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FOUND: A Triceratops-like Dino With an Extra Fancy Frill

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Wendiceratops pinhornesis (Image: Danielle Dufault/PLOS ONE)

The newest addition to the growing group of Ceratopsida dinosaurs—the family that includes, most famously, Triceratops—had a particularly fancy frill and, likely, a large horn growing straight up out of its nose. The scientists who announced its discovery, in PLOS ONE, named it Wendiceratops pinhornesis, after the person who found it and the place where it was found.

The dinosaurs' bones were first spotted by Wendy Sloboda, a professional fossil hunter, at the  Pinhorn Provincial Grazing Reserve in Alberta. She alerted paleontologists at the Southern Alberta Dinosaur Research Project, and for two field seasons, they spent their time uncovering the fossil.

The frill of the animal was "ornamented by a pretty spectacular wave of gnarly hooks that project forward," David Evans, one of the paleontologists told NPR. They look a bit like a cresting wave. But more importantly, they and other Wendiceratops features give the scientists clues into Certaopsida evolution. "We're finding that these horned dinosaurs replaced each other every half-million years," Michael Ryan, another paleontologist who worked on Wendiceratops, told NBC News.

Bonus finds: Golden spiral ornaments worn by Bronze Age priestsorgansPluto's heart

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

 


Hidden Wonders of the Digital World: EVE Online

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The Press Pass braves the cruel cosmos. (All screencaps by Eric Grundhauser)

Inside EVE Online, a colossal multi-player science fiction game, space is vast and space is gorgeous, with blazing nebulas, a rainbow of different suns, and countless bits of unknowable future technology.

At least, the vistas we could enter without being blown up.

EVE Online got started in 2003 and currently has around half a million registered users (EVE does not release exact user numbers) from all around the world. Unlike many other standard MMORPGs, EVE takes place almost exclusively in outer space, not in some kind of fantastical Earth, as you guide your ship through a staggeringly vast universe of star systems and galactic regions. Space warfare is its primary driver, with mind-boggling ship-building, resource management, and economics systems, and an intricate and ever-evolving system of political wars among the huge player corporations. The crunchy, minutia-driven mechanics of EVE Online have led to the game often being described as “spreadsheets in space,” and that isn’t exactly an incorrect description.

But what many people often forget amongst the stat blocks and backstabbing is that these are some beautiful fucking spreadsheets—and we just had to explore them.


A journey of cosmic exploration deserves a futuristic soundtrack. Hit play. 

As the in-game story goes, in the year 7987 CE, the now star-faring human race discovered a stable wormhole that led to a far-flung quadrant of space, ripe with new planets and resources. The EVE Gate was built around the wormhole to stabilize it and the human race began colonizing the worlds beyond the gate in a region that came to be known as New Eden. But just 74 years after the gate was built, the wormhole mysteriously collapsed and the expansionist humans were trapped in their distant portion of the galaxy. Cut off from Earth, the colonies began dying off or simply reverting back to simple survival societies on their new planets.

Warp to (pun intended) roughly the year 23349 CE and mankind has built itself back into a quartet of warring empires whose battles play out among the stars of New Eden and beyond using fleets of ships large and small, piloted by clones encased in protective capsules (player pilots are known as “capsuleers”). When you start the game you create a character, and must choose one of the four races of humans to join. There is the Amarr Empire, a militant theocracy; the Minmatar Republic, a rebellious, tribal society; the Gallente Federation, full of hedonistic dilettantes, and the Caldari State, a proud, loyal people. Once these choices are made, you are given a starter ship, and shunted out into this brave (and dangerous) new galaxy.

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Somewhere between a red sun and a planet.

And it is nothing less than a bit daunting. Senior PR and Social Media Lead Ned Coker for CCP Games, the company behind EVE, says that there are over 7,900 solar systems, 67,000 planets, 342,000 moons, 5,900 space stations and 66 regional markets in the playable EVE universe. And those numbers don’t include the countless asteroid fields, mysterious monuments, and wormholes throughout the game world.

Then there is the player base. EVE Online differs from many MMORPGs in a few major ways. Many MMORPGs split players across a number of segmented servers, but in EVE, there is only one server that everyone plays on, Tranquility. So, the massive player base is all flying around a single galaxy. The exception is Chinese players who play on their own server because, as Coker says, the laws in China do not allow a Western company to operate virtual worlds in the country.

The other major difference that exists in EVE is that player-versus-player combat is always on. This means that at any time, anywhere in the galaxy, an aggressive player (or more often, group of players, known as “corporations”) in a stronger ship can come and blow you out of the sky. However this is not to say that space is a lawless wasteland. Each system is broken up into different security levels, policed by NPCs from the various races. High security systems (hi-sec), will quickly respond to any indiscretions in force; low security systems (low-sec), will do the same just with less of a force; and then there are the unguarded systems (null-sec), regions that are lorded over by often-violent player corporations, which are dangerous for any capsuleer daring enough to travel through them.

