Tuesday, October 23, 2012
Diversions
One of the freebies picked up at the Olympia the other day was a nicely produced booklet for children called 'À la découverte de l'Europe', also, I now find, available in a very whizzy online format. Must have cost a bit to put together.
An engaging and jolly introduction to the world of Europe. I learn, for example, that the Germanic peoples were the Angles, Saxons, Franks, Goths and Vikings and that the Germanic languages are Danish, Dutch, English, German and Swedish. Neither of them groupings which I would have come up with unaided. More interesting, the booklet suggested much similarity between the United States of Europe and the United States of America. Europe has 25 or so states, half that of the US, but very much the same order of magnitude. As are the populations, products and such like. But with a big gap between the small number of states with more than 35 million people and the rather larger number with less than 15 million - with nothing much in between. Including both Cyprus and Malta - the former surprising me, being in two rather unsettled halves, with one half more or less belonging to a non-member, Turkey. And the structural arrangements looked to be very much modeled on those of the (US) constitution, with executive (the Commission), legislature (the Parliament (roughly congress) and the Council (roughly senate)) and justice (the Court); perhaps appropriate as the constitution was very much the product of the European enlightenment. Not to mention the comfort blanket of the euro over a good part of the whole. Will it one day come to rival the dollar? No doubt much political science ink has already been spent on compare and contrast, so no need for me to add any more to it.
The other diversion was prompted by the childhood adventures of Oliver Sacks in the world of photography, adventures which have now sparked my own, albeit transient, interest. What exactly was a contact print? I asked Mr. Google and found out roughly what a contact print was, but could not find any nicely potted essay about photography, in general. So off to the library where in short order, in far less time than that spent online, I found and took out 'The History of Photography', a fat older book from OUP from 1955, formerly of Sunbury and now of Epsom Library. But an excellent introduction to the whole business. The glory days of chemistry, research (not the institutional, team work stuff you have to do now. Private enterprise by yeomen, gentlemen and a few ladies), patents and fortunes made of the second half of the nineteenth century. The searches for just the right chemicals to do the job, searches sounding not so unlike those we do these days for drugs. Fascinating stuff - but in large part made obsolete by the replacement of analog film processes by digital ones. A lesson, inter alia, on how easy it is to get diverted away from the business in hand, be that painting the kitchen or whatever!
An engaging and jolly introduction to the world of Europe. I learn, for example, that the Germanic peoples were the Angles, Saxons, Franks, Goths and Vikings and that the Germanic languages are Danish, Dutch, English, German and Swedish. Neither of them groupings which I would have come up with unaided. More interesting, the booklet suggested much similarity between the United States of Europe and the United States of America. Europe has 25 or so states, half that of the US, but very much the same order of magnitude. As are the populations, products and such like. But with a big gap between the small number of states with more than 35 million people and the rather larger number with less than 15 million - with nothing much in between. Including both Cyprus and Malta - the former surprising me, being in two rather unsettled halves, with one half more or less belonging to a non-member, Turkey. And the structural arrangements looked to be very much modeled on those of the (US) constitution, with executive (the Commission), legislature (the Parliament (roughly congress) and the Council (roughly senate)) and justice (the Court); perhaps appropriate as the constitution was very much the product of the European enlightenment. Not to mention the comfort blanket of the euro over a good part of the whole. Will it one day come to rival the dollar? No doubt much political science ink has already been spent on compare and contrast, so no need for me to add any more to it.
The other diversion was prompted by the childhood adventures of Oliver Sacks in the world of photography, adventures which have now sparked my own, albeit transient, interest. What exactly was a contact print? I asked Mr. Google and found out roughly what a contact print was, but could not find any nicely potted essay about photography, in general. So off to the library where in short order, in far less time than that spent online, I found and took out 'The History of Photography', a fat older book from OUP from 1955, formerly of Sunbury and now of Epsom Library. But an excellent introduction to the whole business. The glory days of chemistry, research (not the institutional, team work stuff you have to do now. Private enterprise by yeomen, gentlemen and a few ladies), patents and fortunes made of the second half of the nineteenth century. The searches for just the right chemicals to do the job, searches sounding not so unlike those we do these days for drugs. Fascinating stuff - but in large part made obsolete by the replacement of analog film processes by digital ones. A lesson, inter alia, on how easy it is to get diverted away from the business in hand, be that painting the kitchen or whatever!
# posted by Jim @ 12:01 AM 
