Articles of Interest – Page 5

Will Crystal Palace rise again?

Back when plans were submitted for a building to commemorate the Millennium, which of course materialized as the Millennium Dome, I thought a full sized replica of Crystal Palace would be ideal. This story caught my attention:

“Plans for a replica of the original Crystal Palace are being worked on by architects and developers. The original building was built by Sir Joseph Paxton in Hyde Park for the Great Exhibition of 1851, 160 years ago.

After being moved to a location in Sydenham, now known as Crystal Palace Park, it was destroyed by fire in 1936. The plans for a new building, estimated to cost £220million, incorporate galleries, a snow slope, music auditorium, leisure facilities and a hotel.

They have been drawn up by the New Crystal Palace company, a consortium of local businessmen. It expects to submit the plans to Bromley council “in the next six to eight months”. Company spokesman Patrick Goff said: “We want to put the Crystal Palace back and give the park a heart again. Our plan could be entirely funded through the commercial elements, with no money needed from the public purse.”

However, a rival scheme for the park has been put forward by the Mayor’s London Development Agency. It is proposing the construction of 180 private houses in the park, despite local objections. The new homes would be built on the site of a caravan park. The £67.5million scheme also includes student accommodation, landscaping and various improvements to the park itself as well as a new regional sports centre that includes an indoor swimming pool. Plans were approved after Public Inquiry in December 2010..

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Commitment Phobia

Remember Albert (George Segal) and Mollie (Kirstie Alley) in Look Who’s Talking ? When Albert says, “I’m going through a selfish phase..” Do you know someone like that?

There are many, many reasons why relationships break down. The focus here is on why men can often seem unable to commit to a relationship, why they procrastinate in being honest, often way past the point the woman has emotionally committed, taking him at his word. Many of these behaviours are non-verbal. Look beyond any reasonable levels of anxiety. It goes without saying women can behave in similar fashion, but even as a man, I recognize this phobia is particularly prone in men..

Commitment phobic men may be identified by SOME or ALL of the following behaviours:

They often have a history of short-term relationships and there is often an excuse that they haven’t met the right woman, or they justify their history by saying they still have plenty of time to settle down. If they have been married it is likely to have been for a short time.

They want a relationship but they also protect their freedom and space, so whether they recognize this or not, they are often attracted to long distance, or on-line relationships, and/or busy independent women. They are quick to move in on a woman they are attracted to, and they pursue ardently until they win the woman over.

They are very charming. They say and do all the right things and they can be very romantic. They are good salesmen in order to get their own needs met, but in reality they often have little concern for the woman’s feelings, as they tend to operate from a hidden agenda.

These men are usually very affectionate and loving. This is because in their mind the relationship is not going to be long term, so they feel free to give affection and love, knowing it won’t be forever. It isn’t long though before they suddenly begin to distance themselves, possibly by not contacting or not wanting to see her for days, or not including her in weekend arrangements, for example. This is because they subtly want to give the woman the message that they don’t want a long-term committed relationship, in short, the classic ‘cold feet’..

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The Rosette motif in ancient art

rosette on phaistos disk — THE PHAISTOS DISK, CRETE- note the four appearances of the eight-petalled rosette, described as a star anemone

Eight-petaled rosettes similar to those on the Phaistos Disk and on various ancient game-boards, such as discovered at Ur in Mesopotamia, and the example shown here from Knossos, Crete, appeared also on many other objects, over a wide geographical area and span of time. They appear to be solar symbols, or more precisely represent the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, and so indicated the passages from one state of existence into another.

Game-board from Knossos, Crete — Silver and Lapis lazuli gameboard from Knossos, with a border of 72 sixteen petalled rosettes

In Mesopotamia, the eight-leaf rosette was also the emblem of the fertility goddess Ishtar and her associated planet Venus. However, this apparent broadening of the symbol only confirms the basic meaning of birth, death and rebirth.

In a well-known myth, Ishtar descended into the underworld and was held there as if dead, before she returned to life, just as Venus the evening star disappears from the sky for some time and then heralds as the morning star the return of the life-giving light. The symbolism is the same as that derived from the cycles of the sun.

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Bottle building – 1963 & 2011

Guest Blog by Matthias McGregor

The Guardian has some great videos from the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas earlier in January. The Miniwiz bottle building (pictured below) really caught my eye:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/video/2011/jan/08/ces-2011-recycling-architecture

Alex Chou of Miniwiz shows off the company’s recycled plastic bottle building blocks, which have been used to construct a fully functional five-storey building in Taiwan..