Travel through the vast expanses of space is achieved by either slow impulse flying, or quicker warp travel within each star system, and using stargates to travel from system to system. The easiest way to get around is to plot a course on the map and throw your ship into autopilot as it slowly takes its course through sometimes dozens of stargate jumps in real-time. This means that traveling from one far-flung portion of the galaxy to another can often take over an hour, if you survive.

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In EVE a stargate will take you much farther than Egypt.

For our purposes (and because we did not have the six months to a year it can take to truly delve into many of the mechanics, as much as we would have loved to), we focused simply on the simple exploration of the most interesting and gorgeous bits of the EVE universe.

To narrow down our search, we contacted the master of EVE exploration and author of the awesome EVE Travel blog, Mark726. In his Buzzard-class Covert Operations ship, Professor Science, Mark726 has been tooling around EVE since 2007, rooting out the hidden wonders in the dark corners of the galaxy. He is one of a small group of players who gravitate not towards the space combat, but towards space-faring itself.

Mark726 suggested a few of his favorite places (and full disclosure, explained exactly how to navigate EVE space as I was floundering) and I set off in my little Velator-class Gallente rookie ship. I named my ship the Press Pass in the hopes that it might dissuade any hostile players from preying on me as I traveled (it did not).

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Random warp bubbles will force you to stop and smell the comet dust.

The first thing about traveling in EVE is that it is simply awe-inspiring. This is no journey through a black expanse dotted with single points of light, but instead your little ship throttles past bright red suns, huge planets that blot out the sky, and colorful nebulas that are locked realistically in space so that their aspects change as you travel to closer or further systems. It would be easy to just randomly drift through space forever, just taking in the cosmic vistas. Combined with the constant threat of being attacked and destroyed, exploring in EVE gives a very real sense of one striking out into the great unknown.

Getting a little more focus, the Press Pass warped and jumped to what was by far the most highly recommended landmark, a huge monument known as Titanomachy. (Mark726, Ned Coker, and even Creative Director, Torfi Frans Olafsson all suggested that I check it out). The in-game memorial was created after the Battle of B-R5RB, a 22-hour player battle that gained widespread media attention, and was said to have cost the gamers $300,000 of in-game assets. Over 600 ships were lost in the fighting including an unprecedented amount of enormous Titan-class ships, the largest in the game, which take thousands of play hours to build and learn to fly. After the fighting stopped, the destroyed hulks were made permanent floating fixtures in space, along with Titanomachy itself, a colossal statue, affixed to the broken prow of a Titan.

Despite it taking me through various low and null-sec systems, I got there just fine and was not disappointed. The scale in EVE is often hard to correctly communicate in pictures, but the Press Pass was thoroughly dwarfed by the wreckage and monument itself.

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Titanomachy surrounded by the shattered Titans of the Battle of B-R5RB.

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Titanomachy in scale.

Flying away from Titanomachy I stopped by a semi-common landmark in the current EVE universe called a Jove Observatory. These huge, mysterious spires are thought to have been created by a secretive fifth race that originated in New Eden, the Jove. The purpose of the floating spikes is unknown, but their titanic scale and cosmic mystery bring to mind the Monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey by way of H.R. Giger.

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I was scared to get too close to the Jove Observatory.

Emboldened by my successful trip to the carnage of B-R5RB, I next set course for a place Mark726 called the Infested Comet Remains located with the Contested Canyon of Rust. This ruined space station was overrun by rogue robots and had to be abandoned and is now hidden deep within a series of ancient warp ramps. Unfortunately the the drones that created the wreck still infest the area. Having devoted no time to honing ship combat, when the first ancient warp tossed my ship right into a cluster of the angry drones, the Press Pass was destroyed for the first time, but definitely not the last.

When a ship is destroyed you are ejected as a little survival pod that can get your capsuleer back to a station to take control of another ship, although the capsule too can be destroyed by determined enemies. Luckily there was a space station nearby and the Press Pass II was soon soaring through the galaxy.

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The ancient warp ramp that would spell the doom of the original Press Pass.

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Goodbye Press Pass I.

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A naked capsuleer.

Inspired by the brush with death, the next landmark to visit was known as the Capsuleer Cemetery. Unlike Titanomachy, or the Jovian monument, which were permanent fixtures created by CCP Games, the Capsuleer Cemetery was created by players as an unofficial monument to all the dead clones that have died in New Eden over the years. A player or players have placed number of capsuleer corpses in permanent beacon markers orbiting a disused space station that seems to be encased in an impenetrable warp bubble. The hundreds of bodies floating there in space make a memorable statement about the constant dangers of the EVE universe.

article-imageThe anomaly that marks the site of the Capsuleer Cemetery.

