Hanover Historical Texts Project is a collection of primary source texts from ancient times to the modern era in English translation. There is a great number of interesting texts, for instance accounts of
Zeno, he of the paradoxes,
the diary of Lady Sarashina, a lady-in-waiting in Heian era Japan,
a letter from Count Stephen of Blois and Chartres, a crusader writing to his wife,
Arthur Young's travels in France before and during the Revolution,
a report by the American ambassador in St. Petersburg on March 20th, 1917, immediately after the February Revolution, and finally
Petrarch's letter about his graphomania. That last one is from what is perhaps my favorite part of the website, a trove of
Petrarch's Familiar Letters. But there's much more in the Hanover Historical Texts Projects besides what I've mentioned.
posted by Kattullus
on Oct 24, 2011 -
6 comments
Journeyman Pictures has uploaded nearly 4000 videos to YouTube. Many of these are trailers for the documentaries they sell, but they have also posted hundreds of full-length videos. Most are for short documentarie, but there are a lot of features too. It's somewhat daunting to explore, but the
playlists are a good place to start, and so are the shows:
Features,
Shorts,
News and
Savouring Europe, a European travelogue series. Here's a few interesting ones:
Gastronauts, about French culinary students working to make astronaut food more palatable,
Demon Drummers, about student Kodo drummers,
India's Free Lunch, about the effects of free school lunches on Indian society,
The Twitter Revolution, about YouTube and Twitter's role in the 2009 Iranian uprising,
Europe's Black Hole, about Transnistria, the breakaway region of Moldova,
Small Town Boy, about a gay male carnival queen in a small town in England,
The Vertigo of Lists, Umberto Eco talks about the ubiquity of lists in modern culture and
Monsters from the Id, about scientists in the science fiction films of the Fifties.
posted by Kattullus
on Aug 24, 2010 -
10 comments
The Guardian ran a series of articles looking at the state of high-speed rail travel today. France intends to
double its length of track over the next decade, and China is planning
a massive rail-building programme, including a high-speed line which will halve the travel time between Beijing and Shanghai to 4 hours.
In Germany, domestic air travel is rapidly going extinct, and Spain's network has made
day trips between Madrid and Barcelona a possibility. The USA, which has long neglected its rail network, is
planning up to 10 high-speed lines. Meanwhile, Britain's only high-speed line goes to France, but there is talk of
a 250mph line from London to Birmingham and beyond, possibly by the early 2020s. Meanwhile, the CEO of France's rail operator, SNCF,
weighs in on what the UK should do.
posted by acb
on Aug 7, 2009 -
49 comments
I've long felt that the U.S. of A. "jumped the shark" as a country when we rejected the Metric System. The price of gasoline would still be under a dollar (per liter). Yet, we'd drive less because a short 20 mile trip would become a long 32 km trip. Then there's
the most important measurement of all [maybe NSFW animated graph], providing us with the joy of 12.9(!) while we try to ignore that Japan is .1 ahead of us and France is .1 more than
South Africa. (And is that Korean average North or South?)
posted by wendell
on Aug 14, 2006 -
65 comments
