This week Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift turned 300. Published on the 28th of October 1726, the tale of the hapless adventurer, Lemuel Gulliver, and his travels among the lands of giants, floating islands, and talking horses have entertained audiences for centuries.
The University of Liverpool has launched a digital exhibition, Gulliver’s Travels: Before and Beyond, to mark the book’s tercentenary. The exhibition uses items from the University’s Special Collections and Archives and was curated by a team of colleagues across the Department of English and the Cultural Heritage Service.
The exhibition places the book within an expansive timeline split into three sections that draw out its rich history and enduring legacy. The first section explores the literary and scientific texts that came to influence Swift’s unique vision, from Homer’s giants in the Odyssey to the tiny world opened up by the invention of the microscope in Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665). The second section examines the immediate historical and political environment that Swift satirised in Gulliver’s Travels. The third section looks at the productive influence of Gulliver’s Travels on the development of the wonderful worlds of science fiction.
You can explore the exhibition here: Gulliver’s Travels: Before and Beyond – University of Liverpool Digital Heritage Lab
“Up in Illinois, we’ve forgotten what it’s all about. I mean the dead, up in our town, tonight, heck, they’re forgotten. Nobody goes to sit and talk to them. Boy, that’s lonely. That’s really sad. But here– why, shucks. It’s both happy and sad. It’s all firecrackers and skeleton toys down here in the plaza and up in that graveyard now are all the Mexican dead folks with the families visiting and flowers and candles and singing and candy. I mean it’s almost like Thanksgiving, huh? And everyone set down to dinner, but only half the people able to eat, but that’s no mind, they’re THERE. It’s like holding hands at a séance with your friends, but some of the friends gone.”
― Ray Bradbury
You will probably be surprised to discover an unlikely connection between the popular Pagan holiday celebration of Halloween and the ancient Jewish Festival of Hanukah. The improbable link connecting the two holidays stems from a word often associated with Halloween that has linguistic etymology stretching across millennia and continents.
Throughout the Halloween season one frequently encounters stories that incorporate the term macabre which can mean “focused on death”, “evoking horror”, “gruesome,” or “ghoulish”. But macabre, a loanword from French, is not related to any word, French or otherwise, that means “death” or “horror” or “gruesomeness.”
Before macabre was macabre, it was Macabré, a Middle French word that, according to the OED, first appeared in Jean le Fèvre’s Respit de la Mort (1376), where the author says “Je fis de Macabré la dance” — apparently his claim to have written a work called la danse Macabré. There is some dispute about the origin of Macabré, but Merriam-Webster considers it settled:
We trace the origins of macabre to the name of the Book of Maccabees, which is included in the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox canons of the Old Testament and in the Protestant Apocrypha. Sections of this biblical text address both the deaths of faithful people asked to renounce their religion, and the manner in which the dead should be properly commemorated. In medieval France, representations of these passages were performed as a procession or dance which became known as the “dance of death” or “dance Maccabee”; the latter was spelled in several different ways, including danse de Macabré. In English, macabre was originally used in reference to this “dance of death” but then gradually broadened in use to describe anything grim or horrific.
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Visit Tallinn has given a new spin on Estonian cultural heritage, with a tourism video pairing traditional folk dance with hip-hop to bring the country’s identity to a new audience.
Born From Culture features Tallinn University’s folk dance ensemble Soveldaja performing to American rapper Future’s ‘Mask Off’, alongside Estonian accordion music played by Ernst Valdmaa.
The ad offers a surprising mash-up, with traditional choreography set against a contemporary soundtrack to reframe folk dance for audiences who might otherwise scroll past it. Accompanying the film is the message: “Times can change. The Estonian spirit does not. Some things just run in our blood.”
The tourist campaign also taps into a broader shift towards tourism advertising that sells destinations through their distinctive personalities and cultural quirks. For Estonia, the juxtaposition of folk dance and hip-hop offers a way to communicate the country’s enduring cultural identity without presenting tradition as something frozen in time. Instead, the video positions heritage as something that can evolve alongside contemporary culture, with local performers and musicians remaining central to the story.
NB: if the video fails to open in your browser, please click HERE
I have seen Van Gogh’s The Starry Night dozens of times at MOMA in New York City, but never once stopped to question its provenance. Every aspect of the iconic painting has been written about and evaluated for decades. But do we really know when it was created ?
