M.J. Rose

It seems like the world is going to hell in a hand basket — but at least some forward thinking folk near the north pole are making sure the Earth’s crop diversity is protected in a doomsday vault under the ice.

Alexander Rose, the Executive Director of The Long Now Foundation, shares his experience touring the vault (he goes further in than even Jimmy Carter was allowed to go…)

From The Blog of the Long Now,

Inside Svalbard, the Doomsday Vault Saving the Past and Future of Agriculture

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is an underground repository located at 78 degrees North latitude that currently stores nearly a million seed samples to preserve crop diversity for the future. Many see the vault as a resource for a “doomsday” scenario brought on by severe climate change or other ecological disaster. Long Now has been following the Svalbard vault closely since it was first announced over a decade ago. In 02011, Long Now Executive Director Alexander Rose had the opportunity to visit Svalbard with unprecedented access to the vault through a partnership with the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI).

Rose’s account of the trip follows below, and includes an update on the recent surge in public interest surrounding Svalbard over the past year.

Video below —

For the entire story, click here.

…a small piano bar in Manhattan is the only place open to the public to see Bemelmans’ work.

From Atlas Obscura,

Bemelmans Bar
The walls are decorated with whimsical murals painted by the creator of the Madeline franchise.

In a bar in Manhattan that is covered in art, lives the last public place Ludwig Bemelmans’ whimsy plays a big part.

“The story of the feisty literary heroine Madeline begins in Paris, but the girl with the red hair and big yellow hat travels all around the world in the books written and illustrated by Ludwig Bemelmans. Much like his most famous character, Bemelmans’ life began in Europe, in the Austrian Tirol, but he emigrated to the United States when he was nearly 20 years old. After working in the hotel industry and serving in the army, he began writing and illustrating books for children. He found huge success with his Madeline series, the first book of which came out in 1939.

He went on to write five books about the spunky seven-year-old and her adventures, and also produced popular artwork for publications like The New Yorker and Vogue. In the 1940s, Bemelmans took on a commission that combined two of his passions: hotels and painting. He was contracted to decorate the new bar that was built in The Carlyle, a luxury hotel in Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

For this, he was paid not in cash, but received free board for himself and his family for a year and a half, the duration it took for the wall murals to be completed…”

For the rest, click here.

You don’t have to be a math nerd to be excited about this recent discovery. It changes everything we thought about how, when, and where this sort of math was discovered…

From the Guardian.com,

Mathematical secrets of ancient tablet unlocked after nearly a century of study
Dating from 1,000 years before Pythagoras’s theorem, the Babylonian clay tablet is a trigonometric table more accurate than any today, say researchers

“At least 1,000 years before the Greek mathematician Pythagoras looked at a right angled triangle and worked out that the square of the longest side is always equal to the sum of the squares of the other two, an unknown Babylonian genius took a clay tablet and a reed pen and marked out not just the same theorem, but a series of trigonometry tables which scientists claim are more accurate than any available today.

The 3,700-year-old broken clay tablet survives in the collections of Columbia University, and scientists now believe they have cracked its secrets.

The team from the University of New South Wales in Sydney believe that the four columns and 15 rows of cuneiform – wedge shaped indentations made in the wet clay – represent the world’s oldest and most accurate working trigonometric table, a working tool which could have been used in surveying, and in calculating how to construct temples, palaces and pyramids.

The fabled sophistication of Babylonian architecture and engineering is borne out by excavation. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, believed by some archaeologists to have been a planted step pyramid with a complex artificial watering system, was written of by Greek historians as one of the seven wonders of the ancient world…”

For the rest, click here.