dead, David in exile and dying, and Gros incompetent, the former were glad to welcome the support of Ingres, and soon made him the chief of their party. Ingres was amazed and enchanted at his sudden popularity and the honors now thrust upon him. He was speedily elected to Institute, and later was made a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor and a Senator. The full story of the war between the Classicists and Romanticists must be reserved for a later chapter, but it may be said at once that Ingres threw himself heart and soul into the championship of the classics by precepts and example.
But where Ingres differed from his predecessor David was, that with him it was the treatment rather than the subject which was all important. A fanatic for drawing from the first, he held strong and peculiar views on Color. ‘A thing well drawn is always well enough painted,’ he said; and his own use of color was merely to emphasize the drawing in his pictures. ‘Rubens and Vandyck,’ he argued, ‘may please the eye, but they deceive it—they belong to a bad school of Color, the School of Falsehood.’ From his early Roman days Ingres had shown himself to be faultless draughtsman of the human figure, and his drawings and paintings of nudes are the works on which his fame most surely rests today. The most celebrated, and perhaps the most beautiful, of his works, ‘La Source’, has an interesting history, for, though begun as a study in 1824, it was not till 1856, when the artist was seventy six, that he turned it into a picture. One of the most precious gems of painting in the Louvre, this picture preserves the freshness of a young man’s fancy while it is executed with the knowledge of a lifetime. ‘It is a fragment of Nature, and it is a vision,’ is the comment of a great French critic on this picture.
If Ingres was the greatest artist the classical movement produced in France, yet he belongs too much to the nineteenth century to be considered a true product of the revolutionary and Napoleonic period. Indeed, the greatest Continental artist of that period was not a Frenchman, and it is to Spain that we must turn to find a man of oustanding genius whose protean art fully expresses the surging thoughts and feelings of this time of changes.
The French Revolution And Its Influence On Art (continued)
Asian Art Trend
James Pomfret writes about the speculative trend in the art market (s) of Asia, especially among the nouveau riche Chinese + Indian entrepreneurs + the risks and opportunities + the impact @ http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/02/03/business/rtrinvest04.php
Monday, February 04, 2008
Valuable Lessons From Borsheims
Bankruptcy filings are shaking up the jewelry industry in the US + elsewhere, and when you talk to industry analysts they say it’s too early to tell what the fallout would be as a result of the peculiar trend where well-known jewelry retailers are going belly-up + when I look around I see a unique jewelry company: Borsheims + I am impressed + there is a lesson for all in the gem & jewelry sector.
Here is what Berkshire Hathaway website (via Warren E Buffet, CEO) says about Borsheim's:
Fine jewelry, watches and giftware will almost certainly cost you less at Borsheim's. I've looked at the figures for all publicly-owned jewelry companies and the contrast with Borsheim's is startling. Our one-store operation, with its huge volume, enables us to operate with costs that are fully 15-20 percentage points below those incurred by our competitors. We pass the benefits of this low-cost structure along to our customers. Every year Borsheim's sends out thousands of selections to customers who want a long-distance opportunity to inspect what it offers and decide which, if any, item they'd like to purchase. We do a huge amount of business in this low-key way, which allows the shopper to conveniently see the exceptional values that we offer. Call Joe Corritore or Susan Jacques at Borsheim's (800-642-4438) and save substantial money on your next purchase of jewelry.
Useful links:
www.borsheims.com
www.berkshirehathaway.com
‘If you don't know jewelry, know the jeweler.’ - Warren E. Buffett
I think it's the best advice.
Here is what Berkshire Hathaway website (via Warren E Buffet, CEO) says about Borsheim's:
Fine jewelry, watches and giftware will almost certainly cost you less at Borsheim's. I've looked at the figures for all publicly-owned jewelry companies and the contrast with Borsheim's is startling. Our one-store operation, with its huge volume, enables us to operate with costs that are fully 15-20 percentage points below those incurred by our competitors. We pass the benefits of this low-cost structure along to our customers. Every year Borsheim's sends out thousands of selections to customers who want a long-distance opportunity to inspect what it offers and decide which, if any, item they'd like to purchase. We do a huge amount of business in this low-key way, which allows the shopper to conveniently see the exceptional values that we offer. Call Joe Corritore or Susan Jacques at Borsheim's (800-642-4438) and save substantial money on your next purchase of jewelry.
Useful links:
www.borsheims.com
www.berkshirehathaway.com
‘If you don't know jewelry, know the jeweler.’ - Warren E. Buffett
I think it's the best advice.
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