Rishi Coffin For A Commoner

On this day, 29th April 1770,  Captain James Cook  first landed at Botany Bay,  (Sydney, Australia).

James Cook, with Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander landed at Kurnell in the afternoon of April 29th 1770, in search of fresh water. In the next few days, excursions around the bay were undertaken and samples of native flora collected, which proved so plentiful that Cook named the area Botany Bay.

The State Library of New South Wales holds many items relating to this voyage of the Endeavour, including Joseph Banks Journal and a copy of James Cook’s Endeavour log.

Portrait of Captain James Cook / painted by Sir Nathaniel Dance. Engraved by Cosmo Armstrong. State Library of New South Wales.

A Journal of the proceedings of His Majesty’s Bark Endeavour on a voyage round the world, by Lieutenant James Cook, Commander, commencing the 25th of May 1768 - 23 Oct. 1770 - Entrance of Endeavour River and Botany Bay Maps

Sailor’s Eyeballs (Valonia ventricosa)

Known as bubble algae or sailor’s eyeballs, Valonia ventricosa are one of the world’s largest single-celled organisms. They’re found in almost every ocean in the world, mostly in tropical and sub-tropical regions among coral rubble.

These tough, shiny multi-nucleic cells, a kind of green algae, usually grow to be 0.4 to 1.5 inches in diameter but sometimes reach up to 2 inches across. By comparison, most human cells are so small they’re invisible to the naked eye; Valonia ventricosa are larger than your fingernail!

photograph by Alexander Vasenin | Wikipedia

via: American Museum of Natural History

Four years of failed harvests (1695, 1696, and 1698–99) resulted in severe famine and depopulation, particularly in the north of Scotland. Starvation killed 5 to 15 percent of the Scottish population, but in areas such as Aberdeenshire, death rates reached 25 percent.

Rarely has a natural disaster had such wide-ranging historical consequences as did the famine that struck Scotland in the mid-1690s. Little more than a decade later, as Scotland’s social elites despaired about their nation’s grinding poverty and profound structural weakness, the country’s Parliament finally voted away its age-old independence in favor of unification with England, previously Scotland’s bitterest and most enduring enemy.

The author of this sermon was a very colorful figure. A Scottish Presbyterian minister denounced as a rebel in 1674, he was restored next year but arrested again the following February. Later he was arrested for refusing to pray for the Prince of Wales, but again released. His matrimonial adventures were no less robust than his professional career. He was married seven times and fathered at least nine children.

David Williamson (1636- 1706). Scotland’s sin, danger, and duty: faithfully represented in a sermon preach’d at the West-Kirk, August 23d, 1696: being a solemn fast-day upon occasion of the great dearth and famine. Rare BT162.F3 W54 1720 

Discovering the daily life during jomon period - 縄文人の生活再現 

Entanglement Made Simple, a divulgative article of theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek, in Quanta Magazine.

Image by James O'Brien for Quanta Magazine

Idempotence.

A term I’d always found intriguing, mostly because it’s such an unusual word. It’s a concept from mathematics and computer science but can be applied more generally—not that it often is. Basically, it’s an operation that, no matter how many times you do it, you’ll still get the same result, at least without doing other operations in between. A classic example would be view_your_bank_balance being idempotent, and withdraw_1000 not being idempotent.

HTs: @aidmcg and Ewan Silver who kept saying it

No. 2 Construction Battalion

Fighting for a country that didn’t want them.

On March 25 1917, Canada’s first and only black military unit left Halifax harbor for the Western Front. Six hundred soldiers, mostly from Nova Scotia, formed up as No. 2 Construction Battalion. Many had been trying to enlist since 1914,  but winning this privilege had been an up-hill fight: for two years military authorities had turned down black recruits, telling them “This is a white man’s war.”

Finally, in 1916, Canada allowed black recruits entry into a segregated united of laborers. An additional 165 African-Americans crossed the border to join them, creating a full complement of 600 men. Winning the struggle to join up hardly ended discrimination. Except for the reverend, all officers were white, and even when they went to board their transport ship on March 25 the captain initially refused to let them on, saying that he would not let them travel on the same vessel as white soldiers.

The recruits hoped to be allowed to fight when they reached France, but instead the Canadian Expediotnary Force immediately downgraded them from a battalion to a company and assigned them to fell trees and prepare positions for white soldiers. They were not ever even issued with rifles. Their work was tedious and demoralizing, and many considered themselves failures even as they suffered casualties from artillery shells and poison gas.

The unit returned to Canada in 1919, but received no fanfare upon arrival. Much like America’s black soldiers, they returned to a country that did not value them or their sacrifice and actively oppressed their rights. Most of these veterans returned to poverty and unemployment. When they finally had their first reunion in 1982, only nine could attend from twenty known survivors. Their legacy and sacrifice has been revived since then. Although very few men were allowed the chance to serve, they began the first crack in the Canadian military’s institutionalized racism.

Around 6 million years ago, the African and Eurasian plates moved together, cutting the Mediterranean Sea off from the Atlantic. Without an influx of water from the Atlantic, evaporation began removing more water from the Mediterranean than rivers could replace. The sea dried out almost completely over the course of a couple thousand years.

About 5.3 million years ago, the Straits of Gibraltar reopened, creating a massive flood into the Mediterranean known as the Zanclean Flood. Water rushed down the straits and into the Mediterranean at speeds as high as 40 m/s (90 mph). At its peak, the Zanclean Flood is estimated to have reached rates 1000 times greater than the volumetric flow rate of the Amazon River. 

A similar breach flood occurred in the Black Sea within the past 10,000 years when the Bosporus became unblocked. That flood likely had a devastating impact on Neolithic societies in the area and may be the inspiration for the floods described in the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Bible. (Image credit: BBC, source)

#Feathursday: Innate and Learned Behaviors

Once again we bring you a portion of the educational series Man: A Course of Study. This booklet uses the Herring Gull to teach innate and learned behaviors. We wish we knew who the illustrator of this booklet was because they’ve done a great job helping us understand how baby bird brains work.

Man: A Course of Study was developed by Jerome S. Bruner, an American psychologist who wanted to build a curriculum to teach fifth graders about what it is to be human. He often used animals as contrast to help explain the biological nature of humans.

From the teaching series, Man: A Course of Study published by Curriculum Development Associates. Our copy is the first commercial edition published in 1970.

More Feathursday posts

Some of our other posts from Man: A Course of Study