Boing Boing: Collaboration across 120 years yields “oldest” movie ever The article is in Sky and Telescope. In 1882 David Peck Todd photographed a transit of Venus in California. Two astronomers have found the 147 negatives archived at Lick Observatory, just down the road here, and have turned them into a Quicktime movie. Another kind…
ruins and remains
ghosts, abandonment, ruins
From Phil@philosophistry – ghost town gallery.com – a gazeteer of ghost towns. You can send virtual postcards through the site. See also my comments last August on photographs of archaeological ruin.
archaeology of the contemporary past
The Newcastle Journal has run an article about the WWII remains I mentioned in connection with the landscape archaeology around Dunstanburgh Castle in the UK. The two concrete radar buildings still survive and there is clear evidence of where equipment was sited. The remains of the Nissen huts behind the radar station, which accommodated the…
Dunstanburgh, Northumberland
English Heritage, the government agency reponsible for managing the historic environment in the UK, has posted a web diary of a fascinating survey done last November of Dunstanburgh Castle in the north of England. [Link] This is one of my favorite places. I have been visiting, photographing, teaching and writing about it for as long…
designing text
I want to pick up a comment or rather link that Sam left on the Blather site entry – to Eric Benson’s blog. Archaeological text generation – Markov chains … The official definition of a markov chain is: A model of sequences of events where the probability of an event occurring depends upon the fact…
the uncanny
There is a sense of the uncanny to the village in Scotland that has been discovered to go back 5,500 years. [Link] Ralph Waldo Emerson: English Traits, Stonehenge: “We walked in and out, and took again and again a fresh look at the uncanny stones.” (1856). The Uncanny? The return of what is no longer…