The incendiary feline featured above (and elsewhere on this page) comes from a digitized version of an early 16th century military manual written by Franz Helm. An artillery master, Helm wrote about a broad and imaginative set of destructive ideas for siege warfare. Although my German is somewhat rusty, I got the sense that he was awfully fond of exploding sacks, barrels, and various other receptacles, and eventually decided to combine these ideas with an unwitting animal delivery system. These animals, according to Helm’s guide, would allow a commander to “set fire to a castle or city which you can’t get at otherwise.”
“Create a small sack like a fire-arrow … if you would like to get at a town or castle, seek to obtain a cat from that place. And bind the sack to the back of the cat, ignite it, let it glow well and thereafter let the cat go, so it runs to the nearest castle or town, and out of fear it thinks to hide itself where it ends up in barn hay or straw it will be ignited.”
That’s the military strategy in a nutshell. Seems like a great idea, apart from the fact that cats are notoriously unpredictable. In any case, here are more illustrations of weaponized cats to round out your work week.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2014.
In a brisk WIRED interview, Professor Tarek Masoud answers frequently asked questions about Iran’s history. He explains that Iran is not an Arab country but a predominantly Persian one, with a distinct language and identity. He traces how the country became an Islamic republic after the 1979 revolution, driven by political repression, economic tensions, and resistance to Western influence.
Along the way, he tackles the following questions: Just how liberal/progressive was Iran prior to the 1979 revolution? Why did the Iranian revolution happen? Is Iran the only Middle Eastern country whose modern borders were not created by colonial powers? The son of Iran’s last Shah is rallying protesters, but do Iranians really want another king?
By the end, you’ll know a little bit more about the country at the center of America’s latest military adventure.
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In the world of cryptography, substitution ciphers are child’s play. Indeed, we may remember literally playing with them as children, writing secret messages to our friends by replacing all the letters with numbers, say, or shifting them one or two places over in alphabetical order. Cracking such codes was a trivial matter even before the computer age, but certain simple variations could make them more robust. Take the document known as the Copiale cipher (downloadable as a two-part PDF), a 105-page bound manuscript that stayed undecipherable for more than 260 years. Its mystery finally yielded to the efforts of University of Southern California computer scientist Kevin Knight and Uppsala University linguists Beata Megyesi and Christiane Schaefer only in the early twenty-tens.
As Tommie Trelawny tells the story of the Copiale cipher in the Hochelaga video above, the manuscript, which was originally thought to date between 1760 and 1780, first had to be converted into machine-readable code. The text’s use of 88 unique symbols, one of them shaped like an eye, necessitated coming up with names for all of them apart from the Roman letters, which had no particular meaning in isolation.
When another scan searched for repeated letter combinations, its results shed light on probable similarities with the German language. This made sense, since the book was found in Germany in the first place. Could multiple symbols in this strange cipher have been substituted for single German letters? Could the code be, in cryptographic terms, a homophonic cipher?
Approaching the text under that hypothesis revealed meanings suggesting, tantalizingly, that it had been written by a secret society. It even describes an initiation ritual in which the inductee must first “read” a blank piece of paper, then try again with eyeglasses, then again after washing his eyes, and then, finally, undergo a symbolic “operation” involving the plucking of a single eyebrow. This society, the Oculists, turns out to have been composed entirely of ophthalmologists meeting in the seventeen-forties. That they did so covertly may owe to their having been Freemasons, whose rites had recently been banned by Pope Clement XII. The Copiale cipher suggests that Oculists appear to have had no aims more sinister than the pursuit of knowledge — not that, for most of us today, the notion of eighteenth-century eye surgery isn’t terrifying enough.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
When we think of modern architecture, we often think first of what’s called the International Style, whose minimalist, rectilinear, decoration-free forms were championed by the likes of Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Le Corbusier. Though they did build projects all over the world, that isn’t exactly the reason for the name. In fact, the International Style represents an attempt to develop a culturally neutral aesthetic for all built environments, deployable equally in Europe, Asia, the Americas, and everywhere else besides. That pretense to universality may count as the most utopian aspect of an avowedly utopian movement — and the one whose impracticality came soonest to light.
Before he became Brazil’s most famous architect, Oscar Niemeyer subscribed to the principles of the International Style. But then, as an acolyte of Le Corbusier, he could hardly have done otherwise. When the great man came to Rio de Janeiro in 1936 to design the new Ministry of Education and Health, Niemeyer was hired to work on the project.
The experience seems to have done its part to convince him that the International Style wasn’t as international as all that, and furthermore, that its rigid dictates would have to be bent to suit his homeland. This bending would, in a sense, be literal: like Frank Gehry or Zaha Hadid after him, Niemeyer devoted his architecture to the pursuit of the curve, inspired by examples seen in everything from the mountains of Brazil’s landscape to the bodies of its women.