Great concept, but it’s not exactly a new one. It reminded me of Heineken’s WOBO experiment almost 50 years earlier. Alfred Heineken was on holiday in the Caribbean island of Curaçao, and was dismayed to see thousands of glass beer bottles littering the beach, many of them bearing his name. Back in Amsterdam where the Heineken brewery was based, the average bottle was recycled 30 times. But on a small island like Curaçao, with neither the means nor incentive to recycle, each beer bottle was used once and discarded.

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Charles Berlitz and the Bermuda Triangle

The Bermuda Triangle (1974) Charles Berlitz

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Charles Berlitz, 90, the eminent linguist who wrote the bestsellers ‘The Bermuda Triangle’, ‘The Lost continent of Atlantis‘ and ‘The Philadelphia Experiment’, died Dec. 18^th 2003 at Tamarac, Florida.

Mr. Berlitz was the grandson of Maximilian Berlitz, who founded the language schools that bear the family name. Charles was born in New York in 1913 and grew up in a household where he was encouraged to learn a new language every year. By age 3, he spoke four languages and had created his own.

“I didn’t realize my family were speaking different languages,” he told The Washington Post in a 1982 profile. “I thought every person had their own particular way of speaking. Since I’d hear my mother switch to German when she spoke to my grandfather, I thought everyone had to learn everyone else’s way of speaking to communicate. I wanted my own language, too.”

Berlitz spent 26 years of his life in the US Army, half of that on active duty, serving as an intelligence officer. He served in World War II, the Korean War, and Vietnam. Over the years, he also did counter-intelligence and investigative work for the military.

The Washington Post reported that he married Valerie Seary Berlitz in 1950, and he was also survived by a daughter, Lin Berlitz-Hilton; and two grandchildren. His daughter summed up the manner in which her father lived his quite extraordinary life, “He was the last of the real gentlemen. He taught me that every person you meet has the ability to teach you something interesting.”

He met his future wife when she was studying at a Berlitz school in Australia and asked for a refund. He said the encounter resulted in a marriage proposal but no money, explaining: “Hard company to get a refund from.”

During his life, he learned 30 languages from Arabic to Zulu. He wrote dozens of books about language, a subject he described as more than simply communication. Words also indicate how people of different cultures think, he said, citing as an example how the colour red in China symbolizes joy, celebration and marriage, while white is associated with death and mourning.

His book “Native Tongues” (1982) was a compendium of anecdotes about the development of language. He noted that the Italian greeting “ciao” came from the word for “slave,” schiavo, or “I am your slave..”

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The Gentle Tasaday

The Gentle Tasaday: A Stone Age people in the Philippine rain forest (1975) by John Nance

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In the mid-1970’s, worldwide attention focused on a twenty-five-member tribe living in the dense jungle of Mindanao in the southern Philippines, said to have been living indefinitely in isolation. Their discovery led to the forming of several expeditions composed of Filipino and American anthropologists, news correspondents, television crews of the National Geographic Society, a cabinet minister of the Philippine government, and an American conservationist, the late Charles A. Lindbergh.

Discovery of the Tasaday was unremarkable. Sometime in 1962, a hunter from a town at the forest’s edge stumbled upon them while laying his wild-pig traps deep in the mountains of South Cotabato. As related, following a trail of strange footprints, he came upon three small men wearing only loin coverings made of leaves. With sharp sticks they were digging up a large root.

Although the tongue spoken by the hunter was related to that of the Tasaday, he resorted to sign language because of difficulty in communicating. The hunter’s tribe practically lives back-to-back with the Tasaday, but the difference in their languages was compared to that between early German and today’s English. Scientists deduced that this suggests an isolation of about a thousand years. Why, the very name ‘Tasaday’ (pronounced Taw-sawdai) was said to combine the Malay word sadai (“abandoned”) and the Malayo-Polynesian word tawo (“man”)! Tasaday is also the name of the forested peak rising above their hidden valley. So complete has been their isolation that, when first contacted, they knew nothing about a nation called the Philippines.

The existence of this tribe became known to outsiders through the efforts of PANAMIN, an agency working for the interests of cultural minorities in the Philippines. As in the Amazon and elsewhere, there is a desperate need for the right help. During early meetings between the hunter and the tribesmen at the forest’s edge, it was not known that they lived in caves, and there were no immediate attempts to go deep into the rain forest. The latter decision to visit the caves was made to protect the Tasaday from loggers, farmers, ranchers and miners who were nibbling away at their shrinking realm. They were to prove a very real threat. The Gentle Tasaday (1975) gives a comprehensive picture of the threat to the tribespeoples..

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Human Follies and Fallacies

Follies and Fallacies in Medicine (1989) by Petr Skrabanek and James M^cCormick

“Books do not arise of themselves; they do not emerge from the primeval slime, but are grafted on to some bizarre selection of everything that has gone before, a selection which is determined by the past experience of their authors”.

