Notices by Shriram Krishnamurthi (shriramk@mastodon.social)

Might as well be my office door.

(Actually, an exhibit at the Venice Architecture Biennale.)

#Italy25

1/ One of the lesser masterpieces in Padova is the Ovetari chapel at the Eremitani church. One of its notable weaknesses is that much of it was blown away by Allied bombs in WW2! What's left is still wonderful. But first: Andrea Mantegna! #Italy25 ↵

5/ As I said, the church itself was bombed, and has been painstakingly reconstructed. It's an awe-inspiringly large space, with the Ovetari to the front and right of the main church. ↵

4/ This is relevant because the key paintings in the Ovetari are by Padova's own Mantegna, then still a young, rising star. The Ovetari has cycles on the lives of St. James and St. Christopher, and Mantegna painted several of the panels, including the three best ones. ↵

3/ Then, in 2001, I happened to be in Milan's gem, the Brera. I rounded a corner, and saw it in the flesh (to so speak), and was blown away. It's difficult to explain that feeling of having your breath taken away, but I vividly remember and thrill to that moment to this day. ↵

2/ I first heard of Mantegna in some art history class for his late-Renaissance "Lamentations over the Dead Christ". It's a technically virtuoso piece, for sure, but didn't register very much beyond that. ↵

6/ After the bombs fell, citizens rushed to rescue what bits they could of the frescoes. Some panels had been moved elsewhere for unrelated the reasons. They had b&w photographs of the walls. So the result combines all of these: ↵

@tealeg @GossiTheDog Yep, saw and shared this on bsky…

@tealeg I'm pretty close to giving up on X and maybe also Mastodon. (-:

Take out food coloring and half the things sold will look inedible. Cheetos sales will go to zero. Will totally tank the economy.

My physiotherapist this morning got confused between QR codes and URLs (this particular one was a QR code pointing to a URL) and called it "QRL", and honestly this is brilliant and we should just all adopt it.

TIL that "golconda" is a word in the English dictionary ("a source of wealth, advantages, or happiness"). Text from
https://casetext.com/case/limone-v-us-3?et_rid=1039201653&s_campaign=rhodemap:newsletter

To: hr@opm.gov
From: Me

RE: What did you do last week?

1. I let freedom come my way
2. I started out of town
3. I saw Sheriff John Brown
4. I shot the sheriff
5. I went back and shot the deputy too, because he seemed woke

Sincerely,

@ahfrom A sequence of miserable little characters.

BREAKING: Trump signs executive order rescinding the undecidability of the Halting Problem, claiming it holds back American progress. All major chip manufacturers immediately slave through the night to add HALTP to their instruction sets in compliance.

Just learned about this recent case where a transgender person in Karnataka, India successfully challenged the Registrar to accommodate name and gender changes (not possible by prior law). Progress that I couldn't have imagined decades ago.
https://clpr.org.in/litigation/ms-x-v-state-of-karnataka/

Trying to figure out why Elon's transgender child is real estate news…Oh, I see, I'm on the WSJ, so this is perfect clickbait for the median readership.

@aral Zoom was a genuine improvement over its predecessors, and is still better than Teams, so I don't think that's fair.

Of all the UX improvements Zoom needs, they have decided to make precisely zero and instead enshittify it. Can't wait for someone to do to Zoom what Zoom did to Skype.

EDIT: You can turn this off, instructions here:
https://x.com/ajay9470/status/1876363012011180114

It's funny ("funny") how it turned out there are two ways to build a fash social network: you could start from the bottom (like 3-4 did in the past few years) and struggle to get past like 100K users, or you can just buy X and lose a lot of people. The latter is clearly much more successful.