In 1956, the newly elected president Juscelino Kubitschek immediately realized the plan, written into the country’s constitution long before, of building a new central city to relieve Rio of its status as the capital. Christened Brasília, it was to be constructed on a vast, empty plateau entirely along rational, modernist guidelines, with defined districts organized along a cruciform city plan often likened to a bird or an airplane and monumental structures meant to project a forward-looking image. Niemeyer was selected to design those structures, which immediately became elements of the city’s visual signature upon its inauguration in 1960: ever since, seldom has a photograph failed to include the twin towers and domes of his National Congress or the Space-Age crown of thorns atop his Cathedral of Brasília.
The both administrative and otherworldly form of central Brasília remains alluring, though the city itself began drawing criticism even before its completion. “This is what you get when perfectly decent, intelligent and talented men start thinking in terms of space, rather than place, and about single rather than multiple meanings,” declared a frowning Robert Hughes in his 1980 TV series The Shock of the New. “It’s what you get when you design for political aspirations and not real human needs. You get miles of jerry-built platonic nowhere infested with Volkswagens.” Indeed, the domination of car infrastructure and strict separation of functions hardly proved conducive to the spontaneous, convivial aspects of Brazilian life. But residents and visitors alike tend to report that Brasília’s urban design has been improved as its population has grown, and massively, with commensurate improvements to its quality of life over the decades. It may not inspire many bossa nova songs, but the capital nevertheless reflects a genuine facet of what Brazil is — and what it once dreamed of becoming.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Above and below, you can watch musicians perform “Songs of Consolation,” a 1,000-year-old song set “to the poetic portions of Roman philosopher Boethius’ magnum opus The Consolation of Philosophy,” an influential medieval text written during the 6th century. According to Cambridge University, the performance of the piece, which had been lost in time until recently, didn’t come easily:
[T]he task of performing such ancient works today is not as simple as reading and playing the music in front of you. 1,000 years ago, music was written in a way that recorded melodic outlines, but not ‘notes’ as today’s musicians would recognise them; relying on aural traditions and the memory of musicians to keep them alive. Because these aural traditions died out in the 12th century, it has often been thought impossible to reconstruct ‘lost’ music from this era – precisely because the pitches are unknown.
Now, after more than two decades of painstaking work on identifying the techniques used to set particular verse forms, research undertaken by Cambridge University’s Dr Sam Barrett has enabled him to reconstruct melodies from the rediscovered leaf of the 11th century ‘Cambridge Songs’.
The song is performed here by Benjamin Bagby, Hanna Marti and Norbert Rodenkirchen, three members of the medieval music ensemble known as Sequentia.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.
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We live, as we’re often told, in the era of globalization. In fact, we’ve been told it so often over the past few decades that it now hardly seems like an observation worth making. But however thoroughly our era is defined by connections between far-flung nations, societies, economies, and cultures, we shouldn’t flatter ourselves into thinking we are pioneers in a wholly new globalized reality. As classicist Eric Cline explains in this recent Big Think interview, an interconnected world flourished in the late Bronze Age, and especially the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries BC. “Life was pretty good” in those days, he says, at least if you lived in one of the lands around the Mediterranean and Near East that constituted what he calls the “ancient G8.”
The member peoples of this retrospective organization included the Mycenaeans and Minoans in Greece, the Hittites in modern-day Turkey, the Assyrians and the Babylonians in modern-day Iraq, as well as the Cypriots, Egyptians, and Canaanites. Alas, as implied by the title of Cline’s 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed, their good times together didn’t last.
In that book, and in lectures on YouTube, he’s explained the variety of factors that contributed to the dissolution of that once prosperous “small-world network.” His surprising popularity for a historian of the Bronze Age owes in part to his willingness to draw comparisons with that time and our own. Many of his fans surely found him out of curiosity over one question: is our “flat” twenty-first-century world similarly headed for a collapse?
If so, we might pay less attention to why the ancient G8 collapsed, and more to what became of its formerly interdependent societies when the crisis had run its course. Such is the subject of Cline’s After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations, and of the Big Think interview extract at the top of the post. Some coped, some adapted, some transformed, and others simply vanished. Cypriots and the Phoenicians of Canaan, for example, remade themselves to thrive in the chaos; the Egyptians muddled through with a mixture of adaptation and coping; the Mycenaeans and the Minoans lost more or less everything, including their writing system, and had to rebuild from square one. But the truly cautionary tale is that of the Hittites, whose civilizational annihilation appears to have been in large part self-inflicted. “Don’t be a Hittite,” is one of Cline’s pieces of advice; another is to gain an understanding of antifragility sooner rather than later.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Though you may not hear it every day, chimera remains an evocative word, perhaps even more so for its rarity. It descends from the Greek Khimaira, literally “year-old she-goat,” the name of a mythical fire-breathing creature with a caprine body, sure enough, but also the head of a lion and the tail of a dragon. Today the word broadly refers to any compound, usually bizarre, of parts drawn from disparate sources, a usage that dates back to the Middle Ages. Look at the illuminated manuscripts from that time, and you’ll find chimeras aplenty, a host of beastly mash-ups that look evocatively funny enough to be converted straight into twenty-first-century internet memes — most of which appear to have originally been intended as depictions of real, individual animals.
