A useful map of the classical Greek world, showing the colonies, can be found here.
A useful animated map from pre-history to the Roman Empire. Just a few minutes long.
Author: ertrac
Kate Tempest’s Brand New Ancients won the Ted Hughes Prize for innovation in poetry.
“Just as in her narrative, the ordinary is lifted into the extraordinary; score, writing, band and voice come together to create a package that never makes you question why you aren’t just reading or listening to this. That’s because Tempest, fierce and shy in the same moment, is such a genuinely galvanising presence and acutely responsive to her audience. It matters that we are there; it matters that these stories are told. It matters that we listen.” from the Guardian review by Lyn Gardner.
Part 1 is the performance piece I would like you to watch. (The other parts of the poem are less relevant to the course, and somewhat violent in nature.)
Also by Kate Tempest, check out Icarus
![Time lapse photo of the cleaning patter of a Roomba Robot. By Chris Bartle [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.](http://coll100ertexample.blogs.wm.edu/files/2014/12/Roomba_time-lapse.jpg)
[…]
Humanity is the start
of the race; I say
Humanity is the mould to break away from, the crust to break through, the
coal to break into the fire
The atom to be spilt
Tragedy that break man’s face and a white fire flies
out of it; vision that fools him
Out of his limits, desire that fools him out of his limits, unnatural crime,
inhuman science,
Slit eyes in the mask; wild loves that leap over the walls of nature, the wild
fence-vaulter science,
Useless intelligence of far stars, dim knowledge of the spinning demons
that make an atom,
These break, these pierce, these deify, praising their God shrilly with fierce
voices: not a man’s shape
He approves the praise, he that walks lightning-naked on the Pacific, that
laces the suns with planets,
The heart of the atom with electrons: what is humanity in this cosmos? For
him, the last
Least taint of a trace in the dregs of the solution; for itself, the mould to
break away from, the coal
To break into the fire, the atom to be split.
[…]
Categories
Wanderers
This short video was featured as the Astronomy Picture of the Day for December 8, 2014, where you can find more information. The film is comprised of a series of visualizations of what it might be like for humans to wander the solar system. All the background features are accurate artist’s renderings of what we know about the planets and moons of the outer solar system. The imagination of the film maker inserts the humans, and the narration is Carl Sagan.
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Black Marble
The ‘Black marble’ video shows composite images of the Earth at night:
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The Turbo-Encabulator
A classic pastiche of a tech briefing. Pre-Star Trek technobabble.
For more, see the wikipedia entry.
Here is a NASA application called Eyes on Exoplanets that allows you to explore the exoplanet database, including all the Kepler discoveries. (Requires a download and install to run.)
Here is a beautiful visual summary by astrophysicist Alex Parker of over 2,000 high-quality planet candidates identified by the Kepler Space Telescope, visualized as if they are orbiting a common parent star. This gives you a sense of the wide diversity in size and orbital characteristics.
Painted Stone, a piece by composer/astrophysicist Alex Parker. This shows 100,000 asteroids identified by the Sloan Digital Sky survey. (In Fall 2016, the number is now up to 200,000.) The so-called Trojan asteroids that lead, and lag, Jupiter by 60 degrees on its orbit are clearly visible once you get to see the whole collection of objects.
Why is this important? The asteroids might be a source of resources, and a way to fuel our exploration of space. Here’s a short video by the company Planetary Resources, which is hoping to commercialize asteroid mining. (No endorsement is implied here. The following is just a good short video explaining the ‘why’ of asteroid mining.)
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Supernova sonata
From the Astronomy Picture of the Day, May 26, 2011. The Supernova sonata is a piece of music composed using the data from the most distant supernovas. Details on the method used, and the background of the composer, Alex Harrison Parker, can be found via the links.