Archive for the ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’ Category
July 6th
The origin of the Tunguska blast a century ago has never been solved. 
The explosion near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River on June 30, 1908 flattened some 500,000 acres of Siberian forest. An eyewitness described flashes and thunder and everything (including their hut) flattered completely by a strong wind.
No one knows what caused it, but a long-standing theory is the crash of an asteroid or comet.
But other interesting theories abound.
Struck by the similarity of Tunguska and Hiroshima decades later, Alexander Kazantsev, a popular science fiction writer, wrote a story in which the Tunguska blast was the exploding nuclear power plant of a spaceship from Mars. Russian scientists took up the cause and claimed to find various bits of evidence–never proved–for a UFO crash. 
Another theory is the Nikola Tesla “death ray.” The man who pioneered radio and modern alternating currents claimed to have invented a device that could transmit energy over huge distances.
The story goes that Tesla tested it the evening of June 30, 1908. He aimed the death ray towards the Arctic and turned it on. At this time, Robert Peary was trekking to the North Pole and Tesla asked him to look out for any unusual disturbances. Tesla then watched the newspapers and sent telegrams to Peary, but didn’t hear about anything unusual in the Arctic.
But Telsa did hear the news about an unexplainable event in Siberia. He was thankful no one was killed, as it was clear to him his death ray had overshot its target. He then dismantled the machine, saying it was too dangerous to keep. Tesla claimed the plans for the death ray were stolen from his hotel room in the 1940s.
June 30th
Has the Internet made us less attentive readers?
In this month’s Atlantic, Nicholas Carr admits he now has trouble reading books and longer magazine articles—thanks, he speculates, to the Internet’s way of turning us into superficial information grazers.
In Slate, Michael Agger describes some studies that show how lazy our brains are online: they prefer short sentences, explanatory headlines, and bulleted lists, and they skip large chunks of text.
Personally, I still have plenty of patience for reading books and magazine articles, but only when I’m offline, and only when I’m not anxious about some other time commitment. Online, however, I’m exactly like the rest of us, erratic, impatient, unable to concentrate on (too) much at one time…
I don’t know. When I need to do any sort of sustained writing or thinking, I try to close my Internet browser, though it isn’t always easy. Other times surfing the web is like keeping my eyes occupied while my mind searches for the right word or concept—sometimes I find that it helps, and other times I’m probably just kidding myself.
What do you think?
June 27th
Stewart Brand, author, visionary thinker, and environmentalist, wrote a book about a new form of human thinking about time and responsibility for the future.
The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility, introduces the “Clock of the Long Now Project“–a gigantic mechanical clock in the Nevada desert, as monumental as Stonehenge, and engineered to record time over 10,000 years.
In concise essays, Brand touches on the mathematics and philosophies of time, episodes of history, and arguments for stretching out our perceptions of time, the benefits of long-term thinking, reversing our shorter and shorter attention spans.
The idea to build a momument scale, multi-millennial, all mechanical clock as an icon to long term thinking came from computer scientist Danny Hillis. 
Brian Eno, a board member of the Long Now Foundation, described their mission: “The idea is to extend our concept of the present in both directions, making the present longer…Civiliations with long nows look after things better. In those places you feel a very strong but flexible structure which is built to absorb shocks and in fact incorporate them.”
June 25th
In honor of the 125th anniversary of the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge, Danish artist Olafur Eliasson has designed four man-made waterfalls to run down underneath the bridge’s two main towers.
The waterfalls will be turned on tomorrow and will remain on till Oct. 13 between 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. You can learn more about the project at its official website; for my own part, I can’t wait to see it!
May 27th
The first photographs from the NASA Mars lander, Phoenix, are back! You can check them out on this website.
May 25th
In her 1952 spiritual autobiography, The Long Loneliness, Dorothy Day (1897-1980) described her early habit of keeping a diary:Â “When I was a child, my sister and I kept notebooks; recording happiness made it last longer, we felt, and recording sorrow dramatized it and took away its bitterness; and often we settled some problem which beset us, even while we wrote about.” Day maintained this habit, though somewhat irregularly, throughout her life.
Somes her reflections were prompted by happiness, sometimes by sorrow, but mostly her diary entries were an expression of her intense interest in life and her responses to what was happening around her.
The Duty of Delight: The Diaries of Dorothy Day, edited by Robert Ellsberg, has just been issued by Marquette University Press.
May 3rd
How many life-changing events are unplanned, but come from chance discoveries?
The Red Leather Diary - Reclaiming a Life Through the Pages of a Lost Journal by journalist Lily Koppel, is the story of such a discovery.
Like something out of a novel, a chance find in an Upper West Side dumpster turned into Koppel’s look at a young woman coming of age in New York City in the 1930s. Koppel stumbled across the diary inside a steamer trunk near her apartment. And thanks to a hired sleuth, she found the owner of that diary. Florence Wolfson, the young writer, was still around at 92.
In her diary, which Koppel augments with interviews with Florence, we can see a young woman with an artistic, literary aesthetic trying to take advantage of all New York City offers and find herself in the process.
Though written at a time when sex was a a subject discussed discreetly at best, the diary is studded with brief but graphic details about relationships with both men and women.
How, Florence was asked, did the diary end up in dumpster? She is not sure, but she suspects the journal was inadvertently abandoned in storage when she and her husband left 98 Riverside Drive in 1989.
The move from New York City to an affluent Connecticut suburb seemed to write a final entry to the chronicle of the eager, searching girl she had been. “Where did all of that creativity go?” Wolfson wondered aloud to Koppel as she pondered the newly rediscovered story of her youth. “If I was true to myself, would I have ended up in Wesport?”
May 1st
A German artist took photographs of 100 different products—mostly food and candy—and compared the pictures on their packages with what was actually inside. Of course we all know there’s bound to be some exaggeration in an advertising photo, but the comparisons are still quite surprising. I’ve reproduced one of the most unappetizing examples above; you can check out the whole series here.
Guten Appetit, as they say!
March 31st
Clairefontaine is a French company that makes paper for all Quo Vadis planners. As Karen explained last year, many people believe that the company was named after a real person, “Claire Fontaine,” but in fact the name simply comes from the site where their paper mill is located—the town of Etival-Clairefontaine.
As it turns out, there is a person named “Claire Fontaine,” or at least someone who uses that name: a French ready-made artist who re-purposes found objects and works in neon, video, sculpture, painting and text. She just took part in an exhibit at New York’s New Museum (closed yesterday, unfortunately), and according to her website, she’s currently preparing a book about the concepts of ready-made artistry and her own notion of “human strike.”
March 24th
Until it was mentioned in yesterday’s Times, I never realized that Good Friday marks the official birthday of the peace sign. Gerald Holtom, a designer from West London, came up with the now-famous symbol by combining letters from the semaphore, or flag-signalling, alphabet. An N stands for “nuclear”; a D for “disarmament”; and the circle around the two is meant to symbolize Earth.
The peace sign had its first official outing 50 years ago at a Good Friday demonstration in England that was organized by the Direct Action Committee Against Nuclear War and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
