Showing all posts about history
What did Earth look like in the distant past?
1 June 2022
A fantastic visualisation of ancient Earth, as it is thought to have appeared in the distant past, going back 750 million years, created by Ian Webster, based on plate tectonic and paleogeographic maps made by C. R. Scotese.
Even better, type in your location’s name and see it where it was in the past, relative to the landmasses of the time. 750 million years ago, during the Cryogenian Period, the major city nearest me, Sydney, sat in the ocean. Might’ve been the best place to be, given glaciers covered the then landmasses, and the world was in the grips of the biggest known ice-age.
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How did dinosaurs spend their last day on Earth?
2 May 2022
Riley Black, writing for the Smithsonian Magazine, depicts the last day in the life in of an Edmontosaurus, a dinosaur focussed on finding food and avoiding predators, while trying to divest itself of lice like creatures feeding on his flesh.
There was no impending sense of doom. There was no shift to the wind, or darkening of the clouds. No lightning, no thunder. In this little patch of Hell Creek, Montana, all is as it ever was as far as the dinosaurs are concerned. But more than two thousand miles away, a chunk of extraterrestrial stone more than seven miles across just slammed into the Earth.
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Saving the roof of Jane Austen’s Hampshire cottage
3 November 2021
Good news for Jane Austen fans who like, or are one day hoping, to visit the house in the English village of Chawton, Hampshire, where she spent the final eight years of her life, and wrote several of her novels… funds have been raised to repair the roof of her old cottage, which was built in the seventeenth century.
The roof was last refurbished in 1948 before the House opened to the public. Over 70 years on and over a million visitors later, major repairs are required to ensure the watertightness of the building and preserve the museum collection.
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Single microbe theory, was it a bug that killed off the dinosaurs?
20 December 2012
The mass extinction that killed off ninety percent of animal, plant, and insect species on Earth around two-hundred-and-fifty-one million years ago, could be attributable to an ocean residing microbe called methanosarcina, thinks Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Daniel Rothman:
Called methanosarcina, this sea-dwelling microbe is responsible for most of the methane produced biologically even today. Rothman and his team discovered that methanosarcina developed the ability to produce methane 231 million years ago. While that ability came around too late to be single-handedly responsible for the link. However, mathanosarcina requires nickel in order to produce methane quickly. Nickel levels spiked almost 251 million years ago, likely because of a spike in Siberian lava from the volcanoes themselves. This indicates that methanosarcina was directly responsible for producing the methane that killed off an overwhelming majority of the Earth\’s species.
Bound to be hotly disputed but will surely make for a talking point or two over the year-end break.
Originally published Thursday 20 December 2012.
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Someone out there knows who Adelaide’s ‘Somerton Man’ is
22 August 2011
The “Mystery of the Somerton Man”, or “The Taman Shud Case”, where the body of an unidentified male was found on Somerton beach, near Adelaide, capital of South Australia, in December 1948, remains one of Australia’s most perplexing unsolved “missing persons” cases.
Was the dead man, who became known as “Somerton Man”, the victim of an elaborate murder plot, or did he take his own life? Why is it that no one was able to positively identify him, despite extensive publicity given to the case at the time? What is to be made of his apparent association with an Adelaide nurse, and rumours of links to espionage groups?
The police had brought in another expert, John Cleland, emeritus professor of pathology at the University of Adelaide, to re-examine the corpse and the dead man’s possessions. In April, four months after the discovery of the body, Cleland’s search produced a final piece of evidence — one that would prove to be the most baffling of all. Cleland discovered a small pocket sewn into the waistband of the dead man\’s trousers. Previous examiners had missed it, and several accounts of the case have referred to it as a “secret pocket,” but it seems to have been intended to hold a fob watch. Inside, tightly rolled, was a minute scrap of paper, which, opened up, proved to contain two words, typeset in an elaborate printed script. The phrase read “Tamám Shud.”
Efforts to solve the mystery remain on-going, which includes determining the man’s identity, and what exactly occasioned his death, are being lead by a University of Adelaide team. More information about the case can be found on Wikipedia.
UPDATE: researchers believe they have identified the dead man.
Originally published Monday 22 August 2011.
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Australia, crime, history, legacy
Oranges and Sunshine, a film by Jim Loach, with Emily Watson, David Wenham
10 June 2011
Oranges and Sunshine, trailer, a drama set in 1986, is the debut feature of British TV producer Jim Loach, and is based on the book Empty Cradles by British social worker Margaret Humphreys. Her book chronicles efforts to expose the British government’s child migrants program of the 1950’s and 60’s, where over 130,000 children were forcibly sent overseas.
