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Athanasius Kircher – 17th century Buckaroo Banzai

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.

The Riddle Of The Spores

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.

[via Disinformation]