The Weekly Web

Image courtesy of the American Museum of Natural History

My round-up of the best of my online ramblings over the past week begins with the Shamans of Siberia. The American Museum of Natural History in New York City has a comprehensive program of events and activities that run throughout the year. I have visited the museum twice and hope to visit again during my trip to New York over the coming summer. I signed up for their email newsletters several years ago, and each issue always makes me wish I lived much closer to the museum than my current address some ten thousand miles away. 

The latest newsletter had several links to items of interest, and I thought this would be a good time to mention an ongoing program called Shelf Life, which presents a series of short videos highlighting the Natural History museum’s ongoing conservation programs. In Shamans of Siberia in 360, we get to look at an expedition to Siberia that took place from 1897 to 1902.

The Jesup North Pacific Expedition (1897–1902) was conceived and directed by Franz Boas, the founder of American anthropology. The expedition aimed to investigate the links between the people and cultures of the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America and the eastern Coast of Siberia. Boas was also concerned about documenting cultures that he and many other anthropologists feared would soon be lost to colonialism and acculturation.

The video below is one of the new style of documents that presents footage in 360 degrees. Make sure you enlarge the video to full screen, and then use your cursor to manipulate the film to see everything around the camera.

Read more here…

The ‘Protector’ and ‘Fitzjames’ (in the background), c.1885 at Largs Bay. State Library of South Australia

South Australia’s “hell afloat”

InDaily is an online publication out of Adelaide, Australia—my home town. The site has been publishing a regular series, Time and Place, which focusses specifically on important South Australian events and achievements. The entry: South Australia’s “hell afloat”, provided information about an aspect of the state’s early history I knew nothing about, and I suspect that few others did—or still do.

Between 1880 and 1891 the hulk Fitzjames, colloquially known as ‘hell afloat’, served as a Reformatory for over 100 boys aged from eight to 16 years of age. The first 35 of these were transferred from the Boys’ Reformatory at Magill on 5 March 1880. Some had been sentenced for having committed serious crimes, while others had been found guilty of petty theft, or deemed uncontrollable or neglected.

Read more here…

More Time and Place stories here…

Sumida River, Tokyo.

36 Hours in East Tokyo

One of the most daunting cities for foreign visitors, Tokyo is a manic, hyperactive assault on the senses. But steady your focus and you’ll notice that a distinct strand of traditional elements also weaves through the Japanese capital. Even without leaving Eastern Tokyo, here defined as the area east of the Imperial Palace, a visitor can experience the enormous breadth of what this mesmerizing metropolis has to offer. From boutiques blooming in abandoned spaces to new ramen shops taking root amid glittering high-rises, Eastern Tokyo promises — now more than ever — to leave even experienced travelers wide-eyed with wonder.

Read more here...

National Portrait Gallery, London

50 Free Things to Do in London, England

Actually, this Guardian newspaper series dating from 2012, originally ran to 200 free things to do in London. I have included links to Parts 3 & 4 of the series, but Part 2 seems to have disappeared. Even the Guardian website does not seem to know where it is. Be aware that some of the details provided in the articles may have changed in the five years since first publication.

See Part 1: Central London...

Part 2: I will update this post when (and if) I find part two of this series

See Part 3: North London...

See Part 4: West London...

Photo by Dan Winters / Courtesy NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS

Interstellar Travel — Don’t Hold Your Breath

This story by Burkhard Bilger (The Martian Chroniclers), published in the New Yorker in April, 2013, is a ‘long read’, but is worth the time taken to read in full. Mars of course, is the next planet humans have long set their eyes and hearts on to send a manned mission to. The fascination with the red planet is the belief that some form of life (however basic and primitive), exists on some primal level. 

The search for life on Mars is now in its sixth decade. Forty spacecraft have been sent there, and not one has found a single fossil or living thing. The closer we look, the more hostile the planet seems: parched and frozen in every season, its atmosphere inert and murderously thin, its surface scoured by solar winds. By the time Earth took its first breath three billion years ago, geologists now believe, Mars had been suffocating for a billion years. The air had thinned and rivers evaporated; dust storms swept up and ice caps seized what was left of the water. The Great Desiccation Event, as it’s sometimes called, is even more of a mystery than the Great Oxygenation on Earth. We know only this: one planet lived and the other died. One turned green, the other red.

If humans ever do make it to Mars, and survive long enough to reproduce and populate that planet, it will be long after I have moved on to whatever other dimension awaits—if any. Personally, I can’t see the point of exporting the full gamut of human foibles and failings to another planet—unless the first hundred crews are manned by politicians, and that is never going to happen. If we can’t get this world sorted out, what makes anyone think we can do so on a planet as harsh and barren as Mars? But that’s just the cynic in me talking. I’d love to read your comments on this topic. In the meantime, you can read the full article here…

Friday Foto: Weightless in Space

...

0.065 pounds? Ahh, if only! If only.

