BBC Radio 4 has started an excellent new series, "A History of the World in 100 Objects", which will be broadcast throughout 2010. Rather then telling history in the standard way by focusing on documents, it uses objects from the collection of the British Museum, and covers 2,000,000 years of human history. The radio shows, which can be streamed or downloaded, are 15 minutes long.
The podcasts are narrated by Neal MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, and includes the voices of many contributors. One of the great things about the project is that it's interactive, and anyone, provided they meet the project guidelines, can add an object to the website.
I've been following an interesting blog lately that tracks the movements of a pack of 23-25 wolves on Ellesmere and Axel Heiberg islands, located in the Canadian High Arctic. The research team, lead by Dave Mech and Dean Cluff,was able to place a GPS/ARGOS radio tracking collar on Brutus, the leader of the pack, in July 2009, making following the pack much easier, particularly during the long winter. Tracking data is stored in the collar and Emailed to the project team every four days.
The packs home area is centered on Eureka, where there is a weather station. They feed primarily on musk-oxen, caribou, and arctic hares.
Here is the "Wolves of the High Arctic" blog
http://internationalwolfcenter.blogspot.com/
An article by Dave Mech on arctic wolves:
http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/essay_mech.html
Here's a photo taken of Brutus at the wolves den.
This photo , and many others taken by the expedition can be found here.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/intlwolfcenter/
Brutus exhibits dominant behavior towards an offspring.
"One Sentence" posts true stories, concisely told. Many of the best ones seem more like the opening line of really intriguing story.
http://www.onesentence.org/
Here's a collection of sixteenth-century jokes:
http://www.shipbrook.com/jeff/jokes.html
This is great collection of "shaggy dog" stories and Feghoots. The name "Feghoot" comes from "Through Time and Space with Ferdinand Feghoot", a series of short-short stories that appeared regularly in "The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction" from the 1950's into the 1970's. They all end with painful puns, similar to those in "The Adventures of Peabody and Sherman" episodes on "Rocky and Bullwinkle".
It's been a while since the last post, and I'm slowly going to try to blog more.
Yesterday I was reading about major updates to the online sound archives of the British Library. This is an amazing collection. Access to the collections varies according to geographic location; more files are available to residents of the United Kingdom, and even more to those who are associated with a UK institution of higher learning. Over 23,000 sound files are available to everyone.
The archive includes spoken word and musical recordings, and includes both field and commercial recordings. The files can't be embedded, so links are provided instead.
My favorite part of the collection is the archive of world and traditional music. Of particular interest are 952 recordings from Decca's West Africa yellow label series. These are commercial recordings, made between 1948 and 1958, and include many rare performances that are unavailable elsewhere.
Here are Adeolu and his Rio Lindo Orchestra from this series:
The archive also contains 244 ethnographic wax cylinder recordings, made between 1898 and 1919. The sound quality is poor, but they are well worth hearing.
Here is the beautiful and disturbing "Death Wail", recorded in 1898 during the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait, which is located between Australia and Papua New Guinea.
The archive also contains a collection of regional sounds and dialects from many locations in England, This recordings are interesting not only for their preservation of dialects, but because they are also oral histories, and provide a record of a way of life that no longer exists.
A resident of Cheshire discusses traveling through the area with his threshing machine. This was recorded in 1966. The speaker was 76 at that time.
Here's a belated Thanksgiving post, although is probably works better as a post-Thanksgiving post, since it's about food contamination.
I was listening to a great podcast from Angel Baby's show "Lost in Paradise" (November 23 show). She played a superb rockabilly record that I wasn't familiar with: "Cranberry Blues" by Robert Williams and the Groovers, a song about the Cranberry Crisis of 1959. I started researching the crisis, and that led to this post.
http://lostinparadise.podomatic.com/
The herbicide aminotriazole, introduced in the mid 1950's, had been effective in controlling weeds in cranberry bogs. In 1958, in spite of concerns about the possible carcinogenicity of ATZ, it was approved by the Department of Agriculture, but only for use after the end of the growing season,, so as to avoid contamination of the cranberry crop. Most of the 1957 crop turned out to be contaminated, and was voluntarily taken off the market. I'm not sure what happened with the 1958 crop.
The problem was not resolved, as a small percentage of the 1959 cranberry crop from Washington and Oregon was contaminated. Following the advice of the FDA, Arthur Flemming, the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, recommended against eating cranberries from these states. This of course was really bad timing for the cranberry industry, as it was close to Thanksgiving. Since it was diffiult to determine the origin of cranberries, sales dropped nationwide. Many supermarket chains refused to carry cranberries. This had a long term impact on the cranberry industry , and it took a long time for it to fully recover.
This crisis occurred during the early stages of the 1960 presidential campaign, and candidates Kennedy and Nixon did their part in demonstrating the safety of cranberries; Nixon by eating lots of cranberry sauce and Kennedy by drinking several glasses of cranberry juice in front of reporters.
There is an extensive discussion of the crisis in"A Scientist at the White House", the diary kept by President Eisenhower's science adviser George Bogdan Kistiakowsky. Sorry for the long URL.
The November 23, 1959 issue of Life magazine had an interesting article on the crisis, with some great photos that I can't embed, including one of "Secretary Flemming" being carried to an ambulance after being hung in effigy.
