History

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The Tower Restored

Pisa’s famous leaning tower was reopened in 2001, but now the historic turret has been deemed stable, and its gradual tilt seems to be semi-permanently arrested for the first time since its construction more than 800 years ago.

The Telegraph reports on the release of The Tower Restored, a 1000 page account of the saving of Pisa’s Tower, representing step-by-step the experiences of the entire committee that spent years working towards a solution that would allow the  preservation of the eight-century-old wonder:

On the night of September 7 1995, the tower lurched southwards by more than it had done in the entire previous year. Burland was summoned for an emergency committee meeting, and Ladbrokes were offering 11-4 odds the tower wouldn’t survive into the 21st century. ‘We really were within days of losing it,’ Burland says. The anchor plan was immediately abandoned and another 300 tons of lead ingots added.

The locals were up in arms, the Mayor of Pisa railing that a ‘plumber with a toilet-jack’ would have done a better job. Worse still, because they had to have their charter ratified every three months by the Italian parliament, Burland and co spent the end of 1995 and start of 1996, an election year, waiting for a new government to sanction them anew.

The lead eyesore remained, and several committee members’ cars were pelted with Tuscan tomatoes.

diagram of how they saved the tower
Professor John Burland was part of the committee charged with with solving the unique challenges of saving the Tower of Pisa for more than two decades before the historic reopening in 2001. Burland and the rest of his team managed to solve the complex challenges involved in saving the wonder, while preserving the historic, artistic, cultural, and architectural integrity of Pisa’s miraculous landmark leaning tower.

The committee stood down in 2001, but last year saw two intriguing postscripts to their work: first, the official announcement that the tower has been fully stabilised, its lean finally checked; and second, the publication of The Tower Restored, an intriguing 1,000-page account, co-authored by the whole committee, of every step they took to save the marble cylinder.

While apparently some of the locals have grumbled that arresting the ever-increasing lean that would lead to inevitable collapse somehow diminishes the very character of the very famous Leaning Tower of Pisa, the team that’s spent two decades racing to solve the terribly challenging engineering difficulties entwined within extremely important artistic and cultural considerations would clearly disagree.

Saving the grand old tower seems actually to affirm the aptness of the name of the Piazza dei Miracoli.

Filed under: There, Archaeology, Art, engineering, History, Italy, Museums

Byron and Shelley Excoriated from the Grave

Author Daisy Hay while

Claire Clairmont by Aemilia Curran, 1819

researching her book Young Romantics, about the Shelleys, Byron and their “tangled lives” found a fragment of a memoir by Claire Clairmont (1798-1879), Mary Shelley’s young, head-strong step-sister. Clairmont, perhaps most famous for describing Byron as “Mad, bad, and dangerous to know” was in her teens when Byron got her pregnant and then dumped her. Dr. Hay is including the fragment, written by Clairmont when she was in her seventies and looking back at her pursuit of Byron, and her journeys with the Shelleys. Clairmont says of her time with the two poets that “Under the influence of the doctrine and belief of free love, I saw the two first poets of England… become monsters.” You can read more here.

Filed under: There, History, literary history, Poetry

Knowledge and Power in the Neo-Assyrian Empire and Digital Cuneiform

Language Hat‘s post about the utterly nifty Knowledge and Power in the Neo-Assyrian Empire site, a site about

From the Central Palace in Nimrud and now in the British Museum, London. Circa 728 BC.

From Nimrud, circa 728 BCE

the Neo-Assyrian capital of Nineveh PGP in what today is northern Iraq, from the middle of the seventh century BCE. Nineveh and the royal court there is the earliest attested site of courtly scientific patronage in world history. The Website presents contemporary documents from the seventh century BCE that include letters, reports, and queries from scholars, along with pedagogical resources. In addition, the site includes court poetry, royal prophecies, memos, and letters from temple staff to the king. This is a very well-done site, aesthetically appealing, and easy to navigate, with pointers to other resources, on and off line. I favor Essentials as a good starting place. The Cuneiform Revealed section covers writing systems as well as language, and makes me think about the UCLA/Max Planck project, The Cuneiform Digital Library.

Filed under: There, Archaeology, Art, History, Writing

Freedom, Sex, and Censorship, as Reported by the Internet

Several news stories and blog posts worth noting, discussing topics that bear discussion and offer the potential of deeply  interesting further developments.

And so, with no further ado, here’s the Tuesday round-up.

An NPR report about a current lawsuit challenging the Patriot Act as unconstitutional:

The U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments Tuesday in a case that pits an individual’s right of free speech and association against a federal law aimed at combating terrorism. At issue is part of the Patriot Act that makes it a crime for an American citizen to engage in peaceful, lawful activity on behalf of any group designated as a terrorist organization.

