"A Montreal-based art expert's identification of a fingerprint on a mixed-media drawing once credited to an anonymous 19th-century German artist has confirmed a determination announced last year in Toronto last year that the work was created by Leonardo da Vinci.

As a result, the 33-by-22-cm drawing in chalk, pen, ink and wash tint on vellum is now estimated to be worth at least $150-million (U.S.) – not the roughly $20,000 that Peter Silverman, a Canadian collector, paid to New York dealer Kate Ganz in 2007 on behalf of a fellow collector and friend from Switzerland.

Previous carbon-dating and infrared analysis had determined that the drawing, sometimes called Profile of a Young Fiancée , had undergone some restoration in the 19th century, but the essential work could be attributed to Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). That attribution was announced in June, 2008, at Toronto's ideaCity conference by Pascal Cotte, one of the founders of Lumière Technology, a Paris-based firm specializing in digitalized forensics.

Earlier this year, Martin Kemp, emeritus professor of art history at Oxford and Leonardo specialist, contacted Peter Paul Biro in Montreal and sent him “a small image of a blurry print that looked like a fingerprint, asking me if it compared to anything in my database of Leonardo fingerprints.” Kemp was one of the first to accept the Leonardo attribution while Biro is co-founder of London-based Art Access and Research and its director of forensic studies. Using “multispectral” images provided by Lumière, Biro determined that the fingerprint, found in the drawing's upper right-hand corner, was from the middle or index finger of Leonardo's left hand and “highly comparable” to a fingerprint on a Leonardo art work in the Vatican. It's believed to be the first work to be given the da Vinci imprimatur since' Lady With An Ermine' was identified as such in the early 19th century.

Not much is known about the painting before it surfaced at auction at Christie's New York in late 1998. Identified at that time as “German school, early 19th century,” Ganz bought it for $19,000 at the sale and held onto it ..."

Full story via theglobeandmail.com

I've been on sort of a da Vinci binge this week -- inexplicably drawn to read about him and study his work. He's even crept into my work, in the sense that I've also felt moved to use The da Vinci Enigma Tarot with each of my clients for at least one spread. It's a damn fine deck which would be perfect, IMO, if not for the loopy captions which were added to each card.

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"It is not all of life to live, nor yet all of death to die.
For life and death are one,
and only those who will consider the experience as one
may come to understand or comprehend what peace indeed means."
__Edgar Cayce

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"A dispute has broken out over the remains of Mother Teresa after Albania demanded that the nun’s bones should be returned to her ethnic homeland from India, where she spent most of her adult life and is buried.

Sali Berisha, the Albanian Prime Minister, said on Saturday that his Government was seeking repatriation of Mother Teresa’s remains before the 100th anniversary of her birth in August next year. He said that talks with the Indian Government had begun, and would be “intensified” in the coming months.

The call to exhume the Nobel laureate has met with fury in India, with church and state officials saying that her remains should stay in Calcutta — the northeastern city where she achieved global fame for her work with the poor and sick.

However, some now fear that her remains could become the subject of an ugly three-way struggle, as she was born to ethnic Albanian parents in what is now Skopje, the capital of the Republic of Macedonia, and at the time was part of the Ottoman Empire ..."

Full story via timesonline.co.uk

I side with India in this appalling situation.

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"It is a story which fans of the Doors know only too well. Travelling American rock historian Brett Meisner decided, one day in 1997, to stop by his grave at the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris to pay respects to his hero. As he did so, he asked his assistant to take a souvenir photograph. Almost as soon as it as taken, the picture was forgotten. But five years later, they found it ... and noticed something that would shock the world: a chilling image in the background of, what appeared to be, the singer himself.

Crowds of people had been there at the same time - up to 1,000 still visit the singer's grave daily - but nobody else recorded the strange image. Word quickly spread across the internet. The Morrison ghost photograph became notorious and, keen to know what had happened, Meisner agreed that both the picture and negative should be sent for extensive analysis. But, according to a new book, 'Ghosts Caught on Film 2: Photographs of the Unexplained' researchers have, to this day, been unable to explain the picture. A trick of the light has, apparently, been ruled out while image manipulation - the most likely explanation - also appears 'unlikely'. In fact, the book goes even further, and concludes the image is simply unexplainable.

