blog

Brighton punches above its weight in all aspects of culture except one: history. We have venues for music, galleries for art, cinemas for film, theatre for plays, groups for geeks, workshops for writers - the list goes on and on - but nothing for history. The Catalyst Club caters for it a little perhaps, but it doesn’t have a historical remit, it just happens that the subjects discussed there inevitably involve events from the past, which isn’t strictly history.

I’d like to go somewhere where I could hear someone telling me something interesting about a historical subject new or largely unknown to me. I was put off history at school by a bad teacher, but recently I’ve realised its import. It touches everything. It doesn’t matter what one does, the more history one knows, the better placed one is in one’s field.

So two alternatives present themselves to me. Either someone tells me about an existing historical lectureship group in Brighton (comments box below), or perhaps I could start one? I know from FlashBrighton how simple such groups are to organise; a venue, a few emails, and they run themselves.

What do you think?

It’s fine to take anyone’s idea you want and just use it without permission.

Well that’s it, that’s all I really wanted to say, but one has to justify these things, right?

(more…)

the necessity to develop and apply geometry to farming produced by the seasonal flooding of the nile found expression in a series of mathematical papyri. the great egyptian mathematician ahmose was responsible for the moscow mathematical papyrus:

moscow mathematical papyrus - courtesy of wikipedia.org

(more…)

i’ve finally finished my essay ’swindon orbital’, which has taken 4 months to complete. for me it’s a major piece of work and  i’m happy with it, with some reservations (which i think is healthy). i’ll keep this short post because the essay itself is what’s worth reading. if you’ve not heard about it before and would like to know more, start off here.

once completed, friend and fellow writer james burt suggested it should be published in actual book and promoted in swindon, so i did. details of its promotion - including a bbc radio interview and a newspaper article - can be found here. if you’d like to purchase a printed version of the book contact me directly here (copies cost £5), and if you’d just like to download the pdf, you can find it here.

if you do read it, please come back here and add your feedback. i’d like to know what you think.

today is the 23rd of april: st george’s day, the patron saint of england. the hard, historical facts of the day and the figure himself may well be a little flimsy, but it is a good opportunity to reacquaint ourselves with one of this country’s leading artists & visionaries: william blake.

it is usually the famous two verses from his poetic work ‘jerusalem’ that are quoted on occasions like this:

and did these feet in ancient times,
walk upon england’s mountains green?
and was the holy lamb of god,
on england’s pleasant pastures seen?

etc. i love jerusalem, made it my business to memorise those two fabulous verses years ago, but we are all well acquainted with them already, i think st. georges day is an excellent opportunity to have a look at some of his less well-known pieces.

(more…)

the peter greenaway film ‘the draughtman’s contract‘ depicts the tale of an artist commissioned to produce drawings of a country estate. to aid him in this task the artist, a mr. neville, uses a tool known as ‘alberti’s perspectival window’:

scene from 'the draughtman's contract': courtesy of flickr user *bene*

(more…)

there are very few cultural universals: symbols, rules and artifacts shared by all civilisations. but some do exist and none so prevalent as the right angle. in the west we owe our knowledge of the right angle to the ancient egyptians, but importantly a number of civilisations discovered or invented the right angle entirely independently of each other: in the indus river valley, the region surrounding the yellow river in present-day china and what we now know of as mexico and peru, as well as various primitive clans. a knowledge of the right angle allowed these various and isolated peoples to develop other important structures such as the square, the cube and the grid; all of which made absolutely key contributions to their continued development.

modernist building taken with fish eye lens: courtesy of flickr user bikini sleepshirt

how did this happen?

(more…)

last weekend i attended barcamplondon6. generally i like to cover a historical topic at barcamp and i planned to talk about william blake, having spent much of the preceding week reading his biography. i didn’t get enough time to prepare anything though and so had to go back to one of my old presentations as back-up. i let the attendees choose which they’d prefer and they opted for ‘the history of the right angle’, a session i first gave at barcampbrighton3.

masonic symbol showing calipers and set square; courtesy of flickr user tim ellis

i’ve been planning on blogging about this topic for some time and dusting off the old presentation has given me the impetus to do so. the slide format i used won’t transfer well onto the ‘net so i’m going to rewrite it a series of blogposts, starting with this one.

continued here…

last weekend i visited arundel with e and her parents. arundel is a lovely little market town on a hill in west sussex, home to the duke of norfolk and a well-preserved norman castle since 1068. today it has a beautifully twee little town centre:

amongst other shops in this photograph one can see a butcher, a grocer’s shop and a bookshop. i was enjoying my stroll around these expensive, specialists stores - admiring the cheeses on offer in the grocer’s window - when it struck me that the only sense in which this place was any more ‘real’ than some virtual version of it - one recreated in second life, say - was that it was a physical location. the england i grew up in and know is all about suburbs, supermarkets, fast food shops, television, blue collar jobs, computer games, motorways, petrol stations, nhs hospitals, prefabricated school buildings, etc, etc. the chocolate box, pastoral & staunchly tory view of england that arundel suggests is just a tourist backdrop. a pretty one, sure, but as unrealistic a backdrop as any scene i’ve seen at the movies or in some computer generated environment.

today is the 3rd of march, 2009, meaning the date is 3.3.9, being square root day (3 x 3 = 9); a facetious geek holiday. i’ve got work today so i can’t ‘celebrate’ it properly but i’ll make sure i have a good square meal tonight and raise my glass to that universal cultural symbol: the square.

take a look around you: they’re everywhere, rectangles, cubes and squares, in every ancient and modern culture all around the world and throughout history; ‘really important. take a few minutes today to show your appreciation for this fundamental cultural symbol.

here’s to the square!