Sassymonkey Reads brings us an examination of “Common Sense” ratings of YA books on the Barnes & Noble Website:

I was prepared to be really ranty about Common Sense Media. I was prepared to dislike them and everything that they stood for. When I saw the ratings on BN.com last night I was angry. After going to their website I really don’t have an issue with what they are doing. I may not agree with their age-appropriateness on a lot of items (I was a free-range reader as a kid) but they are giving kids their voice as well as the adults and I appreciate that. They are anti-censorship. They aren’t against any of the books, but they are trying to provide ways for families to discuss the issues in the books rather than for them to simply not read them. I can see Common Sense Media being a good tool for parents and educators. I have to give them kudos for their efforts.

But (there’s always a but) I have issues with the way that their service has been implemented on BN.com. The focus is entirely negative. It lists only what the book has in it that is potentially “wrong.” There is no context for any of those potential issues. There are no merits to any of the books like how they deal with those issues.  I think it completely derails what Common Sense Media set out to do.

The Political Carnival discusses a new bill being awaiting the governor’s approval in Utah. Masquerading as a measure against illegal abortions, the bill’s actual content should make anyone with even potential access to a uterus absolutely ill with outrage:

In addition to criminalizing an intentional attempt to induce a miscarriage or abortion, the bill also creates a standard that could make women legally responsible for miscarriages caused by “reckless” behavior.

Using the legal standard of “reckless behavior” all a district attorney needs to show is that a woman behaved in a manner that is thought to cause miscarriage, even if she didn’t intend to lose the pregnancy. Drink too much alcohol and have a miscarriage? Under the new law such actions could be cause for prosecution.

“This creates a law that makes any pregnant woman who has a miscarriage potentially criminally liable for murder,” says Missy Bird, executive director of Planned Parenthood Action Fund of Utah. Bird says there are no exemptions in the bill for victims of domestic violence or for those who are substance abusers. The standard is so broad, Bird says, “there nothing in the bill to exempt a woman for not wearing her seatbelt who got into a car accident.”

Finally, because after all that you might be wondering where on earth this kind of stuff gets started, Jon Stewart deconstructs how those memes get started, and the cognitive disconnect required to spread the some of the racist, sexist, anti-progressive, unconstitutional, and anti-American sentiments that cloak themselves in modern American conservatism .

Filed under: There, Books, censorship, Economics, History, legislation, Literacy, politics, reading, sexism

Virus Fossil Bed

Good Ideas Come in All Sizes

Scientists spent thirteen years mapping and sequencing the human genome. The Human Genome Project, though completed in 2003, was only the barest beginning of what we have yet to learn about ourselves, our own DNA, where we’ve come from, and where we’ve yet to go.

Hereditary predispositions to disease and illness—cancer, for example—may well be regulated or even eradicated in another generation or two.

Also, think of the billions of dollars to be made if we can only learn to manipulate the DNA of parents to guarantee children of unusual brilliance, custom eye-color chosen off a ring of those little color-sample chips, and perfect pitch.

Scientists are reconstructing million-year-old viruses from the remnant DNA scraps found in the human genome, according to this article in the New York Times:

Scientists who hunt for these viruses think of themselves as paleontologists searching for fossils. Just as animals get buried in rock, these viruses become trapped in the genomes of their hosts. While their free-living relatives continue to evolve, fossil viruses are effectively frozen in time.

Now, while reconstructing viruses that changed the course of human evolution may sound rather alarming, we’re told that the search for these virus fossils, and their eventual reconstitution, has a great deal of information to impart about the course that human evolution has taken:

Fossil viruses are also illuminating human evolution. Scientists estimate that 8.3 percent of the human genome can be traced back to retrovirus infections. To put that in perspective, that’s seven times more DNA than is found in all the 20,000 protein-coding genes in the human genome.

So not to worry. This is gentle pursuit of science for its own sake. It’s not as if they’re cloning dinosaurs. Or building flesh-eating battle robots.

Filed under: There, DNA, fossils, health, History, Science

Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse 5 POW

In December of 1944 Private Kurt Vonnegut was captured by Wehrmacht troops. A month later, Vonnegut and his fellow POWs were imprisoned in an underground slaughterhouse known by German soldiers as Schlachthof Fünf (Slaughterhouse Five), beneath Dresden. The following February Vonnegut survived the allied bombing of Dresden and wrote a following letter in May of 1945 to his family from a repatriation camp. The letter is astonishing reading.

Filed under: There, History, Letters