Tag: history

2 ka Silk Road

As early as 1.9 ka BP, the complex of trading networks on sea and land that are known today as the Silk Road ran from Europe, Africa, Arabia, Persia, India, China, Korea, Japan and back again. Traders did local legs of the massive voyage, stopping at market cities to sell their goods which would then be traded again a little further away and so on, until silk from China wound up adorning Roman emperors and Roman gold-flecked glassware jewels ended up the prized possession of a 1.5 ka BP Japanese nobleman.

A distant mirror

currently reading this. the middle ages are due for a major reexamination in my view, it wasn’t all just knights and damsels in distress.

The fourteenth century reflects 2 contradictory images: on the one hand, a glittering age of crusades, cathedrals, and chivalry; on the other, a world plunged into chaos and spiritual agony. In this revelatory work, Barbara W. Tuchman examines not only the great rhythms of history but the grain and texture of domestic life: what childhood was like; what marriage meant; how money, taxes, and war dominated the lives of serf, noble, and clergy alike. Granting her subjects their loyalties, treacheries, and guilty passions, Tuchman re-creates the lives of proud cardinals, university scholars, grocers and clerks, saints and mystics, lawyers and mercenaries, and, dominating all, the knight–in all his valor and “furious follies,” a “terrible worm in an iron cocoon.”

Rocket mail

what ever happened to this? i want my zappos order delivered by rocket! same day delivery is so last century.

1959: “Rocket mail” becomes “missile mail” when 3000 pieces of mail are delivered by a cruise missile fired from a US Navy submarine.

Experiments in delivering mail by rocket had met with mixed success since the first rocket mail was sent between 2 Austrian villages in 1931. The first successful delivery by this method in the United States occurred in 1936, when 2 rockets fired from Greenwood Lake, New Jersey, landed on the New York shore ~300m away.

Proactive Politics

Let’s take a look back at the seminal date February 12, 2004. Just a month before, Gavin Newsom had been sworn in as Mayor of San Francisco for his first term. On that day in February, he ordered the clerk of the City and County of San Francisco to allow same-sex couples to get married. When news broke of his decision, he was flooded with a torrent of angry messages sent by people from around the world. He received and still receives death threats. Of course, Newsom also faced attacks from Republicans, but even more frustrating (and hypocritical), he was much maligned by his fellow Democrats.

Most of these Democratic politicians lacked the courage to publicly criticize him–why lose out on political contributions from the LGBT community and their allies? Instead, they did it behind closed doors, and through more subtle actions. Previously extended invitations to speak at events like the Democratic National Convention were rescinded, some elected officials even refused to be photographed with him.

Greatest grid

Visions of Manhattan and the 1811 master plan

The city grid, which once served to organize the development of private real estate by providing access to land parcels, now has a more pressing role to play in making cities livable. Our reimagining of the grid starts from the premise that how we use public rights of way no longer meets the city’s needs, so we should transform the streets radically, dedicating them to pedestrians. Our idea has 2 major precedents: the Dutch woonerf and the Barcelona superblock. The shared street or woonerf has a continuous, curbless, textured surface, and through these cues and others (such as signage), nudges car drivers to conform to the speed of pedestrians using the same space.

Ancient Hairdressing

the most amazing hairdresser in the world.

The depth of her knowledge blew me away. She is fully conversant in the archaeology (including unpublished artifacts), ancient literary sources and published scholarship of Roman hairstyling, and not just Roman but Etruscan and Greek as well.

Her work in this field is unique because her experience as a stylist gives her particular insight into how hair works and what can be accomplished with what tools. She upends a number of assumptions — that Roman women must have used wigs to achieve their more elaborate hairstyles, that they used hairpins — and injects a whole new simplicity and accuracy to the very vocabulary of ancient hairdressing.