The Interdisciplinary approach to science and human reasoning generally, has much to recommend it.* By this we mean new insights, or evidence weighing against established theories in one field, that may profitably be used to re-examine areas in another field of knowledge .There are books published that confine their criticisms to the field their writers are familiar with, or feel best placed to give examples, but which can often be applied in ways the authors themselves may not at first have reckoned with, or conversely, deliberately scattered seeds for others to cultivate elsewhere. One such book is Follies and Fallacies in Medicine. It is not easy to obtain.

The authors aim as stated, ‘is to reach inquisitive minds, particularly those who are still young and uncorrupted by dogma. We offer no solutions to the problems we raise because we do not pretend to know of any. Both of us have been thought to suffer from ‘scepticaemia’ (an uncommon generalised disorder of low infectivity. Medical school education is likely to confer life-long immunity) but are happy to regard this affliction, paradoxically, as a health-promoting state..’

Many examples of erroneous reasoning, obfuscation, faulty logic and accidental misinformation are given; they are not concerned with deliberate falsification, deception or fraud, which can at times pollute the scientific literature. It appears that there is a need to spell out cautions necessary to establish truth, for even the best intentioned author will have a personal bias, a tendency to form a conclusion or a belief before the evidence necessarily justifies it’..

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Fever

You feel feverish. Often taken as the first sign of an infection, you feel exhausted, and hot and clammy. The usual response is to go to bed, and take aspirin, paracetamol or ibuprofen- to lower the body temperature.

It has long been acknowledged that such drugs could, in theory, be counter-productive, they do after all, interfere with the body’s natural response to infection. These concerns have been largely set aside, however, for a variety of reasons, the need to relieve discomfort, fears about febrile convulsions in young children, simple habit, and some might add the psychological urge to do something rather than nothing.

Febrile convulsions, whilst frightening for parents, almost never cause lasting harm. In any case, they seem to be caused by a rapid climb in temperature, rather than a raised temperature as such. One paediatrician said: “I consider the thermometer a common source of undue parental anxiety. Physicians frequently are asked to ‘treat’ a fever, but this pressure to ‘do something’ should be tempered by the realization that, in most cases, fever is merely the body’s defence against a self-limited disease.”

The upshot is that the drugs, used as anti-pyretics, are routinely used in vast quantities for any feverish illness, from the sickest of patients in intensive care, to people using over-the-counter cold remedies at home. Standard medical advice for flu, for example, is to rest and dose up on paracetamol..

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Henry II and Thomas a Becket

Out of the thirty four years of his reign (1154- 1189), Henry II spent twenty-one on the Continent. Socially and culturally, England was a backwater compared with the continental parts of the Angevin dominion.

Henry introduced several major reforms to England. Prior to 1166 trial by ordeal was a common way of determining guilt or innocence in criminal cases. Under this system, an accused person might have to pick up a red hot bar of iron, or pluck a stone out of a boiling cauldron. If their hand had begun to heal after three days they were considered to have God on their side, affirming their innocence. Henry gradually replaced this rather painful system with a jury of 12 men. He also introduced the first personal property tax. At the same time he forced Wales to at least nominally acknowledge the sovereignty of the English crown.

Henry was married to the forceful Eleanor of Aquitaine, the divorced wife of Louis VII of France, and in their squabbling she turned their sons Richard, John, and Geoffrey against him. The “Devil’s Brood” intrigued, fought, and rebelled against their father. By 1174 she was influencing the ‘young King Henry’ as well (see below). In the end, the crown went to Richard, while John “Lackland” received nothing, until 1185, when he was offered Ireland. Geoffrey received even less; He died before his father.

Henry desired to be absolute ruler of his dominions, both Church and State, and could find precedents in the traditions of the throne when he planned to do away with the special privileges of the English clergy, which he regarded as fetters on his authority. As Henry’s chancellor since 1155, Becket enforced the king’s traditional medieval land tax that was exacted from all landowners, including the churches and bishoprics, assisted by a force of 800 knights. This created both a hardship and a resentment of Becket among the English churchmen. To further implicate Becket as a secular man, he appeared an accomplished and extravagant courtier and a cheerful companion to the king’s pleasures. Thomas was devoted to Henry’s interests with a firm and yet diplomatic thoroughness.

It is not for his political successes that Henry is best remembered, but for his role in the murder of Thomas a Becket. In June 1162, Becket had been consecrated archbishop of Canterbury. In the eyes of many contemporaries, Becket did not deserve the highest ecclesiastical post in the land. Despite his clerical education, his appointment was without precedent (he was a secular cleric not monastic)..

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