“At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us.“
— Albert Schweitzer (Nobel Laureate of the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize)
150 years of Nature
The chronological account of the dedicated editors-in-chief of Nature is a faithful mirror of this renowned “weekly illustrated journal of science”. The scientific fame curves between 1859 and 2008 are facsimiled according to the n-gram frequency in the Google Books Corpus, and those after 2008 are obtained from the Google Scholar search engine due to the coverage of the Google Books n-gram database. Our findings indicate that Sir Joseph Norman Lockyer (red), Sir Richard Arman Gregory (orange), Lionel John Farnham Brimble (blue), Arthur J. V. Gale (green), Sir John Royden Maddox (cyan), David Dai Davies (magenta) and Philip Campbell (black) enjoyed fame and reputation during their tenures, and the collective memory of these unsung journalists has both short-term and long-term components.
Blind Guci Musicians in Ancient Chinese Imperial Courts
Guci art and blind court musicians, each shedding light on the significance of the other, appear in literature from Chinese antiquity. Those blind pioneers played a role in epic history while other blind people lived rather constricted lives. They are credited with having “magical auditory and tactile sense, prodigious memory, keen discernment and proficiency in temperament” in historical paradigms. Unfortunately, those blind artists have contributed greatly to the development of Chinese culture, especially in music – but hitherto their work has not yet been properly valued. We recover the fascinating ‘missing history’ with detailed extensive documentation, and suggest some reasons why these records and bias in later accounts disappeared from view. (Listen to the bimillennial-years Chinese rap here A precious audio snippet featured the original record of the radio programme “Yongkang Guci” on August 28, 2009. (25 downloads) )
