Author: Chris Barrus

The German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (1602-80), a rough contemporary of Descartes and Galileo, was no ordinary man. He studied Egyptian hieroglyphs and helped Bernini with his fountain in the Piazza Navona. He made vomiting machines and eavesdropping statues. He transcribed bird song and wrote a book about musicology (still used today). He taught Nicolas Poussin perspective and made a chamber of mirrors to drive cats crazy. He invented the first slide projector and had himself lowered into the mouth of Mount Vesuvius just as it was supposed to erupt. He proved the impossibility of the Tower of Babel and made a model of how the animals were arranged in Noah’s Ark. And he collected the objects that filled the Museo Kircheriano, Rome’s first wunderkammer or collection of curiosities.

And courtesy of the Museum Of Jurassic Technology he’s back in fashion.

Hilarity ensues…

Oi! Watcha got there is them Mi-Go, they’re an intruhduced spoicees from Yuggoth, and oi hate ’em! They’re pushin’ owt the native sentient fungus, and they’ve got no natcheral predatahs!

A former USAF wargamer speaks out on Indian/Pakistani war scenarios. It’s not good, and ends in nukes.

A 1998 hurricane in Guatemala eroded enough landscape that ancient sources of Olmec-style jade have been uncovered.

The Times of India and DAWN – a English-language Pakistani news site.

Nice interview with Rusty of streaming radio station SomaFM who speaks out on CARP, the RIAA, and the tech issues behind running a popular net stream station.

So what happened to that anthrax investigation anyway?

After five letters containing anthrax spores had been posted, in the autumn, to addresses in the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation promised that it would examine “every bit of information [and] every bit of evidence”. But now the investigation appears to have stalled. Microbiologists in the US are beginning to wonder aloud whether the FBI’s problem is not that it knows too little, but that it knows too much.

Awesomely detailed geologic history of western USA.

A retrofuture world of art deco awaits you. Hurry before I post more of this fascist apocalyptic crap.

Based on this, I predict that in five years we’re going to have a recession/economic panic the likes of which we haven’t seen since 1929.

Taking a broader look, spending on government programs from 1999 to 2003 will have increased 22 percent (in inflation adjusted dollars), according to a new analysis by the Washington Post. Measured against the GDP, total federal spending will soar to 18.5 percent in these three years. Spending rose 9 percent in the last two years of the�Clinton�presidency but will rise 15 percent in the first two years of the Bush administration. If�Clinton�was a social democrat in love with big government, what does that make Bush?