Canadian Vignettes
Posted 13 Oct, 2005 at 23:03 by blue in /History | Permanent link
If you own a television and watch the CBC or any other Canadian television station, then you have no doubt been exposed to some of the short Canadian history vignettes that air from time to time. Usually these are less than a minute long and portray some aspect of Canada's history.
Well, now you can find a collection of them online along with a short write up for each one that provides some additional background.
Some of my favorites include:
- The Arts - Stratford
- Canada and the World - John Humphrey
- Canada and the World - Lucille Teasdale
- Canada and the World - Water Pump
- Canadian Symbols - Flags
- Canadian Symbols - Les Voltigeurs de Québec
- Canadian Symbols - Sam Steele
- Commerce - Le Réseau
- Commerce - Nat Taylor
- Exploration - Jean Nicollet
- First Nations - Sitting Bull
- Innovators - Frontier College
- Military - Juno Beach
- Military - Osborn of Hong Kong
- Military - Tommy Prince
- Military - Valour Road
- Military - Vimy Ridge
- Settling Canada - Syrup
- Women - Agnes Macphail
- Women - Emily Murphy
- Women - Rural Teacher
If you have some time... check them out. Canadian or not, some of them make interesting reading to find out a little more of the story behind the video.
If you do check them out... what are your favortites... and why?
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How did New Orleans arrange to be lower than sea level anyway?
Posted 01 Sep, 2005 at 12:20 by wendy in /History | Permanent link
Unsurprisingly this topic came up the other day. It didn't seem very likely that the city has been sinking, and yet, how exactly would you go about building a coastal city that was beneath sea level anyway? And why on earth would you do something like this? Doesn't it just seem insane? And just what is a levee anyway? Turns out that Wikipedia has the answers to these questions and more.
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H. Floresiensis
Posted 23 Jan, 2005 at 11:18 by brent in /History | Permanent link
I just finished reading an interesting article in the February 2005 issue of Scientific American. The article describes the discovery of what could be a new species of the genus Homo on the island of Flores. Some interesting characteristics were similarities to H. Erectus, the diminutive height of 1 meter at adulthood, relatively advanced tools, and apparently existing as recently as 13000 years ago.
So I say "what could be" because there is still alot of research occurring as the discovery is relatively recent and there is also some controversy surrounding the discovery as it upsets some currently held beliefs about the dominance of, well, us. Furthermore the advanced tools they possessed seem to contradict the correspondingly small brains they had along with small bodies.
What came to mind as a potential reason why they might have been effective thinkers is in the process of diminuition they would probably have sloughed off less valuable portions of the brain and reorganized it so that other areas could have taken over increasing the number of connections to different areas resulting in higher associative power vs. raw processing power. Connections between disparate processing areas do seem to have interesting results according to Ramachandran (regarding synesthetes). They are working on examining the inside of the braincase to understand some surface characteristics of the brain. They are also working on seeing if they can recover some DNA for further examination.
They may be able to simulate the study though with say breeds of dogs that are similar but vary in size to understand how diminuition affects the restructuring of their brains and the corresponding intelligence of the animal, though it would probably be more relevant for a species that isn't domesticated.
Even more interesting is there is a possibility that similar finds may exist on islands nearby or in other locations where myths of diminutive people exist (as they did on Flores).
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An interesting observation
Posted 21 Jan, 2005 at 08:01 by blue in /History | Permanent link
The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple. Fire. The wheel. The other basic machines.
A good example of a simple technology with profound historical consequences is hay. Nobody knows who invented hay, the idea of cutting grass in the autumn and storing it in large enough quantities to keep horses and cows alive through the winter. All we know is that the technology of hay was unknown to the Roman Empire but was known to every village of medieval Europe. Like many other crucially important technologies, hay emerged anonymously during the so called Dark Ages.
What other crucial technologies are there that we take for granted?
(and who knew I spent so much of my youth playing with such simple, yet profound, technologies ;) )