Archive for the ‘history’ Category
Handmade Islands
January 29th, 2010
In a bay off the coast of Montenegro there’s a church on an island. The island was built by hand.
The idea that devotional rock-throwing has become an art of creating new terrain, generation after generation, rock after rock, pebble after pebble, is stunning to me. Perhaps in a thousand years, a whole archipelago of churches will exist there, standing atop a waterlogged maze of old pleasure boats and fishing ships, the mainland hills and valleys nearby denuded of loose stones altogether. Inadvertently, then, this is as much a museum of local geology—a catalog of rocks—as it is a churchyard.
Howard Zinn Dies at 87
January 28th, 2010
Historian, author, and activist Howard Zinn died yesterday on vacation in Santa Monica. Aside from publishing the seminal A People’s History of the United States, Zinn was among the first to call for immediate, unconditional withdraw from Vietnam, helped hide the Pentagon papers, and consistently spoke out for the causes of pacifism and social progress. Good thinker, good speaker, good guy.
The Permanent Thunderstorm
January 20th, 2010
There’s a near-permanent lightning storm over Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela:
For 140 to 160 nights out of the year, for 10 hours at a time, the sky above the river is pierced by almost constant lightning, producing as many as 280 strikes per hour. Known as the “Relampago del Catatumbo,” this lightning storm has been raging, on and off, for as long a people can remember.
It’s been storming there since at least 1595.
Well quipped, Dr. Bohr
January 14th, 2010
Neils Bohr was once visited at his country house by a friend of his, another scientist. The friend was astonished to see that Bohr had a horseshoe nailed up above his front door. He asked, “Do you really believe that that brings you luck?”
Bohr said, “No, of course not… but I’m told that they work even if you don’t believe in them.”
Keith Jenkins
January 9th, 2010
I think people in the past were very different to us in the meanings they gave to the world, and that any reading on to them of a constancy of human nature type, of whatever kind, is without foundation. I mean, which sort of human nature do you want to pick? I don’t think this need lead to scepticism about knowing “history” because, to repeat, when we study history we are not studying the past but what historians have constructed about the past. In that sense, whether or not people in the past had the same or different natures to us is not only undecidable but also not at issue. In that sense, the past doesn’t enter into it. Our real need is to establish the presuppositions that historians take to the past. It would therefore be more constructive (though again ultimately impossible) to try to get into the minds of historians rather than the minds of the people who lived in the past and who only emerge, strictly speaking, through the minds of historians anyway, a task this whole book is encouraging. Not so much “all history as the history of past people’s minds” then, but “all history as the history of historians’ minds.”
Keith Jenkins, Re-thinking History
Pre-Columbian Geoglyphs
January 9th, 2010
In general, the geometric figures are formed by a ditch approximately 11m wide, currently 1-3m deep, with adjacent 0.5-1m high earthen banks, formed by deposition of the excavated soil. Ring ditches have diameters that vary from 90 to 300m. The circular structures are more common in the south, while composite and rectangular structures become more frequent as one moves north (see Figure 2). When there are two or more structures, they are usually connected by embanked roads. Some of the single rectangular structures may have short roads coming out of their mid-sides or corners. Composite figures include a rectangle inside a circle or vice versa.
Pretty cool paper; they used Google Earth to find geoglyphs! Read the full article here (pdf).
Dubai
December 30th, 2009
Martin Becka took a series of photographs of Dubai with a 150-year-old camera.
Gävle Goat Burned Again
December 23rd, 2009
My pyromaniacal readers will no doubt be thrilled to hear that the Gävle goat has once again been reduced to cinders.
Gavle city spokeswoman Anna Ostman said someone set fire to the 43-foot-high (13-meter-high) creature around 3 a.m. local time. Only a charred wooden skeleton of the traditional Swedish Christmas symbol remained on Wednesday morning.
“It feels very sad,” Ostman said. “We had really hoped that he would survive Christmas and New Year’s.”
Vandals have burned down the goat 24 times since it was first set up in Gavle in 1966 to mark the holiday season. It has also been smashed several times, run over by a car and had its legs cut off.
Making a Fiberglass Chair
December 14th, 2009
The amount of craftsmanship that went into making a mundane, ubiquitous fiberglass shell chair is incredible.