For better or terse…
Family lawyers said an addiction to text messages or emails has replaced “working late” at the office as the main tell tale signs of an extra-marital affair.
Andrew Newbury, partner at specialist law firm Pannone said: “We see the same features in so many of the marital disputes that we deal with.
“Broader social and business horizons, activities and technologies which may once have seemed fairly exotic are now frequent parts of the many divorces we handle.
“It’s important for couples to realise, however, that they represent how society and tastes are changing. Just because someone takes up salsa dancing or enjoys spending time with their friends doesn’t automatically mean that they’re having an extra-marital fling.
“Sometimes people cannot appreciate the unfortunate implications of what their partner may be up to – while others seem all too ready to suspect when the explanation is perfectly straightforward.”
He also said wives sudden desire for plastic surgery is often quoted as the factor which first tipped off their husbands. However, the firm warned there was no hard and fast link between a desire for breast enlargement and a roving eye.
Previous studies have suggested text messages have also become popular for ending relationships, with a fifth of young people having used it to dump a boyfriend or girlfriend.
from The (Daily) Telegraph (UK).
As we let our fingers do the walking, we might send a birthday text to Alma Maria Mahler-Werfel (nee Schindler), the daughter of Emil Schindler (the landscape painter), step-daughter of Carl Moll (co-founder of the Vienna Secession), wife and/or mistress of and/or muse to composer Gustav Mahler, painter Gustav Klimt, theater director Max Burckhard, composer Alexander von Zemlinsky, architect (and Bauhaus stalwart) Walter Gropius , artist Oskar Kokoschka, composer Alban Berg, and poet and writer Franz Werfel, among others, and a composer in her own right– she was born on this date in 1879.
RIP, Henri Cartan who has died at age 104. As Science News notes in its obituary:
In the 1930s, a group of young French mathematicians led an uprising that revolutionized mathematics. France had lost most of a generation in the First World War, so the emerging hotshots in mathematics had few elders to look up to. And when these radicals did look up, they didn’t like what they saw. The practice of mathematics at the time was dry, scattered and muddled, they believed, in need of reinvention and invigoration.
So they took up arms: pens and typewriters. Using the nom de plume “Nicolas Bourbaki” (after a dead Napoleonic general), they wrote a series of textbooks laying out mathematics the right way. Though the young mathematicians started out only intending to write a good textbook for analysis (essentially an advanced form of calculus), they ended up creating dozens of volumes which formed a manifesto for a new philosophy of mathematics.
Cartan was the last of the founders of Bourbaki; two of his students won the Fields medal, one won the Nobel Prize in physics and another won the economics Nobel.
Read Cartan’s full obituary here.