The Great Wall of Vietnam

A couple weeks ago I linked to a report that archaeologists were working to uncover and preserve the "Great Wall" of Vietnam -

"This is the longest monument [~200 km] in Southeast Asia," CNN.com quoted Professor Phan Huy Le, president of the Vietnam Association of Historians, as saying. The wall is built of alternating sections of stone and earth, with some sections reaching a height of up to four meters...

Construction of the Long Wall started in 1819 under the direction of Le Van Duyet, a high-ranking mandarin serving Emperor Gia Long, and it served to demarcate territory and regulate trade and travel between the Viet in the plains and the Hre tribes in the mountain valleys.

Today I found at the BBC another report, this time with a photo (above, copyright EFEO).  A quick search yielded a couple more low-resolution photos (here and here) -

From the looks of it, I would bet this wall was designed not so much as a military defense, but rather to funnel travelers and traders toward defined crossing points where tariffs could be collected, as was done where the Silk Road crossed the Great Wall in China.

Stanley Ann Dunham and her son

For obvious reasons, I was intrigued when I first realized that Barack Obama's mother's first name was "Stanley."  I learned more about her today from a well-written piece in the New York Times -

The president’s mother has served as any of a number of useful oversimplifications. In the capsule version of Obama’s life story, she is the white mother from Kansas coupled alliteratively to the black father from Kenya. She is corn-fed, white-bread, whatever Kenya is not...

Intentionally or not, the label obscures an extraordinary story — of a girl with a boy’s name who grew up in the years before the women’s movement, the pill and the antiwar movement; who married an African at a time when nearly two dozen states still had laws against interracial marriage; who, at 24, moved to Jakarta with her son in the waning days of an anticommunist bloodbath in which hundreds of thousands of Indonesians were slaughtered; who lived more than half her adult life in a place barely known to most Americans, in the country with the largest Muslim population in the world; who spent years working in villages where a lone Western woman was a rarity; who immersed herself in the study of blacksmithing, a craft long practiced exclusively by men; who, as a working and mostly single mother, brought up two biracial children; who believed her son in particular had the potential to be great... never knowing who or what he would become...

As she told him, with a dry humor that seems downright Kansan, “If nothing else, I gave you an interesting life.”

Much more at the link.

An impressive balancing act

YouTube link.

Performed by Mädir Eugster Performer, Performance, performer, performer, Performerin, Performance, performer, performer on the France2 channel, produced by MagicTV/Patrick Sébastien.  One supposes that performances similiar to this date back to the courts and streets of the Middle Ages and before, though I have no evidence for that.

For obvious reasons (and perhaps for stagecraft) it's a bit slow in developing; those in a hurry will probably want to skip through using the video progress bar.

Via Nothing To Do With Arbroath.

Don't get on this bus

Source unknown; posted by lightsOut at Reddit.

Parhelia

During this change of seasons, we've been noticing rings around the sun, as ice crystals in the upper atmosphere refract light to create halos or smaller sun dogs. The best online source I've seen on this topic is Atmospheric Optics, which has sections on sun dogs, moon dogs, rainbows, and other related phenomena.

The image embedded above is "Vädersolstavlan" -

...an oil-on-panel painting depicting a halo display, an atmospheric optical phenomenon, observed over Stockholm on April 20, 1535. It is named after the sun dogs (Swedish: Vädersol, "Weather sun") appearing on the upper right part of the painting. While chiefly noted for being the oldest depiction of Stockholm in colour, it is arguably also the oldest Swedish landscape painting and the oldest depiction of sun dogs...

The painting is divided into an upper part depicting the halo phenomenon viewed vertically and a lower part depicting the city as it must have appeared viewed from Södermalm in the late Middle Ages. The medieval urban conglomeration, today part of the old town Gamla stan, is rendered using a bird's-eye view. The stone and brick buildings are densely packed below the church and castle, which are rendered in a descriptive perspective (i.e., their size relates to their social status, rather than their actual dimensions). Scattered wooden structures appear on the surrounding rural ridges, today part of central Stockholm...

Over time, the painting has become emblematic of the history of Stockholm, and as such appears frequently in various contexts. The 1000 kronor banknote published in 1989 shows a portrait of King Gustav Vasa, based on a painting from the 1620s, in front of details from Vädersolstavlan. In the arcs of the parhelion is the microtext SCRIPTURAM IN PROPRIA HABEANT LINGUA, which roughly translates to "Let them have the Holy Scripture in their own language". This is a quote from a letter written by the king in which he ordered a translation of the Bible into the Swedish language...

More re the painting at Wikipedia. Those interested in parahelia might look at my old posts on sun halos and light pillars.

"Ice-out" pending

This past week, Paul Douglas' On Weather blog posted this photo showing the lake ice status in Minnesota.  Leech Lake (my favorite) is the one at the end of the upper pink line.  When the ice is out up there, my blogging will be subject to more frequent interruptions.

When I was little, communities used to park cars on the lakes and have residents enter contests to guess when the car would plummet through the ice.  Such contests are still held, but I don't think any cities use cars for that purpose anymore (?).

Sample questions from the National History Bowl

Congratulations to my old high school, which had a team among the finalists for the National History Bowl competition.  The website for the competition offers sets of sample questions; here are some examples -

10. This amendment is the only one adopted by state conventions instead of state legislatures. Utah’s ratification brought it into effect in 1933, which is somewhat ironic in a sense. Name this amendment to the Constitution, the only one to repeal a different amendment, the 18th, which had introduced Prohibition, which came to an end with this amendment’s passing.

6. The inhabitants of this city may have participated in child sacrifice in their worship of the god Baal. Dominated for years by the Barca family, It is described in Book 1, Line 12 of the Aeneid as being both ancient and settled by colonists from Tyre. For ten points, name this city in modern-day Tunisia which was destroyed after the third Punic War with Rome.

6. Although a colony of Portugal not of Britain, it is still a member of the Commonwealth Nations. And although not home to a communist government, its flag still features the star of Marxism and an AK-47. Just like another Portuguese colony, roughly 1500 miles to its northwest, Angola, it won independence in 1975. For twenty points, name this country on the east coast of Africa whose foreign relations with neighboring Zimbabwe and South Africa improved dramatically in the 1980’s.

8. He was clearly the most competent commander for his state in World War I, although that couldn’t prevent his state’s defeat at the hands of Lawrence of Arabia, among others. His military prowess also proved useful in the war against Greece which soon followed. Following the war, he helped institutionalize secular principles in his country and introduced the Latin alphabet in lieu of Arabic. For twenty points, name this man whose mausoleum can be seen in Ankara, the founder of modern Turkey.