In 2018, “GeoWizard” Tom Davies set out to cross the width of Wales, 33 miles, in a straight line. Part 1 is above, and the rest followed in four parts (2, 3, 4, 5).
It looks incredibly difficult.
(Via MetaFilter.)
Might as Well
Money was so worthless during the Weimar hyperinflation of 1922 that these boys literally made a kite out of banknotes.
More at Rare Historical Photos.
A Clever Solution
In 1627 a group of sailors wanted to communicate a grievance to the captain of one of the King’s ships. Technically this amounted to mutiny, which was punishable by death, so they needed a way to express their solidarity without revealing any one of them as the leader and inviting retribution against him.
The answer was to arrange their 76 signatures in a circle, demanding that their allowances be distributed and the ship be victualed before they would weigh anchor. (I don’t know whether the captain agreed.)
From the U.K. National Archives.
Simple Terms
In 1860 Manchester layman J. Gill wrote “a sermon in words of one syllable only”:
He who wrote the Psalm in which our text is found, had great cause to both bless and praise God; for he had been brought from a low state to be a great king in a great land; had been made wise to rule the land in the fear and truth of God; and all his foes were, at the time he wrote, at peace with him. Though he had been poor, he was now rich in this world’s goods; though his youth had been spent in the care of sheep, he now wore a crown; and though it had been his lot for a long time to hear the din of war and strife, peace now dwelt round the throne, and the land had rest.
The whole thing is here. “This Sermon … is offered to the public with the view of showing that at least big words are not necessary for the conveyance of great truths to the minds of the people,” he wrote in a preface. “[I have] an ambition to prove that, in the advocacy of religious truth, very plain, simple, and old-fashioned words have not yet lost their original force and significance.”
Thinking Big
For a 1929 airport design competition, H. Altvater of New York proposed a huge wheel of interlocking runways set atop a ring of skyscrapers.
The judges ruled it “beyond the expressed purpose of the competition” but noted that “it is quite possible that in the future some of the features considered objectionable today will prove entirely practical.”
“Reading Laozi”
“Those who speak know nothing;
Those who know are silent.”
These words, as I am told,
Were spoken by Laozi.
If we are to believe that Laozi
Was himself one who knew,
How comes it that he wrote a book
Of five thousand words?
— Bai Juyi
A Closer Look
Michael Snow’s 1967 experimental film Wavelength consists essentially of an extraordinarily slow 45-minute zoom on a photograph on the wall of a room. William C. Wees of McGill University points out that this raises a philosophical question: What visual event does this zoom create? In a tracking shot, the camera moves physically forward, and its viewpoint changes as a person’s would as she advanced toward the photo. In Wavelength (or any zoom) the camera doesn’t move, and yet something is taking place, something with no analogue in ordinary experience.
“If I actually walk toward a photograph pinned on a wall, I find that the photograph does, indeed, get larger in my visual field, and that things around it slip out of view at the peripheries of my vision. The zoom produces equivalent effects, hence the tendency to describe it as ‘moving forward.’ But I am really imitating a tracking shot, not a zoom. … I think it is safe to say that no perceptual experience in the every-day world can prepare us for the kind of vision produced by the zoom.”
“What, in a word, happens during a viewing of that forty-five minute zoom? And what does it mean?”
(From Nick Hall, The Zoom: Drama at the Touch of a Lever, 2018.)
In a Word
hyetal
adj. of or belonging to rain
Podcast Episode 263: Memories of Proust
Confined in a Soviet prison camp in 1941, Polish painter Józef Czapski chose a unique way to cope: He lectured to the other prisoners on Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time. In this week’s episode of the Futility Closet podcast we’ll describe Czapski’s ambitious project and the surprising importance of literature to the prisoners of oppressive regimes.
We’ll also race some lemons and puzzle over a woman’s birthdays.
Unquote
“Most people consider a glass as half empty or half full. I look at it as too big.” — George Carlin