As recently as a few decades ago in the Western world, stars dazzled humans with their brightness and the Milky Way could be seen spanning the far reaches of the heavens as night deepened into an unspeakable darkness. In the 21st century, such a scene is becoming a rarity across many parts of the globe as we light up the night like never before.
Today our experience of the night differs significantly from that of our ancestors. Before they mastered fire, early humans lived roughly half their lives in the dark. The only night light they had came from the moon when skies were clear. Then, when humans began to gain some control over fire use (probably around 400,000 years ago), everything changed. From that point on, most people have had access to some form of “artificial” light, at least occasionally. Thus began our persistent efforts to light up the night. Even people who lived relatively recently—those with candles, oil lamps, and early electricity—were far more familiar with darkness than we are today. Their nocturnal world simply wasn’t as bright as ours.
But what have we gained by illuminating the night? Has anything been lost in our efforts to banish darkness? Were people, and the world, better off when it was darker?…
Posts Tagged ‘fire’
“To choose the wrong strategy is a serious matter”*…
The estimable Ted Gioia suggests that we’re living in a time without a counterculture…
These are the key indicators that you might be living in a society without a counterculture:
• A sense of sameness pervades the creative world
• The dominant themes feel static and repetitive, not dynamic and impactful
• Imitation of the conventional is rewarded
• Movies, music, and other creative pursuits are increasingly evaluated on financial and corporate metrics, with all other considerations having little influence
• Alternative voices exist—in fact, they are everywhere—but are rarely heard, and their cultural impact is negligible
• Every year the same stories are retold, and this sameness is considered a plus
• Creative work is increasingly embedded in genres that feel rigid, not flexible
• Even avant-garde work often feels like a rehash of 50-60 years ago
• Etc. etc. etc.
He then illustrates his point with a series of 14 tweets: “14 Warning Signs That You Are Living in a Society Without a Counterculture,” from @tedgioia.
* “To choose the wrong strategy is a serious matter. All the movements that only play on liberation, emancipation, on the resurrection of a subject of history, of the group, of the word based on “consciousness raising,” indeed a “raising of the unconscious” of subjects and of the masses, do not see that they are going in the direction of the system, whose imperative today is precisely the overproduction and regeneration of meaning and of speech.” — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation
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As we ferret out ferment, we might recall that it was on this date in 2008 that a worker using a blowtorch to warm up some asphalt shingles at the Universal Studios Hollywood theme park neglected to check that all of them had cooled before he left, and a three-alarm fire broke out. It destroyed three acres of the studio’s back lot tour (including “New York Street,” “New England Street,” and the attraction known as “King Kong Encounter”).
But worse, it obliterated Building 6197 and its contents– between 40,000 and 50,000 archived digital video and film copies were destroyed along with 118,000 to 175,000 audio master tapes belonging to Universal Music Group. Among the artists whose masters were destroyed were Nirvana, Elton John, R.E.M., Sonic Youth, Beck, Bryan Adams, Sheryl Crow, Jimmy Eat World, Suzanne Vega, Les Paul, The Surfaris, and Bryan Adams.
“Everything we know and love about the universe and all the laws of physics as they apply, apply to four percent of the universe”*…
In 1969, the American astronomer Vera Rubin puzzled over her observations of the sprawling Andromeda Galaxy, the Milky Way’s biggest neighbour. As she mapped out the rotating spiral arms of stars through spectra carefully measured at the Kitt Peak National Observatory and the Lowell Observatory, both in Arizona, she noticed something strange: the stars in the galaxy’s outskirts seemed to be orbiting far too fast. So fast that she’d expect them to escape Andromeda and fling out into the heavens beyond. Yet the whirling stars stayed in place.
Rubin’s research, which she expanded to dozens of other spiral galaxies, led to a dramatic dilemma: either there was much more matter out there, dark and hidden from sight but holding the galaxies together with its gravitational pull, or gravity somehow works very differently on the vast scale of a galaxy than scientists previously thought.
Her influential discovery never earned Rubin a Nobel Prize, but scientists began looking for signs of dark matter everywhere, around stars and gas clouds and among the largest structures in the galaxies in the Universe. By the 1970s, the astrophysicist Simon White at the University of Cambridge argued that he could explain the conglomerations of galaxies with a model in which most of the Universe’s matter is dark, far outnumbering all the atoms in all the stars in the sky. In the following decade, White and others built on that research by simulating the dynamics of hypothetical dark matter particles on the not-so-userfriendly computers of the day.
But despite those advances, over the past half century, no one has ever directly detected a single particle of dark matter. Over and over again, dark matter has resisted being pinned down, like a fleeting shadow in the woods. Every time physicists have searched for dark matter particles with powerful and sensitive experiments in abandoned mines and in Antarctica, and whenever they’ve tried to produce them in particle accelerators, they’ve come back empty-handed. For a while, physicists hoped to find a theoretical type of matter called weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), but searches for them have repeatedly turned up nothing…
Dark matter is the most ubiquitous thing physicists have never found. Is it time to consider alternative explanations? “Does dark matter exist?“
[image above: source]
* Neil deGrasse Tyson
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As we interrogate the invisible, we might recall that it was on this date in 1944 that one of the worst fire disasters in U.S. history occurred; the blaze broke out during an afternoon performance of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus that was attended by an estimated 7,000 people. It killed 167 people; more than 700 were injured.