The video above from Curious Archive presents a gallery of medieval chimeras both intended and not. These include spiked sea turtles, small tigers without stripes, hippopotamuses with dorsal fins, elephants with entire stone castles on their backs, hyenas that resemble carnivorous cows, ostriches eating iron horseshoes, and scorpions with mammalian faces.
Mistakes of this kind were perhaps inevitable, given the difficulty of coming by such exotic animals in medieval Europe, even for artists with access to a royal court. Most would have had to rely on word of mouth or depictions in the Bestiary, a text that functions as both “a natural history and a series of moral and religious lessons,” according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and also incorporated “tales about the existence of bizarre and loathsome creatures.”
As in so many domains of the pre-Enlightenment world, the real and the fantastical went together in a way we can have trouble understanding today. We aren’t always aware, for example, that the lore of the time tended to link the lion — an animal locally extinct since before the Middle Ages began — with Jesus Christ. Thus “the symbolic aspects of lions were therefore as important for the artists as their actual physical features,” writes Mental Floss’ Jane Alexander, and in any case, “medieval artists typically weren’t concerned with realism.” At Hyperallergic, Elaine Velie quotes the Met’s associate curator in the Department of Medieval Art Shirin Fozi as observing that, “very often, people think that they’re laughing at the Middle Ages, and they’re actually laughing with the Middle Ages.” It may surprise us to consider that our ancestors, too, had senses of humor — and that the cultural concept of the “funny animal” has been around much longer than we might have imagined.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletterBooks on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro.Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
A curious thing happened at the end of the 19th century and the dawning of the 20th. As European and American industries became increasingly confident in their methods of invention and production, scientists made discovery after discovery that shook their understanding of the physical world to the core. “Researchers in the 19th century had thought they would soon describe all known physical processes using the equations of Isaac Newton and James Clerk Maxwell,” Adam Mann writes at Wired. But “the new and unexpected observations were destroying this rosy outlook.”
These observations included X‑rays, the photoelectric effect, nuclear radiation and electrons; “leading physicists, such as Max Planck and Walter Nernst believed circumstances were dire enough to warrant an international symposium that could attempt to resolve the situation.” Those scientists could not have known that over a century later, we would still be staring at what physicist Dominic Walliman calls the “Chasm of Ignorance” at the edge of quantum theory. But they did initiate “the quantum revolution” in the first Solvay Council, in Brussels, named for wealthy chemist and organizer Ernest Solvay.
“Reverberations from this meeting are still felt to this day… though physics may still sometimes seem to be in crisis” writes Mann (in a 2011 article just months before the discovery of the Higgs boson). The inaugural meeting kicked off a series of conferences on physics and chemistry that have continued into the 21st century. Included in the proceedings were Planck, “often called the father of quantum mechanics,” Ernest Rutherford, who discovered the proton, and Heike Kamerlingh-Onnes, who discovered superconductivity.
Also present were mathematician Henri Poincaré, chemist Marie Curie, and a 32-year-old Albert Einstein, the second youngest member of the group. Einstein described the first Solvay conference (1911) in a letter to a friend as “the lamentations on the ruins of Jerusalem. Nothing positive came out of it.” The ruined “temple,” in this case, was the theories of classical physics, “which had dominated scientific thinking in the previous century.” Einstein understood the dismay, but found his colleagues to be irrationally stubborn and conservative.
Nonetheless, he wrote, the scientists gathered at the Solvay Council “probably all agree that the so-called quantum theory is, indeed, a helpful tool but that it is not a theory in the usual sense of the word, at any rate not a theory that could be developed in a coherent form at the present time.” During the fifth Solvay Council, in 1927, Einstein tried to prove that the “Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle (and hence quantum mechanics itself) was just plain wrong,” writes Jonathan Dowling, co-director of the Horace Hearne Institute for Theoretical Physics.
Physicist Niels Bohr responded vigorously. “This debate went on for days,” Dowling writes, “and continued on 3 years later at the next conference.” At one point, Einstein uttered his famous quote, “God does not play dice,” in a “room full of the world’s most notable scientific minds,” Amanda Macias writes at Business Insider. Bohr responded, “stop telling God what to do.” That room full of luminaries also sat for a portrait, as they had during the first Solvay Council meeting. See the assembled group at the top and further up in a colorized version in what may be, as one Redditor calls it, “the most intelligent picture ever taken.”
Back row: Auguste Piccard, Émile Henriot, Paul Ehrenfest, Édouard Herzen, Théophile de Donder, Erwin Schrödinger, JE Verschaffelt, Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg, Ralph Fowler, Léon Brillouin.
Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2019.
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