Kickoff for July 8, 2024
It's been quite the week, hasn't it? Change, upheaval, but also business (in all senses of the word) as usual. We do live in those proverbial times, don't we?
With that out of the way, let's get Monday started with these links:
A Revolution in Time — Wherein Jonathon Keats explores the idea measuring time not on the basis of 24-hour days but on the rhythms and flows of nature.
From the article:
There is an older tradition that stands in stark contrast to horology. The origins are prehistoric, and the practices were still prevalent at the dawn of the Common Era. I find one of the most vivid descriptions in Pliny’s Natural History, the foremost encyclopedia of the Roman Empire. “‘I have given you plants that mark the hours, and in order that you may not even have to avert your eyes from the Earth to look at the sun’”
How the Atomic Bomb Set Brothers Robert and Frank Oppenheimer on Diverging Paths — Wherein we learn the life-long differences (both personal and philosophical) between the Oppenheimer siblings, and why those differences led to a rift between them later in life.
From the article:
Frank remained anguished over what he felt was Robert’s squandered opportunity to engage the world’s people in candid conversations about how to protect themselves under the shadow of this new threat.
The ancient Roman alternative to daylight savings time — Wherein we learn how the denizens of the Roman empire divided their days, how they read time, and how they handled the changes in the number of hours of sunlight as the seasons changed.
From the article:
With this bold, time-bending system, the ancient Romans never wasted a single moment of daylight – if the Sun was up, it was officially daytime, and they would often be at work. If it was down, it was declared to be the evening – and time for a spot of leisure or sleeping.
The Revenge of the Home Page — Wherein we learn about the recent shift in the way in which people are looking for information, how online publishers are adapting to that change, and some of the problems that come with that shift.
From the article:
Surrounded by dreck, the digital citizen is discovering that the best way to find what she used to get from social platforms is to type a URL into a browser bar and visit an individual site.
Could a Self-Sustaining Starship Carry Humanity to Distant Worlds? — Wherein we learn about the idea of the generational starship, one which successive generations of travellers will live, how those craft are an option for traversing the interstellar gulf, and about the technological and human challenges involved in making such craft viable.
From the article:
Yet this limitation of experience is actually not that different from the lives of all humans in history. All humans have been stuck on just one world, looking to the stars and thinking, “What if?” This vessel, the Earth, while large and diverse, is still just a single ship with a limited landscape, environment, and resources, wherein everyone up to the 21st century lived and died without the choice to leave.
Ill at the Plague Festival — Wherein Marie Mutsuki Mockett introduces us to the Gion Matsuri, an annual festival in Kyoto that has its origins a a ritual to stave off disease, and what the festival means to the denizens of the city in these post-COVID times.
From the article:
The first time I saw the Gion Matsuri, I understood it as a spectacle whose main event was a procession, but now I see it as a physical activity. Men push and pull pieces of timber two or three times their height. Later they push and pull the large floats. Wasn’t working through a pandemic like this? A rediscovery of what the human body could do?