Group items tagged

"Top 10 Lost Technologies"

"Lost" Language Found on Back of 400-Year-Old Letter

"Fragments of a lost ancient Roman law text have been rediscovered in the scrap paper used to bind other books. The Codex Gregorianus, or Gregorian Code, was compiled by an otherwise unknown man named Gregorius at the end of the third century A.D. It started a centuries-long tradition of collecting Roman emperors' laws in a single manuscript."

"O diretor e roteirista J.J. Abrams, criador da série "Lost", levará ao cinema o aclamado livro "Let the Great Word Spi", do irlandês Colum McCann, que ganhou o prêmio nacional de literatura dos Estados Unidos em 2009."

"Ever since the famed Greek philosopher Plato first wrote of a fabled continent called Atlantis more than two thousand years ago, scholars have been locked in fierce debate as to whether such a place truly existed. While a few rare individuals have taken Plato's words seriously, most scoff at the idea that an advanced civilization could vanish as completely as if it had never existed."

""Il Cavallo," the huge equine statue Leonardo Da Vinci never got to make, wasn't plagued by technical problems as was widely believed, a new multidisciplinary research has revealed. On the contrary, Da Vinci's plan for the largest equestrian statue in the world was a perfectly feasible project which, if completed, would have probably been his greatest legacy, more than ''The Last Supper'' or any other work. Commissioned in 1482 by Lodovico Sforza, duke of Milan, in honor of his father Francesco, the massive bronze horse took Leonardo 17 years of research, but was never completed. Indeed, when the full-scale clay model was finally ready to be cast in a single operation in 1499, all the needed bronze was used to make cannons for an imminent war against the King of France. The molds were lost and the clay model was reduced to rubble by the invading French soldiers."

"With the help of enhanced imagery and an expert in Elizabethan script, archaeologists are beginning to unravel the meaning of mysterious text and images etched into a rare 400-year-old slate tablet discovered this past summer at Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent English settlement in America. Digitally enhanced images of the slate are helping to isolate inscriptions and illuminate fine details on the slate-the first with extensive inscriptions discovered at any early American colonial site, said William Kelso, director of research and interpretation at the 17th-century Historic Jamestowne site (Jamestown map). (Explore an interactive guide to colonial Jamestown.) The enhancements have helped researchers identify a 16th-century writing style used on the slate and discern new symbols, researchers announced last week. The characters may be from an obscure Algonquian Indian alphabet created by an English scientist to help explorers pronounce the language spoken by the Virginia Indians. "Just like finding the Rosetta Stone led to a better understanding of the Egyptians, this tablet is beginning to add significantly to our understanding of the earliest years at Jamestown," Kelso said. It conveys messages about literacy, art, symbols and signs personally communicated by the colonists who used it, he explained. "What other single artifact has been found that has so much to tell?" Both sides of the scratched and worn 5-by-8 inch (13-by-20 centimeter) tablet are covered with words, symbols, numbers, and drawings of people, plants, and birds that its owner or other users likely encountered in the New World. There are differences in the style of handwriting, which may mean that more than one person used the tablet as a sketch pad and possibly for writing rough drafts of documents, Kelso noted. Enhanced Images To help researchers decipher the inscriptions, curators at the Smithsonian Institution's Museum Conservation Institute recently produced enhanced images

"The Iliad is the first great book, and the first great book about the suffering and loss of war. We love to tell stories about war. Tony Blair wove his own when giving evidence at the Chilcot inquiry yesterday: the latest, unpoetic attempt to make sense of an east-west clash of powers. He might note that "spin " goes back to The Iliad: the first-century writer Dio Chrysostom argued that Homer, for reasons of his own, suppressed the truth about the Trojan war - in reality, the Greeks lost. "Men learn with difficulty . . . but they are deceived only too readily," he wrote. Why is the first book a book about war? Perhaps because war is inextricably bound up with humanity's urge to tell stories. Civilisation - with its settlements, its boundary lines, its hierarchies - breeds conflict and narrative alike. In The Iliad, two characters have the narrative urge, and something approaching a synoptic view of the scenes surging around them. Achilles sings stories of heroes' deeds in battle, and Helen embroiders scenes of fighting on an elaborate textile."

"Wordsworth changed forever the way we view the natural world and the inner world of feeling. He also connected the two indivisibly. We are his heirs, and we see and feel through him. His vision illumined our landscape. His name is inextricably connected with the Lake District, where he was born in Cockermouth in 1770. His mother died when he was only eight, his father five years later. These early losses gave him an acute apprehension of mortality, but did not impair the flow of his affections. His mother had loved him enough, and her love lasted beyond the grave. He had a free and happy country childhood, and joy is one of his themes: through his vocation as a poet he transformed fear of mortality to intimations of immortality. The story of his early life - his schooldays, his education at Cambridge, his wanderings in France, his response to the French revolution, his love of his sister Dorothy and his passionate friendship with Coleridge - are told in his great autobiographical work in blank verse, The Prelude, most of which written when he was in his 30s (only sections of it were published in his lifetime.) It is a work of astonishing originality, both in its subject matter (childhood and the growth of the mind, described with a pre-Freudian insight unprecedented in literature) and in its form. The verse is powerful, supple, subtle, freely flowing. Wordsworth revered both Shakespeare and Milton. His is the third great iambic voice in the English language. His first volume of poems, Lyrical Ballads, written in collaboration with Coleridge and published in 1798, stakes his territory: the plain, the rustic, the thoughtful, the everyday, the organic: a poetry in which "the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature". It includes The Idiot Boy, a moving ballad treating its challenging subject (a mother's love for her "idiot" son sent out into the night to fetch the doctor for a sick neighbour) with the deepest respect and