Jumps, Explained

Artist profile: Gerard Sekoto

‘Art is the spark, the illumination which is socially significant for it brings about understanding’ – Gerard Sekoto (1913–1993)

Gerard Sekoto was born in Botshabelo, Mpumalanga province, in 1913, the year in which the Natives Land Act dispossessed many black South Africans of their ancestral lands. In 1938 Sekoto moved to Sophiatown, Johannesburg. He held his first solo exhibition the following year, and in 1940 the Johannesburg Art Gallery purchased his work Yellow Houses – A Street in Sophiatown (1939–1940). It was the first painting by a black South African artist to be acquired by a South African art institution, although Sekoto had to pose as a cleaner to see his own painting hanging in the gallery.

Sekoto based this painting, titled Song of the Pick (1946), on a photograph taken in the 1930s of black South African workers labouring under the watchful eye of a white foreman standing behind them. However, in his painting the dynamic has changed. Sekoto has enhanced the grace and power of the labourers, turning them to confront the small and puny figure of the overseer, who appears about to be impaled by their pickaxes.

Sekoto painted this work in the township of Eastwood in Pretoria, shortly before moving to Paris in what became a lifelong exile from South Africa. During the 1980s, postcard-sized reproductions of this iconic painting were widely distributed in South Africa, as both a badge of honour and a source of inspiration in the struggle against apartheid.

Explore a diverse range of art stretching back 100,000 years in our exhibition South Africa: the art of a nation (27 October 2016 – 26 February 2017).

Exhibition sponsored by Betsy and Jack Ryan

Logistics partner IAG Cargo

Song of the Pick, 1946. Image © Iziko Museums of South Africa, Art Collections, Cape Town. Photo by Carina Beyer.

Song of the Pick was based on this image, taken by photographer Andrew Goldie in the 1930s.

Isetan Departmental Store opening poster (1933).

Awesome infographic work by designer Yang Liu. Check out her book ’East Meets West’ (Amazon).

The Hippocratic Oath is one of the most famous pieces of medical writing, and it includes some of the basic ethical guidelines for medical practitioners. It is also constantly evolving. The images above come from a version of the oath that we found in the 1634 edition of Peter Lowe’s surgical text. If you compare it to this example of a modern version, you’ll notice some similarities and some differences. Both of them emphasize respecting the work of prior physicians and protecting the patient’s privacy. On the other hand, the modern oath doesn’t begin with an invocation to the gods, and it makes no mention of refusing to assist in abortions or any type of treatment that involves cutting. These changes illustrate how the practice of medicine, and what we expect of medical practitioners, changes over time.

New students at the Washington University School of Medicine are given the chance to devise their own student oath that is similar to the Hippocratic Oath. Take a look at the 2016 class oath here.

Did You Know Large Wine Bottles Have Special Names?

Wine bottle names are… odd. Once you get large enough, the wine holders become named after biblical kings:

1.5 L Magnum: Equivalent to two standard 750 ml bottles.

3.0 L Double Magnum: Equivalent to two Magnums or four standard 750 ml bottles.

4.5 L Jeroboam : Equivalent to six standard 750 ml bottles.

6.0 L Imperial: Equivalent to eight standard 750 ml bottles or two Double Magnums. Why they stopped using kings here I don’t know.

9.0 L Salmanazar: Equivalent to twelve standard 750 ml bottles or a full case of wine!

12.0 L Balthazar: Equivalent to sixteen standard 750 ml bottles or two Imperials.

15.0 L Nebuchadnezzar: Equivalent to twenty standard 750 ml bottles.

Interestingly, I looked around and could not find why the names are what they are. The names just appeared, I guess, and everyone agreed to use them.

In a recent video, Practical Engineering tackles an important and often-overlooked challenge in civil engineering: dam failure. At its simplest, a levee or dam is a wall built to hold back water, and the higher that water is, the greater the pressure at its base. That pressure can drive water to seep between the grains of soil beneath the dam. As you can see in the demo below, seeping water can take a curving path through the soil beneath a dam in order to get to the other side. When too much water makes it into the soil, it pushes grains apart and makes them slip easily; this is known as liquefaction. As the name suggests, the sediment begins behaving like a fluid, quickly leading to a complete failure of the dam as its foundation flows away. With older infrastructure and increased flooding from extreme weather events, this is a serious problem facing many communities. (Video and image credit: Practical Engineering)

I made this to put on my wall for revision, but I thought it might be helpful for some of you guys too so I thought I would share it!

Drosophila melanogaster (fruit fly) seminal vesicle

Dr. Barbara Laurinyecz

Szeged, Hungary

Technique: Confocal, Fluorescence (600x)

The beautiful stone church at Gallarus, Dingle, Co. Kerry, Ireland. It’s circa 1000 years old

Timbuktu was a center of the manuscript trade, with traders bringing Islamic texts from all over the Muslim world. Despite occupations and invasions of all kinds since then, scholars managed to preserve and even restore hundreds of thousands of manuscripts dating from the 13th century.

But that changed when militant Islamists backed by al-Qaida arrived in 2012.

The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu tells the story of librarian Abdel Kader Haidara, who organized and oversaw a secret plot to smuggle hundreds of thousands of medieval manuscripts out of Timbuktu before they could be destroyed by Islamist rebels.  

Hear author Joshua Hammer tell the story here.

– Petra