Whatever the truth, Meisner's life was never the same after the picture was taken ..."

Full story via express.co.uk

I heart him.

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"The mind loves the unknown.
It loves images whose meaning is unknown,
since the meaning of the mind itself is unknown."
__René Magritte

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"If you're going the wrong way down a road, the answer isn't to step on the gas, but to turn around. It is not that the U.S. doesn't need health care reform, but it needs the right type of reform. Problematic as our system often is, it is possible to make things worse.

All the bills making their way through Congress start from the same failed premise: They would put the government in charge of one-sixth of our economy and some of the important personal and private decisions in our lives.

They would force people to buy a government-designed insurance package or face a penalty. They would establish incentives and structures that could eventually lead to the rationing of care. Some versions would force millions of workers into a government-run plan.

And they would do so at enormous cost to the American people in terms of higher taxes, greater debt and increased insurance premiums. Even the cheapest bill costs more than $800 billion ($2 trillion if off-budget costs are included) over the next decade. Americans would end up paying more, but getting less.

But the problems facing our health care system stem not from too little government control, but too much. Government regulations add more than $169 billion annually to the cost of health care. Other regulations limit competition between insurers and providers by, for instance, prohibiting people from buying insurance across state lines. Government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid are trillions of dollars in debt and are models of waste, fraud and inefficiency. And our current tax laws penalize people who don't receive insurance through their work, meaning that if you lose your job, you lose your insurance.

The bills now before Congress don't fix these problems. They simply pile on new mandates, regulations, taxes and subsidies. No amount of tinkering, or budgetary sleight of hand, can make them better. It's time for Congress to scrap its current flawed government-centered approach and start over with a focus on creating a consumer-oriented free market in health care. After all, isn't it better to get it done right than to just get it done?"

via cato.org

We literally can't afford to bollix this up.

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"The young man woke feeling dizzy. He got up and turned around, only to see himself still lying in bed. He shouted at his sleeping body, shook it, and jumped on it. The next thing he knew he was lying down again, but now seeing himself standing by the bed and shaking his sleeping body. Stricken with fear, he jumped out of the window. His room was on the third floor. He was found later, badly injured.

What this 21-year-old had just experienced was an out-of-body experience, one of the most peculiar states of consciousness. It was probably triggered by his epilepsy (Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry, vol 57, p 838). "He didn't want to commit suicide," says Peter Brugger, the young man's neuropsychologist at University Hospital Zurich in Switzerland. "He jumped to find a match between body and self. He must have been having a seizure."

In the 15 years since that dramatic incident, Brugger and others have come a long way towards understanding out-of-body experiences. They have narrowed down the cause to malfunctions in a specific brain area and are now working out how these lead to the almost supernatural experience of leaving your own body and observing it from afar. They are also using out-of-body experiences to tackle a long-standing problem: how we create and maintain a sense of self.

Dramatised to great effect by such authors as Dostoevsky, Wilde, de Maupassant and Poe - some of whom wrote from first-hand knowledge - out-of-body experiences are usually associated with epilepsy, migraines, strokes, brain tumours, drug use and even near-death experiences. It is clear, though, that people with no obvious neurological disorders can have an out-of-body experience. By some estimates, about 5 per cent of healthy people have one at some point in their lives. People without any obvious neurological disorder can have an out-of-body experience.

So what exactly is an out-of-body experience? A definition has recently emerged that involves a set of increasingly bizarre perceptions. The least severe of these is a doppelgänger experience: you sense the presence of or see a person you know to be yourself, though you remain rooted in your own body. This often progresses to stage 2, where your sense of self moves back and forth between your real body and your doppelgänger. This was what Brugger's young patient experienced. Finally, your self leaves your body altogether and observes it from outside, often an elevated position such as the ceiling. "This split is the most striking feature of an out-of-body experience," says Olaf Blanke, a neurologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne ..."

Full story via newscientist.com

IMO, there are aspects of this phenomenon which go far beyond the ken of science.

And now suddenly I can't stop thinking about the George Ritchie case.

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