Today I attended in New York, at Columbia University (which still looks a bit like a fortress because of the students protests that took place there about 1.5 years ago) a conference at the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Institute for Policy Dialogue.

In 1962, experimental designer Ken Isaacs (7 February 1927 – 8 June 2016) made his ‘Knowledge Box’, a total environment for culture and learning. Isaacs’s hand-made, low-cost box was a twelve-foot-square cube of wood, masonite and steel equipped with twenty-four slide projectors and audio-suppliers. By spreading his designs through mass-instruction instead of mass-production, Isaacs … Continue reading "How To Build A Better World: The Knowledge Box by Ken Isaacs, 1962" The post How To Build A Better World: The Knowledge Box by Ken Isaacs, 1962 appeared first on Flashbak.

Babar's Moon Trip was a pop-up book I had never come across before. It seems influenced a little by the space race and the American efforts to get to the Moon.  They face problems like: not achieving escape velocity for the Moon, failure of stage separation, failure to adjust quickly to reduced gravity on the Moon, and a very short exploration time to obtain samples before their launch window :) It is not really a "pure" pop-up book but rather has some pop-ups and various flaps and tabs you can pull (for action.)  de Brunhoff, Laurent. Babar's Moon Trip. New York: Random House. (18 p.) 1968.

This is the third piece of the fourth part of our series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb) looking at the lives of pre-modern peasant farmers – a majority of all of the humans who have ever lived. Last time, we started looking at the subsistence of peasant agriculture by considering the productivity of our … Continue reading Collections: Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part IVc: Rent and Extraction →

The dragon of Revelation is one of the symbols that needs no interpretation. The Bible provides the interpretation unequivocally. To fully understand the dragon’s influence, however, we must consider the immediate context of Revelation, the book’s relation to the totality of scripture, and the ancient Near Eastern mythology that influenced the Israelite authors. The […]