Sapere Aude
Tag: london
Oyster is startlingly de-humanising for the people who work inside the systems. Bus drivers in particular are now hidden behind plastic screens. Instead of looking at the passengers, they are looking at the internal CCTV to make sure no-one is getting in the back door. I can’t remember the last time a bus driver met my eyes. There’s no more conversation to have – ‘top me up’ doesn’t lead anywhere, in the way a destination does.
jo on public transport in london
talk about ‘long now’: london is sinking into the soft clay as a result of the disappearance of the ice age glaciers on england.
Short of capping the Highlands in new glaciers of lead, however, or attaching gigantic hot air balloons to the spires of churches to pull the city skyward, London will eventually flood: its undersea fate is geologically inevitable. Whether this occurs in a 100 years or a 100 centuries, London will become a city of canals – before it is lost to the sea entirely. It is a new Atlantis, sinking deeper each day into the oceanic embrace of hydrology.
London is one of the most beautiful walking cities in the world, but it’s often hard to navigate above ground. Many people use the tube map to find their way walking the streets, even though it distorts our perception of distance and direction. As a result, people often use other transport modes even for short distances, when walking would be quicker and more pleasant: 1 in 20 people exiting Leicester Square tube station were found to have travelled a distance of less than 800m.To combat this over-use of motorized transport, and to get people out there using their feet, the exhibition proposes that London unite its myriad of bewildering street signs both typographically and formally: the same height, dimensions, fonts, terminology, etc. This will make it harder to lose oneself – and, in theory, it will also encourage people to go for a stroll around “one of the most beautiful walking cities in the world,” without relying on mechanized transport.
london’s inscrutable street signs are both a menace and a joy for losing yourself exploring. i’m sure analogies to info architecture could be found 🙂
the saatchi gallery is one of the most amazing galleries i have seen. highly recommended. it’s history is equally fascinating.
i’ll be at WTFcon saturday and spending sunday in london too. WTF will be an open space event:
Open Space Technology is a self-organizing practice that releases the inherent creativity and leadership in people. By inviting people to take responsibility for what they care about, Open Space establishes a marketplace of inquiry, where people offer topics they care about, reflect and learn from one another, to accomplish meaningful work. It is recognized internationally as an innovative approach to creating whole systems change and inspiring the best in human performance.
the principles:
I went out to Charing Cross, to see Major- general Harrison hanged, drawn; and quartered; which was done there, he looking as cheerful as any man could do in that condition. He was presently cut down, and his head and heart shown to the people, at which there was great shouts of joy. It is said, that he said that he was sure to come shortly at the right hand of Christ to judge them that now had judged him; and that his wife do expect his coming again. Thus it was my chance to see the King beheaded at White Hall, and to see the first blood shed in revenge for the blood of the King at Charing Cross.
some bloggers have more interesting experiences than others.
It was about the beginning of September, 1664, that I, among the rest of my neighbors, heard in ordinary discourse that the plague was returned again in Holland; for it had been very violent there, and particularly at Amsterdam and Rotterdam, in the year 1663, whither, they say, it was brought, some said from Italy, others from the Levant, among some goods which were brought home by their Turkey fleet; others said it was brought from Candia; others from Cyprus. It mattered not from whence it came; but all agreed it was come into Holland again.
I just finished Daniel Defoe’s a journal of the plague year.
2014-09-30: this is an awesome poster visualizing the plague, walking you through how real science is done, in an entertaining and informative way.
2015-10-06: Plague is one of the most virulent pathogens.
the acquisition of a single gene named pla gave Y. pestis the ability to cause pneumonia, causing a form of plague so lethal that it kills essentially all of those infected who don’t receive antibiotics. In addition, it is also among the most infectious bacteria known. “Yersinia pestis is a pretty kick-ass pathogen. A single bacterium can cause disease in mice. It’s hard to get much more virulent than that.”
2021-03-30: Pushing the Black Death origin back.
Monica Green published a landmark article, The 4 Black Deaths, in the American Historical Review, that rewrites our narrative of this brutal and transformative pandemic. In it, she identifies a “big bang” that created 4 distinct genetic lineages that spread separately throughout the world and finds concrete evidence that the plague was already spreading from China to central Asia in the 1200s. This discovery pushes the origins of the Black Death back by over 100 years, meaning that the first wave of the plague was not a decades-long explosion of horror, but a disease that crept across the continents for over 100 years until it reached a crisis point.
2022-02-16: Black Death mortality rates varied widely.
“The data is sufficiently widespread and numerous to make it likely that the Black Death swept away 65% of Europe’s population”. But those figures, based on historical documents from the time, greatly overestimate the true toll of the plague. By analyzing ancient deposits of pollen as markers of agricultural activity, researchers found that the Black Death caused a patchwork of destruction. Some regions of Europe did indeed suffer devastating losses, but other regions held stable, and some even boomed. It’s possible that the ecology of rats and fleas that spread the bacteria was different from country to country. The ships that brought Yersinia to Europe may have come to some ports at a bad time of the year for spreading the plague, and to others at a better time.
2022-08-12: The plague may have had a role in the collapse of Egypt’s Old Kingdom and the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia
During the late 3rd millennium BCE, the Eastern Mediterranean and Near East witnessed societal changes in many regions, which are usually explained with a combination of social and climatic factors. However, recent archaeogenetic research forces us to rethink models regarding the role of infectious diseases in past societal trajectories. The plague bacterium Yersinia pestis, which was involved in some of the most destructive historical pandemics, circulated across Eurasia at least from the onset of the 3rd millennium BCE but the challenging preservation of ancient DNA in warmer climates has restricted the identification of Y. pestis from this period to temperate climatic regions. As such, evidence from culturally prominent regions such as the Eastern Mediterranean is currently lacking. Here, we present genetic evidence for the presence of Y. pestis and Salmonella enterica, the causative agent of typhoid/enteric fever, from this period of transformation in Crete, detected at the cave site Hagios Charalambos. We reconstructed 1 Y. pestis genome that forms part of a now-extinct lineage of Y. pestis strains from the Late Neolithic and Bronze Age that were likely not yet adapted for transmission via fleas. Furthermore, we reconstructed 2 ancient S. enterica genomes from the Para C lineage, which cluster with contemporary strains that were likely not yet fully host adapted to humans. The occurrence of these 2 virulent pathogens at the end of the Early Minoan period in Crete emphasizes the necessity to re-introduce infectious diseases as an additional factor possibly contributing to the transformation of early complex societies in the Aegean and beyond.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 