From Nautilus: “If we ever contact extraterrestrials, we’ll have to find a way to understand them. Who are they? What are their intentions? What have they discovered that we haven’t? Olaf Witkowski thinks the only way to begin that dialogue is to try and kill them. Clearly, there are going to be major differences between us and them. Biological, technological, and cultural gaps are likely to be as wide as interstellar space itself. “The only way to communicate with a creature that is very different from you, and you can make no assumptions at all about how they encode language or meaning, is just killing them,” Witkowski says. He argues that the only universal basis of communication, the sole feature that all life shares, whatever its form is that life wants to live.”
Experts at the Van Gogh Museum have exposed three early fakes
From The Art Newspaper: “For decades Interior of a Restaurant was regarded as a second version of an authentic painting, Interior of the Grand Bouillon-Restaurant le Chalet, Paris. This was understandable, since Van Gogh would sometimes make another version of a composition. The second version of the restaurant scene, which only surfaced in the 1950s, was recently studied after its owner submitted it for possible authentication. The colours also included Manganese blue, a synthetic pigment only patented in 1935. In the original painting the red flowers can be identified as autumn begonias, which graced restaurant tables in November or early December 1887, when the picture was completed. The artist of the second version interpreted them as yellow sunflowers, which would have been over by the end of September.”
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