What date did Vincent van Gogh paint his 1889 masterpiece The Starry Night? Earlier studies had placed the creation in mid-June of that year, based on a letter the artist had written to his brother Theo around June 18. But Kyung Hee University doctoral candidate Elijah Jeong-hyun Kim noted that an observer in that period should have seen a waning gibbous moon, not the crescent seen in the painting.
Intrigued, he began to compare astronomical simulations, weather records, and van Gogh’s other writings. A better estimate of the scene’s creation, he says, is dawn on July 22, 1889. On that date the crescent moon, Venus, and the Hyades star cluster in the constellation Taurus would have been visible from van Gogh’s window in southern France, and the recorded hot weather would have inspired the cicadas the artist mentions in a letter.
Kim’s article appears in the journal Scientific Reports. “Our conversation with Van Gogh’s other skies is still ongoing,” he told Popular Science. “We plan to tell those stories one by one.”
Kafka’s Metro is a real clickbait title since Prague’s Metro, or more precisely Metroskop, wasn’t even opened until 1974, which was 50 years after Franz Kafka’s death. But since you’re reading the post the title worked.
If you’ve ever been to Prague, or long to visit, you may want to explore the Prague subway system, rendered in color and 3d. The site “Metroskop “ shows the Prague metro as it really is underground: the depth of all 61 stations, escalators, stairs, vestibules and tunnels at true heights above lidar terrain. Plus station ridership, surroundings and the story of its construction from the first concepts in 1898 until today. You can even follow a train along its route to experience a strangely-meditative journey through the tunnels under the Czech capital while soothing music plays,
For the last ten years, Sandrine and Geoffrey (now accompanied by their son Victor and pet dog) have been documenting their travels and sharing their photos, stories, itineraries, and budgets with the world on their popular travel blog. Now, to celebrate their ten-year anniversary of travel blogging, they have brought to life their 10 most memorable trips as immersive 3D travel maps.
10 Years, 10 Adventures is a collection of ten WebGL-powered animated travel maps featuring 3D terrain, animated elements, and trip narration. Instead of relying on standard mapping libraries like Mapbox or Google Maps SDKs, the project uses a bespoke WebGL rendering engine paired with custom heightmap and route data.
Each trip features an interactive playback that acts as a media player. Users can “Start the trip” to follow an automated 3D camera flight synchronized with custom audio narration and an interactive elevation profile. You can quickly pan and zoom to featured locations on the route using the links in the map sidebar or by dragging the elevation timeline.
In the last ten years, Sandrine and Geoffrey have visited some stunning locations around the world. From the volcanic shores of Martinique and the dramatic peaks of Iceland to the misty Isle of Skye and the towering Canadian Rockies, 10 Years, 10 Adventures now offers some breathtaking tours of their personal highlights. Take the controls and explore all ten stunning 3D maps on the Trois Pas de Côté anniversary site.
via Maps Mania
The First Photograph: You may be interested in this fascinating deep dive on the world’s oldest surviving photograph, a pewter plate from 1827 that’s nearly invisible to the naked eye. The exposure lasted several days, and even the famous version you’ve seen in textbooks was hand retouched.
I’ve been catching up on a TV series based on an updated version of the famous, fictional French detective Maigret. Did you know that his creator Georges Simenon wrote roughly 200 novels under his own name, and well over a thousand more under sixteen different pseudonyms. Simenon is one of the most compulsive writers featured in this beautiful piece, Brennan Kenneth Brown writes about writers throughout history who just couldn’t stop writing. Chesterton averaged an essay a day for eleven years, Corin Tellado delivered a 76-page novel every week, and writers in China’s web fiction industry do 10,000 words a day. Really makes you think about what that kind of obsession looks like.
“And once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.” –Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore.
Regular visitors to TBTP already know how I feel about globes so I won’t go on and on about why I love this website. Folding Globes: This site lets you print, cut, and fold your own paper globes from real satellite and scientific data. Since you can’t flatten a sphere without distorting it, the globes are split into geometric shapes like icosahedrons and cubes that you fold together. There are free templates for everything from Earth at Night to Mars to Pangaea.
For more than a year, marshalled by animator Andy Bailey, more than 1000 artists collaborated to create a hand-drawn, shot-for-shot, animated, flipbook version of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. The entire three hours. 120,000 individually drawn pages. A couple of months ago, they released the first 11 minutes:
