44 posts tagged with history by brundlefly.
Displaying 1 through 44 of 44.
What Bit the Ancient Egyptians?
"How much can the written records of ancient civilisations tell us about the animals they lived alongside? Our latest research, based on the venomous snakes described in an ancient Egyptian papyrus, suggests more than you might think. A much more diverse range of snakes than we’d imagined lived in the land of the pharaohs – which also explains why these Egyptian authors were so preoccupied with treating snakebites!" [more inside]
The Corpse Can’t Play
It turns out we've been suffering from stand-up comedy for centuries.
Tonight I've watched / The moon and then / the Pleiades / go down...
They struggled against all odds but one.
"When he was alive, Lonesome George was a captive reminder of biodiversity loss. One 2006 book called him 'the only one of his kind left on earth—a symbol of the devastation man has wrought to the natural world in the Galápagos and beyond.' After his death, Washington Tapia, a researcher with the Ecuador National Park Service, told the New York Times it was like losing his grandparents. But even for people less intimate with him did his life and demise serve as a reminder of the mass extinction of species currently underway—the sixth in earth’s history but the only one caused by humans." - Human Error: Survivor guilt in the Anthropocene
The myth of the "Irish slave"
"No! No! No! They don't mean the shuttle! They don't mean the shuttle!"
I seldom use it myself, sir. It promotes rust.
Robert Kinoshita, the production designer and art director who created Forbidden Planet's Robby the Robot and Lost In Space's B-9 Environmental Control Robot [previously], has passed away at the age of 100.
Magicians of the Miniature
Matte Shot (previously) presents: Magicians of the Miniature, an overview and image gallery of miniature effects work.
Climate change and contemporary fiction
"Novels are no use at all in days like these, for they deal with people and their relationships, with fathers and mothers and daughters or sons and lovers, etc., with souls, usually unhappy ones, and with society etc., as if the place for all these things were assured, the earth for all time earth, the sea level fixed for all time." [more inside]
The man who saved the dinosaurs
Dinosaurs were lumbering, stupid, scientifically boring beasts—until John Ostrom rewrote the book on them.
Women in archaeology, geology, and palaeontology
"TrowelBlazers is a celebration of women archaeologists, palaeontologists and geologists who have been doing awesome work for far longer, and in far greater numbers, than most people realize." [via]
The Santa Maria found?
"More than five centuries after Christopher Columbus’s flagship, the Santa Maria, was wrecked in the Caribbean, archaeological investigators think they may have discovered the vessel’s long-lost remains – lying at the bottom of the sea off the north coast of Haiti."
The Misremembering of ‘I Have a Dream’
Relative Power of Contemporary States, Nations and Empires
The Histomap: Four Thousand Years of World History
The Rise and Fall of Katharine Hepburn's Fake Accent
"No one will be admitted after the start of the FPP."
The Gripping, Mind-Blowing, Thrilling Evolution of the Movie Trailer
The Last of the Great Chained Libraries
"On a beautiful sunny day last week, the Turning Over a New Leaf project team decided to take a day off from the office to visit a spectacular chained library in the small town of Zutphen (located in the eastern part of the Netherlands). Built in 1564 as part of the church of St Walburga, it is one of only five chained libraries in the world that survive ‘intact’—that is, complete with the original books, chains, rods, and furniture."
The yard.
"My friend showed me around the MUNI Kirkland bus yard. MUNI is the municipal public transit system serving the city and county of San Francisco. It will turn exactly 100 later this year." [via]
Declassified Photos Reveal CIA’s Deep Sea Rescue of a Spy Satellite
"Only July 10, 1971, America's newest photo reconnaissance satellite, the KH-9 Hexagon, dropped a capsule loaded with film towards the Earth. The reentry vehicle was supposed to open its parachute; an American aircraft would snatch it out of the sky in mid-descent. But the chute was never unfurled. The reentry vehicle hit the Pacific Ocean with a force of approximately 2600 Gs. And then it sunk down into the deep, before settling at 16,000 feet."
A Tall Tail
SHEATH CONTAINING FULLY EQUIPPED OCEAN LINER
"Historians have long debated what could have been done differently to prevent that tragedy, and what still could be done to keep such a tragedy from repeating on future expeditions. In 1913, a Swiss inventor proposed a solution to the problem. Naturally, it involved giant mechanical mosquitoes." [more inside]
First Person Monster Blog
After the Final Curtain
After the Final Curtain: Photographically documenting neglected and abandoned theaters throughout the United States. [via]
The Ghost of Slumber Mountain
"These giant monsters of the past are seen to breathe, to live again, to move and battle as they did at the dawn of life!" The Ghost of Slumber Mountain (1918), by Willis O'Brien. Previously.
"A true war story is never moral."
Classroom Wars: a middle-school history teacher on the seductive stories of mankind's battles.
A Short Vision
"Just last week you read about the H-bomb being dropped. Now two great English writers, two very imaginative writers — I’m gonna tell you if you have youngsters in the living room tell them not to be alarmed at this ‘cause it’s a fantasy, the whole thing is animated — but two English writers, Joan and Peter Foldes, wrote a thing which they called ‘A Short Vision’ in which they wondered what might happen to the animal population of the world if an H-bomb were dropped. It’s produced by George K. Arthur and I’d like you to see it. It is grim, but I think we can all stand it to realize that in war there is no winner." [via]
Inside Movies Since 1920
Boxoffice, an industry magazine for the movie theater business, has been posting back issues dating to 1925. Via Trailers From Hell.
A history of the world in 100 seconds
"Many Wikipedia articles are tagged with geographic coordinates. Many have references to historic events. Cross referencing these two subsets and plotting them year on year adds up to a dynamic visualization of Wikipedia's view of world history." Via curiosity counts.
The Richard Balzer Collection
"I have been collecting for more than thirty years, and my collecting wanders around the theme of visual entertainment, and almost all of the collection dates from before 1900. Over time you will find magic lanterns, peepshows, shadows, transparencies, thaumatropes, phenakistascopes and a variety of other optical toys. You may find things that seem odd in this collection, however, always remember that collecting is a very personal thing and these items may stretch the boundaries of visual entertainment but nevertheless have found a place in my collection." Via @CarinBerger.
Kowloon Walled City
Uncertain Futures
The Poet And The Boxer
"When the eminent French poet Jean Cocteau died last October at the age of 74, his obituaries noted that he had followed an astounding number of part-time careers as well—novelist, playwright, choreographer, film director, critic and artist. But Cocteau's journalistic biographers overlooked the most bizarre of his avocations: he was once the successful manager of a world champion prizefighter." - Sports Illustrated, March 2, 1964 [more inside]
The Works
The Works was a production of the Computer Graphics Lab at the New York Institute of Technology, and (had it ever been finished) would have been the first all 3D CGI feature film. Here are some stills and here's a short clip. [via PopCrunch]
Friends of the Pleistocene
Dinosaurs in the Deep
In 1916, Bone War veteran (and poet) Charles H. Sternberg loaded 22 crates of fossils from the Alberta Badlands onto the SS Mount Temple, intending to ship them to the British Museum of Natural History. They never made it. [via Dinosaur Tracking]
Modern New Orleans
Michael Paul Smith's Model Photography
"What started out as an exercise in model building and photography, ended up as a dream-like reconstruction of the town I grew up in." [more inside]
JSBlog
The Fortsas Bibliohoax
In 1840, book collectors from around Europe flocked to the Belgian town of Binche hoping to buy at auction the late Jean Nepomucene Auguste Pichauld, Comte de Fortsas's collection of one-of-a-kind books. Unfortunately for them, neither the man nor his collection ever existed. More recently, librarian and bibliophile Jeremy Dibbell posted the contents of the Fortras Catalogue to LibraryThing with English translation as well as an introduction to the collection. Scans of the original catalogue can be found on Google Books. [more inside]
Darwin's Evolving Thoughts
The Preservation of Favoured Traces: a visualization of Charles Darwin's edits and additions to On the Origin of Species over the course of six editions. (via) [more inside]
This post is a series of tubes
A Brief History of the Apocalypse
The sky is falling! From Romulus to Ronald Reagan: a comprehensive timeline of apocalyptic predictions. If you decide to put some stock in one or more of these prophecies, you may need to do some preparatory research.
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