Because of the paraffin wax waterproofing of the tent, the flames spread rapidly
Emmett Kelly holding a water bucket on what became known as “the day the clowns cried“
“Oxygen / Everything needs it”*…
As tongues of flame lapped the planet’s largest tract of rain forest over the past few weeks, it has rightfully inspired the world’s horror. The entire Amazon could be nearing the edge of a desiccating feedback loop, one that could end in catastrophic collapse. This collapse would threaten millions of species, from every branch of the tree of life, each of them—its idiosyncratic splendor, its subjective animal perception of the world—irretrievable once it’s gone. This arson has been tacitly encouraged by a Brazilian administration that is determined to develop the rain forest, over the objections of its indigenous inhabitants and the world at large. Losing the Amazon, beyond representing a planetary historic tragedy beyond measure, would also make meeting the ambitious climate goals of the Paris Agreement all but impossible. World leaders need to marshal all their political and diplomatic might to save it.
The Amazon is a vast, ineffable, vital, living wonder. It does not, however, supply the planet with 20 percent of its oxygen.
As the biochemist Nick Lane wrote in his 2003 book Oxygen, “Even the most foolhardy destruction of world forests could hardly dint our oxygen supply, though in other respects such short-sighted idiocy is an unspeakable tragedy.”…
There are very many very good reasons not to burn down the Amazon rain forest. Still, humans could burn every living thing on the planet and still not dent its oxygen supply: “The Amazon Is Not Earth’s Lungs.”
(Again– burning down the rainforest is bad, very very bad. But as long-time environmental reporter Michael Shellenberger argues, if we ground our concerns in the actual details of what’s happening, we’re much likelier to find effective responses.)
* Mary Oliver (from her collection Twist)
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As we take a deep breath, we might recall that it was on this date in 1666 that the Great Fire of London broke out. The conflagration raged for four days, mostly in the City of London, within the old Roman walls; it did not spread to the aristocratic district of Westminster, to Charles II’s Palace of Whitehall, nor to most of the suburban slums. It destroyed 13,200 houses, St. Paul’s Cathedral, and 87 parish churches. Miraculously, fewer than 20 people lost their lives.
“Disasters are called natural, as if nature were the executioner and not the victim”*…
The United States is an enormous country, spanning mountains, deserts, forests, prairie, tundra, and more. This varied terrain is also home to many natural hazards spawned by air, water, fire, and forces beneath the Earth’s surface.
Some of these threats are dramatic; the United States and its territories have the greatest number of active volcanoes of any country except Indonesia, as well as the most tornadoes. Other hazards, like heat waves, are less flashy but can still kill you.
Different regions of the country face very different hazards. But which part of the United States is the most dangerous? It turns out there’s no simple answer, although the south does have a particularly generous share of hazards…
See how the country’s natural menaces differ by geography at “Where in the United States is nature most likely to kill you?”
* Eduardo Galeano
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As we calculate our odds, we might recall that it was on this date in 1899 that New Richmond Tornado– an estimated F5 storm, formed in the early evening, and went on to tear a 45-mile long path of destruction through St. Croix, Polk and Barron counties in west-central Wisconsin, leaving 117 people dead, twice as many injured, and hundreds homeless. The worst devastation wrought by the tornado was at the city of New Richmond, Wisconsin, which took a direct hit from the storm. In all, more than $300,000 ($8,825,000 in today’s dollars) in damage was reported. Still, it ranks as only the ninth deadliest tornado in United States history.
The ruins of New Richmond Methodist Church after the tornado
“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.”*…
Dive into the diurnal at: “A history of what we do in the dark.”
* Mary Oliver
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As we go dark, we might recall this item from John Stow‘s Survey of London (original spelling: A Survay of London), published in 1598:
William Foxley slept in the tower 14 days & more without waking.
In the yeare 1546. the 27 of April, being Tuesday in Easter weeke, William Foxley, Potmaker for the Mint in the tower of London, fell asleepe, and so continued sleeping, and could not be wakened, with pricking, cramping, or otherwise burning* whatsoeuer, ti…ll the first day of the tearme, which was full xiiii. dayes, and xv. nights, or more, for that Easter tearme beginneth not afore xvii. dayes after Easter. The cause of his thus sleeping could not be knowne, though the same were diligently searched after by the kings Phisitians, and other learned men: yea the king himselfe examining the said William Foxley, who was in all poynts found at his wakening to be as if hee had slept but one night. And he lived more then fortie yeares after in the sayde Tower, to wit, vntil the yeare of Christ, 1587, and then deceased on Wednesday in Easterweeke.
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