Enjoy this quick and fascinating video by BBC Future. It explores the history and making of the floating Aztec capital city called Tenochtitlan. They built the city on a man-made island.
At its height, about 400,000 people lived there.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180622-tenochtitlan-the-mexican-metropolis
This classic is based on a play and book by Mary Roberts Rinehart, also called, “The Bat.” The movie is an annotated version and contains factoids and information about further resources to learn more about the movie, the author, and the stars. It also contains information about the historical context in which the movie and book are based. I made this video while working at the Llano County Library in Llano, TX.
Movies are only the beginning. They can spark discussions and research on historical, cultural, and ethical questions.
Bipedalism has very ancient roots in the human family tree. Some traits of bipedalism show up in hominid ancestors from as much as 7 million years ago. But how and why did walking upright on two legs become such a human trait? This article from Erin Wayman for the Smithsonian.com does a great job of breaking down the most recent hypotheses and the history of the study of human bipedalism.
Smithsonian has an online article series called “Becoming Human.” It’s a great overview of how the traits we consider “human” came to be.
The Library of Congress has made 25 million digital catalog records available for anyone to use at no charge. The free data set includes records from 1968 to 2014.
They range from readings from poetry and literature by the original artists to historical cartoons to Abraham Lincoln Papers to papers from Clara Barton’s life. It’s massive and comprehensive and all Free!
One of my new favorite apps is from NASA. Their website is pretty rockin’ too. (https://www.nasa.gov/). You get tweets and selfies from the astronauts on the space station, the latest info on the Mars rovers, gorgeous pix. I’ll probably be posting interesting facts from this site that catch my fancy. I downloaded mine from Google Play.
Project for the Llano County Library in Texas. Annotated version of Public Domain Movie. The movie is only the beginning. Use movies to spark discussion and research on cultural, historical, and ethical questions.
The earliest know edition of the The Instructions of Shuruppak was written between 2,600 to 2,500 BCE. An example of Sumerian wisdom literature, it is one of the earliest examples of literature known to man.
One translation of this list of good advice from royal father to son, is sourced from the below and attributed to Black, J.A., Cunningham, G., Robson, E., and Zólyomi, G., The Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, Oxford 1998:
http://www.gatewaystobabylon.com/myths/texts/life/instructionshruppak.html
This second translation is from the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature at Oxford University. It makes accessible over 400 literary works composed in the Sumerian language in ancient Mesopotamia during the late third and early second millennia BC.
http://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section5/tr561.htm.
We may “know” infinity.
From a 2017 opinion article by the editorial board of CSMonitor:
A discovery in theoretical math, by two mathematicians in 2016, illustrates a steadily growing recognition among scholars that infinity may be knowable.
The award, called the Hausdorff medal, was given to Maryanthe Malliaris of the University of Chicago and Saharon Shelah of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Rutgers University for a 2016 paper in the Journal of the American Mathematical Society.”
The two scholars solved a problem that has stumped mathematicians for seven decades: whether two variations of infinity expressed in sets of numbers are the same . . . .
Says the opinion piece: “By its very nature, infinity is inexhaustible and has been a source of wonder since ancient times. The desire to grasp infinity has contributed to progress in many fields, from science to religion. In fact, the ability to come up with new understandings about reality may itself be infinite.”
For the entire article visit the link below.
Published on the site All That Is Interesting, the story linked below touches on two skeletons among hundreds discovered in an ancienty city in what is now northwest Iran. The city, it seems, was wiped out by an invading army over 2,800 years ago and the two may have taken refuge in the grain bin in which they were ultimately found.
Scientists don’t know if the two figures were lovers, a father and son, or a mother and son. At the end, they died in an embrace comforting one another. Such a sad story that connects us to the humanity of those in the past. We often forget that they are not just archeological finds but the remains of living human beings.
By Gabe Paoletti
Published September 21, 2017
Updated December 20, 2017
“The University of Pennsylvania first discovered this skeletal couple during an archeological excavation of an ancient city in northwest Iran in the 1970s. The two skeletons were discovered in the remains of the ancient city of Teppe Hasanlu, which stood in the area that is now Iran 2,800 years ago.”
For the story in its entirety, visit the link below.
I thought you might like this story from The Washington Post.
The fanged, faceless sea creature that washed ashore during Harvey has been identified.
In an article by Lindsey Bever published on September 14, 2017, the identify of the mysterious creature that washed ashore in Texas City, about 15 miles from Galveston, TX was revealed.
Kenneth Tighe, a biologist and eel-expert with the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, identifed the creature as ” most likely a fangtooth snake-eel, or Aplatophis chauliodus.”
altogether interesting 