Category Archives: Around the World

Chernobyl

It’s been a little over 21 years now since the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl blew up. I wrote about it on the 20th anniversary and a few years earlier, but the MetaFilter thread Chernobyl – 20 years later has some new (at least to me) links on the topic.

My Journey to Chernobyl: 20 Years After the Disaster is an article with photos by Mark Resnicoff, who traveled to the contamination zone in June 2006. There also is a discussion about his essay.

Chernobyl Legacy by Paul Fusco:

On April 26th, 1986, Chernobyl’s Reactor No. 4 unleashed a thoroughly modern plague that emptied cities, condemned entire regions, and seeped invisibly into the bodies of those exposed to its destructive presence.

Photographer Paul Fusco faces the dark legacy of Chernobyl, focusing on the horrifying human consequences of the event that is now 20 years in the past. Fusco’s work forces us to remember an important nightmare that we would forget at the peril of our morality and our future.

It takes a while for the site to load, but it’s worth the wait. At least look at and listen to “Chernobyl legacy” from the menu.

Karol Lasia has a collection of black-and-white photos from the area. Lasia was born in 1986 and traveled to Chernobyl and Pripyat in the summer of 2006.

Great photos

Two great photo links on MetaFilter today:

Georg Gerster aerial photography.
From his website:

“Georg Gerster was born in Winterthur, Switzerland, on April 30th, 1928 […]. Since 1956 he has been a freelance journalist specializing in science reporting and aerial photography. He has undertaken extensive visits to every part of the world, including Antarctica.”

Click on “Picture Gallery” in the left margin on his website to browse a gallery of his photos (direct linking does not seem to be working).

Seb-Przds mindbending photos.
Flickr user Seb Przd specialises in spherical panoramas and conformal mappings. Be sure to take a look at his Equirectangular and Stereographic Projections galleries as well. He explains his technique here.

A Fan of the Desert

Hal writes that today would have been Edward Abbey‘s 80th birthday.

I discovered the author by accident when I found his book Desert Solitaire among a bunch of 75% off foreign language books at my favourite bookstore in Bonn. It must have been either shortly before or after André’s and my first trip to the USA because Arches National Park rang a bell, so I bought the book and instantly liked his writing style, as well as his descriptions of what Arches was like before it became a National Park.

I’ve since read The Fool’s Progress and The Monkey Wrench Gang, too. I enjoy his books partly because he describes landscapes and areas we visited during our trips to the US and instantly recreates the feeling of being there in my mind. I can almost smell the sagebrush…

Another book by him deserves being mentioned here: The Hidden Canyon with photos by John Blaustein. The text is Abbey’s journal of a boat tour through Grand Canyon.

In Desert Solitaire I first read about the controversy of building Glen Canyon Dam to create Lake Powell, which to me seemed strangely out of place in the middle of the desert when we visited it in 1999. If you want to see Glen Canyon the way it looked before the dam was built, I recommend the book Glen Canyon: Images of a Lost World by Tad Nichols, which is another favourite of mine I wrote about before (10 Jan 2001, 3 Nov 2004). You can see some of Blaustein’s photos here and here.

Einmal um die ganze Welt fliegen…

Markus und Arnim, zwei Flugbegeisterte, umrundeten die Welt – mit einem kleinen Flugzeug, einer zweisitzigen Cirrus SR22.

Das ganze fand in zwei Etappen statt. Am 27. Oktober 2005 starteten sie in Deutschland und erreichten am 19. November 2005 Melbourne. Den zweiten Teil der Weltumrundung (den ich noch nicht gelesen habe) starteten sie im Mai 2006. Man kann ihre Reise in ihrem Logbuch nachvollziehen.

The Antikythera mechanism

Okay, the Antikythera mechanism seems to haunt me this week. First, I decide to re-read Richard Feynman‘s What Do You Care What Other People Think?, and from a trip to Greece Feynman writes to his family about a strange, ancient mechanism he saw at the Athens National Museum (more info). This rings a bell because I read an article about it in the most recent edition of Die Zeit (see link below). And today, there’s this at the Astronomy Picture of the Day: The Antikythera Mechanism, crediting the corresponding Wikipedia article on the Antikythera Mechanism. There are several articles about the mechanism, which was found in 1910 but is over 2,000 years old:

Science News: Crusty Old Computer: New imaging techniques reveal construction of ancient marvel.

“Scientists say that they have figured out the arrangement and functions of nearly all the parts of a mysterious mechanical gadget that was discovered a century ago in a 2,000-year-old shipwreck.”

Scientific American: An Ancient Greek Computer?

Der oben erwähnte Zeit-Artikel:
Wissen: Das Urwerk.

“Taucher bargen vor hundert Jahren ein undurchschaubares Räderwerk aus einem Schiffswrack. Erst heute entschlüsseln Forscher sein Geheimnis. Die Griechen waren die ersten Meister der Feinmechanik.”

Sehenswert ist auch die dazu gehörende Bildergalerie.