“ Told often enough that the West and Islam are natural enemies, we start to believe it, and assume it has always been so. But the Metropolitan Museum of Art argues otherwise in Venice and the Islamic World, 828-1797 a show that, with classic Met largesse, recreates the spectacle of two different cultures meeting in one fantastic city, where commerce and love of beauty, those great levelers, unite them in a fruitful bond.”

The Republic of Beauty, Melding West and East

The article begins with..Told often enough that the West and Islam are natural enemies, we start to believe it...and I'm very surprised. Who is saying so? Natural enemies? What's that? And what they mean with West? I'm Italian, from the south, what do I belong to, West or Middle East? The Mediterranean sea has seen all the populations living on its shores coming in contact sooner or later, the culture that developed is a result of a mixing of everything, with peaks of greatness and dips into nothingness for each of the populations involved. The Mediterranean culture is one of the most ancient and rich of the so called West and it's the result of exchange not of enmity. There have been many wars, sure, but that's just the usual human stupidity and greed not natural hostility.

Beautiful pictures of Libraries:

Libraries are the keepers of human history, the shape of men efforts to understand and remember, they bring perspective to human history and enable anyone to learn and keep learning.

Library Smut

“ Phylotaxis (Phyllos - leaf, Taxis - order) is an exploration of the space where science meets culture. Its structure, derived from the Fibonacci Sequence and closely related to the Golden Ratio, is one of nature's most elegant. The Fibonacci Sequence is the set of numbers where each number is the sum of the previous two numbers. This simple sequence governs phenomena as diverse as the petal arrangement of roses, the breeding patterns of rabbits, and the shape of our galaxy.”

Phylotaxis

The World Heritage List includes 812 properties forming part of the cultural and natural heritage which the World Heritage Committee considers as having outstanding universal value.

Useful Oxford dictionary faq

On the BBC: charting the lost innovations of Islam