Many of these children — who came from struggling, or single-parent families, and sent to Australia, and other former British colonies — were under the impression their parents were dead, and that a happier life awaited them elsewhere. The reality was anything but; many were abused by their new carers, or became child labourers.
Humphreys (Emily Watson) is a Nottingham social worker caring for orphaned children. She first becomes aware British children were sent overseas when a woman from Australia asks for help tracing her mother. While searching for the woman’s mother, Humphreys uncovers numerous instances of children being sent overseas.
After learning that Nicky (Lorraine Ashbourne), a woman in a support group she convenes, has a brother Jack (Hugo Weaving), who was sent overseas as a child, Humphreys travels to Australia. There she soon meets many hundreds of others who were taken from their families, including Len (David Wenham), who is trying to find his mother.
It soon becomes apparent that it wasn’t just the children who were lied to. As Humphreys continues to reunite now adult children with their families, she learns the parents, whose children were often forcibly removed from their custody, were also lied to. They were often being told their children had been adopted locally, not sent overseas.
Humphreys’ work however is an uphill battle that takes a physical and emotional toll on her. The British and Australian governments are unhelpful. Meanwhile, the charity and church groups who took the children in are angered by the allegations of abuse levelled at them, which results in Humphreys being threatened by their supporters.
Oranges and Sunshine is an intimate and personal portrayal of a dark chapter in our history. In 2009 then Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologised to the British child migrants, or Forgotten Australians as they are also known. His British counterpart, Gordon Brown, did likewise in 2010.
A compassionately made film that is neither sentimental or sensationalistic, Oranges and Sunshine is a moving, harrowing, and emotional drama. The lid is lifted on a government policy that aimed simply to save money — care for children was cheaper in Australia than Britain — and one that had no regard at all for those the would-be program purported to be helping.
Originally published Friday 10 June 2011, with subsequent revisions, updates to lapsed URLs, etc.
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David Wenham, Emily Watson, film, history, Hugo Weaving, Jim Loach, legacy, Lorraine Ashbourne
A short history of the letter J the alphabets last member
14 April 2011
While sitting in the tenth place in the English alphabet, the letter J, which split off from the letter I, was actually the last addition to the writing system.
“J” is a bit of a late bloomer; after all, it was the last letter added to the alphabet. It is no coincidence that i and j stand side by side — they actually started out as the same character. The letter j began as a swash, a typographical embellishment for the already existing i. With the introduction of lowercase letters to the Roman numeric system, j was commonly used to denote the conclusion of a series of one’s – as in “xiij” for the number 13.
Originally published Thursday 14 April 2011.
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The ghost stations of East Berlin by video train
6 December 2010
After the German cities of West Berlin and East Berlin were completely partitioned following the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, accessing one side of the city from the other — was at first — pretty much out of the question for all but a small number of people.
One group unaffected — to a degree — by the separation of the city were West Berlin train commuters who used a small number of underground services whose lines crossed into parts of East Berlin, as they travelled from one area of West Berlin to another.
While trains still ran through East Berlin, they did not stop at stations on the eastern side of the border. Many of these stations closed during the period the city was divided by the wall were dubbed “ghost stations”, and were usually heavily guarded by East German troops.
The YouTube video, above, contains footage filmed from the driver’s compartments of West Berlin trains as they passed through a couple of East Berlin’s ghost stations.
Update: unfortunately the original YouTube video has been taken down as a result of a copyright claim.
Originally published Monday 6 December 2010.
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There was once a place called Doggerland in Europe
3 September 2009
A landmass that connected what is now Great Britain to continental Europe, once existed up until about eight and half thousand years ago, and is known as Doggerland… at least by more contemporary geologists and scientists, that is.
Map/illustration by National Geographic Magazine staff.
Originally published Tuesday 3 September 2013.
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Progress? Coming soon, the disassociated WordPress blog
13 May 2007
The wordpressing (my new favourite word) of disassociated is well under way. It’ll be a while before anything happens though, as I’m trying to convert four years of static HTML file blog entries into a format I can upload to a WordPress database.
It’s not all cut and paste work. There’s quite a bit of formatting still to do. Redundant CSS styles and HTML tags need to be removed (to say nothing of dead links, but later for those), and there’s still the risk it won’t work. It should though.
As part of the redesign I have created (and uploaded) photos to a new-ish Flickr page, so go check it out. More photos will be added as I go. Bye for now…
Originally published Sunday 13 May 2007.
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