Archive for the ‘history’ Category
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.
Visualizing Empires’ Decline
November 26th, 2009
Charles II
November 20th, 2009
A description of Charles II of Spain, according to the Durants:
“short, lame, epileptic, senile, and completely bald before thirty-five, he was always on the verge of death, but repeatedly baffled Christendom by continuing to live.”
Of course he had problems; the guy’s family tree is a braid.
Interview with Umberto Eco
November 16th, 2009
Der Spiegel has an interesting interview with scholar and author Umberto Eco, in which he discusses the merits of lists:
SPIEGEL: But why does Homer list all of those warriors and their ships if he knows that he can never name them all?
Eco: Homer’s work hits again and again on the topos of the inexpressible. People will always do that. We have always been fascinated by infinite space, by the endless stars and by galaxies upon galaxies. How does a person feel when looking at the sky? He thinks that he doesn’t have enough tongues to describe what he sees. Nevertheless, people have never stopping describing the sky, simply listing what they see. Lovers are in the same position. They experience a deficiency of language, a lack of words to express their feelings. But do lovers ever stop trying to do so? They create lists: Your eyes are so beautiful, and so is your mouth, and your collarbone … One could go into great detail.
Another good one:
Eco: … Culture isn’t knowing when Napoleon died. Culture means knowing how I can find out in two minutes.
Also, hearing the author of Foucault’s Pendulum say, “I felt like a character in a Dan Brown novel,” is a little bizarre.
The Nine Nations
November 16th, 2009
Written in 1981, Joel Garreau’s The Nine Nations of North America breaks the continent down into its most culturally relevant components. I like maps.
- New England
- An expanded version including not only Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut (although omitting the Connecticut suburbs of New York City), but also the Canadian Atlantic provinces of New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland and Labrador. Capital: Boston.
- The Foundry
- The by-then-declining industrial areas of the northeastern United States and Great Lakes region stretching from New York City to Milwaukee, and including Chicago and Philadelphia as well as industrial Southern Ontario centering on Toronto. Capital: Detroit.
- Dixie
- The former Confederate States of America (today the southeastern United States) centered on Atlanta, and including most of eastern Texas. Garreau’s “Dixie” also includes Kentucky (which had both Federal and Confederate governments); southern portions of Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana; and the “Little Dixie” region of southeastern Oklahoma. Finally, the region also includes most of Florida, as far south as the cities of Fort Myers and Naples. Capital: Atlanta.
- The Breadbasket
- Most of the Great Plains states and part of the Prairie provinces: Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, the Dakotas, almost all of Oklahoma, most of western Missouri, western Wisconsin, eastern Colorado, the eastern edge of New Mexico, parts of Illinois and Indiana, and North Texas. Also included are some of Northern Ontario and southern Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Capital: Kansas City.
- The Islands
- The South Florida metropolitan area, the Everglades and Florida Keys, the Caribbean, and parts of Venezuela. Capital: Miami.
- Mexamerica
- The southern and Central Valley portions of California as well as southern Arizona, the portion of Texas bordering on the Rio Grande, most of New Mexico and all of Mexico, centered on either Los Angeles or Mexico City (depending on whom you ask), which are significantly Spanish-speaking. Garreau’s original book did not place all of Mexico within Mexamerica, but only Northern Mexico and the Baja California peninsula. Capital: Los Angeles.
- Ecotopia
- The Pacific Northwest coast west of the Cascade Range, stretching from Alaska down through coastal British Columbia, Washington state, Oregon and into California just north of Santa Barbara. Capital: San Francisco.
- The Empty Quarter
- Most of Alaska, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, Montana and Colorado from Denver west, as well as the eastern portions of Oregon, California, Washington, all of Alberta and Northern Canada (including what is now Nunavut), northern Arizona, parts of New Mexico (mainly the area controlled by the Navajo Nation), and British Columbia east of the Coast Ranges. Capital: Denver.
- Quebec
- The primarily French-speaking province of Canada, which held referenda on secession in 1980 and 1995, the latter of which the “separatists” lost narrowly. Capital: Quebec City.
The Encyclopédie
September 3rd, 2009
French writer/philosopher Denis Diderot is probably best known for editing the Encyclopédie, a series of collaboratively-written books meant to compile all the knowledge of late-1700’s Europe. I just learned that the University of Michigan hosts a hypertext-ed translation of the whole thing. You can read a blurb about the project here. Some highlights:
Aside from some offensively dated ideas about race, I’m really impressed with how modern most of the thinking is. Compare that with, say, the Pseudodoxia, written just a century earlier. Way to go, Enlightenment.
Wilhem Reich
August 11th, 2009
Early in his career, Wilhelm Reich was a respected psychiatrist. He gradually became a crank:
Later in life, he became a controversial figure who was both adored and condemned. He began to violate some of the key taboos of psychoanalysis, using touch during sessions, and treating patients in their underwear to improve their “orgastic potency.” He said he had discovered a primordial cosmic energy, which he said others called God, and which he called “orgone.” He built “orgone energy accumulators” that his patients sat inside to harness the reputed health benefits, leading to newspaper stories about “sex boxes” that cured cancer.
It’s been a while since I’ve written a post about a crank. I love cranks.