Yes, folks, this would have been my weight if I was dancing about on a giant red star somewhere out in the far flung galaxies. I guess I would have to add a few pounds for the space suit I would need to wear, but hey, I think I should be able to bear the load of a few extra pounds without too much trouble, don’t you think? Especially, given that my current earth weight is around 232 pounds.

“Where can I find this magical scale?” I hear you ask. The answer is in the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. To be more precise, you will find a range of similar scales fixed into the floor of the Cullman Hall of The Universe, in the Rose Center. Here’s what the website offers by way of an explanation:

Visitors can step on several digital scales located in different areas of the Hall of the Universe and discover their weight on Saturn, Jupiter, a neutron star, and the Sun, among other celestial bodies. Your lunar weight can be found on the first level beside a model of the Moon. [Source: AMNH website…]

Suggested General Admission
· Adults: $16
· Children (2-12): $9
· Seniors/Students with ID: $12
· Adult Members: Free
· Child Members: Free

Suggested General Admission, which supports the Museum's scientific and educational endeavors, includes admission to all 45 Museum halls and the Rose Center for Earth and Space. Should you wish to pay less than the suggested admission, you may do so by purchasing tickets at any admissions desk at the Museum.

Oddly, purchasing tickets online incurs a service charge of $4 per ticket! You'd think it would be cheaper, but I assume the ticketing agency is adding their fees to the process. It hardly seems worth it. On the other hand, if ticket holders are able to avoid the queues, maybe paying an extra four bucks is good value.

-o0o-

American Museum of Natural History

~ Image: Just like being there – diorama featuring a White Sheep in the AMNH

“The American Museum of Natural History is one of the world's preeminent scientific and cultural institutions. Since its founding in 1869, the Museum has advanced its global mission to discover, interpret and disseminate information about human cultures, the natural world and the universe through a wide-ranging program of scientific research, education and exhibition.” [Source: AMNH website]

Today was my second visit to the museum, and I spent a good 4-5 hours there, and that was without visiting any of the special exhibitions on offer, the Rose Center for Earth and Space, or any of the other special attractions which require a separate entry fee.

As with my previous visit in 2008, I was again fascinated by the many stunning diorama’s within the museum. As saddening as it is to see the variety and beauty of the magnificent animals now encased behind glass, the diorama’s are beautifully presented, and leave visitors with the impression that the settings for each creature are as close to their natural environment as you could hope for – short of being there yourself. But then, do you really want to be standing a few feet from a live grizzly bear, or family of wart hogs?

Pity the Poor Passenger Pigeon
~ Image: The Passenger Pigeon

Take a good look at the image on the left while you contemplate the question: Is there anything on the planet more stupid than humans?

The image shows a number of Passenger Pigeons (Ectopistes migratorius – for the scientifically inclined), behind glass at the museum. Signage next to the exhibition states in part: "The Passenger Pigeon was once the most abundant bird in North America. The naturalist Alexander Wilson, in 1808 estimated that a Kentucky flock numbered 2,230,000,000 birds. “

No, that is not a typo. Wilson estimated the number of birds on this one flock at over 2.2 billion!

The signage goes on to add that according to Alexander Wilson: “This flock filled the sky from horizon to horizon and took four hours to pass a given point."

Unfortunately, the pigeons nested in huge colonies, making it easy for hunters to slaughter them in vast numbers. They were sold for as little as a penny each in New York City, and were even fed to pigs. A hundred years after Wilson recorded his observations, the Passenger Pigeon was extinct in the wild, with the last captive bird dying in 1914.

I ask again, Is there anything on the planet more stupid than humans?

And to think, that the early European settlers in the United States, almost wiped out the bison as well.

Free iPhone Application
~ Image: Screen shot of the AMNH’s free Explorer iPhone app

If you are an iPhone user, before you visit the American Museum of Natural History you may want to download and install the museum’s free Explorer application which contains maps of each floor and the exhibitions on those floors; using GPS you can see where you are within the building, and the app even guides you to exhibitions or displays you particularly want to see; it also comes with pre-loaded tours, and gives you the ability to create your own custom tours, and much more.

Best of all, you can use the Museum’s free WiFi service to navigate your way around the building thereby saving your own bandwidth allocation.

As you might imagine, the most popular areas of the Museum are the galleries housing the dinosaur exhibits. These were packed with children and teens, their parents or carers, and were generally of little interest to me, although I did push my way through the crush of bodies on the way to other parts of the building.

Current exhibitions include Race to The End of The Earth (through until January 2, 2011), which examines the race between the Briton, Robert Scott and the Norwegian, Roald Amundsen to be the first to reach the South Pole; and Traveling The Silk Road (closing August 15, 2010), an exhibition that maps "...the greatest trading route in history - the legendary Silk Road."

If you have half a day to devote to it, the American Museum of Natural History is a fascinating place to visit – with or without children in tow. I’m sure you will come away with a greater appreciation of the vast biodiversity that holds this planet together, and the importance of our place as custodians of that biodiversity.