26 May 2014

Monday miscellany

This skinny house (in Denmark Hill) is up for sale - for £450,000. It's 99 inches wide and has one bedroom and a skinny garden. Look inside here.

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London has a few big heads lying - or standing - around ... big heads of the statuary kind, not the sort carrying themselves around on ordinary shoulders, though there are enough of those too.
In misty Highgate Cemetery 
Other big heads - find out where and who at londonist.com

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Things that can drive you crazy #85 - font size for text messaging on an android phone suddenly goes huge. The fix: while in text messaging mode, use the volume button to change text size.

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Misaligned mirrors show what it's like to have astigmatism -
The eyes see things at different levels, which can lead to double vision, eg when reading; also it makes focussing more difficult. As many as 1 in 3 adults may have astigmatism, and the incidence increases with age, probably because the eye muscles weaken. Thank goodness for modern optometry and prisms in glasses!

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Access to art collections: the Google Cultural Institute, launched in 2011, is partnered with 345 cultural institutions and shows the work of nearly 9000 artists. It now offers more than 6 million items: photos, videos and documents. It aims to make important cultural material available and accessible to everyone and to digitally preserve it to educate and inspire future generations ... which is laudable, even essential.

To browse through the holdings, click on "Art Project". Enter an artist's name in the search box to see good-quality images of their work. Click on the "details" option to learn more about the individual piece ... or you can choose several and group them together to see them side-by-side. 


 If you want to visit a single museum, that's possible too - "streetview" technology will take you on a tour.


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