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This beacon holds the corpse of a dead capsuleer.

Finally I set out to visit Steve, the first Titan ever built in EVE Online back in 2006. The huge ship must have been a frighteningly impressive sight when it launched, so of course it was only a few months before a corporation of players banded together and shot it down. Being such a momentous craft, its remains were also made a permanent monument in the spot where it was shot down. The only problem: Steve’s grave is located 30-some jumps through null-sec space. Given the relatively non-violent reaction the Press Pass had so far received (angry NPC robots aside), this didn’t seem like it would be a big problem. But not all systems are friendly.

When I reached the first null-sec system in the jump chain, I warped across it to the next stargate, but the ship came out of warp far short of the gate. It had been stopped by warp-dampening field surrounding the gate that was swarming with hostile player ships. Within seconds, the Press Pass II was destroyed, and a second later the escape capsule followed, leaving behind a dead, naked clone floating in space.

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Dammit.

The attack had happened so fast that it was hard to tell exactly what had happened, but now the capsuleer’s conscience was back in the starting station, light years away in-game, and about half-an-hour away in real-time. But Steve had to be reached, so the Press Pass III took flight towards the wrecked Titan, to see if maybe the hostile players had left by the time we got back to the stargate.

By the voyage of the Press Pass VII or so, it soon became clear that reaching Steve may be unattainable without some upgrades to the ship. We tried accessing the gate at different times of day, flying to it manually, and even pleading over the general chat channel. But in EVE space, no one cares to hear you scream. Thus we were unable to reach Steve.

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One day... the ancestors of the Press Pass I will meet Steve.

EVE Online is such a huge universe, and carries such an emphasis on impersonal number-crunching that it seems almost hilariously antithetical that exploring it can feel so singular and unique. But it’s instances like my inability to reach Steve the Titan that make it so exciting. Visiting that landmark must be earned, and not simply by finding a way to outwit a computer, but by taking part in the living universe surrounding New Eden. The galactic politics and wars that are so often the focus of EVE sometimes obscure the awe-inspiring backdrops in which they take place. But if all so-called spreadsheets were this pretty, everyone would have an office job.

A special thanks to Mark726, Ned Coker, and Torfi Frans Olafsson without whom I would very literally never have left space dock.

How to Win a Tuna-Throwing Contest

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article-imageJackie Hockaday, who tossed the tuna 11.12m to become the 2014 winner. (Photo: Courtesy Tunarama Festival

To throw a tuna, be prepared to hold the fish by the tail and spin. That’s the way it’s done in the city of Port Lincoln in South Australia where “tuna tossing” isn’t just some unconventional salad preparation. The tuna toss is part of an annual festival called Tunarama that celebrates the town’s seafaring history—and the wealth it’s created.

If Port Lincoln is known for anything, it’s seafood. This small seaside town of 14,000 may be geographically isolated but has the largest fishing industry in the country. Reputedly, the prevalence of high value fish like southern bluefin tuna has helped the city go from a sleepy port town into a place with the highest number of millionaires per capita. Richard Ellis writes in his book, Tuna: Love, Death, and Mercury, that nearby Japan buys “the entire catch of the Port Lincoln tuna fleet”. As Japan’s demand for fatty bluefin tuna rose, so too did the income of tuna fishermen—often referred to as “tuna barons.”

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Matt Staunton, 2015 winner. (Photo: Erin Staunton) 

In 1962, the town decided to create a festival at the same time of year the fishing fleet was put out to sea—on Australia Day weekend at the end of January. This being the southern hemisphere, the timing puts it right in the middle of the continent’s summer.

By 1979, festival promoters decided that the annual Tunarama needed an extra kick. Something that was flashy but also related to the town’s fishing business. At the time, the method of unloading fish from the boats was a very hands-on job. As the official Tuna Toss history states, “Men would stand on the decks of the boats, and throw tuna up onto the waiting trucks.” Hopeful fishermen were often hired on the basis of how far they could throw one of these slippery tuna that weighed an average of 20 pounds. The best got to work; the rest went home. The festival committee decided to rebrand this trial as a “local sport” and add the tuna toss to the lineup of events at Tunarama.

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From the first year, it was a great success. Now there’s also the lightweight “prawn toss” for five- to ten-year-olds.

Unlike the fishermen, festival tuna tossers didn’t have to grab fish by their tails (or wherever they could find enough traction to get a good grip) but rather had a rope handle attached to the tuna. For almost the first 30 years of the festival, they used real frozen fish that were too small or otherwise unsuited for market. Though the hard freeze kept tuna from exploding on impact, they certainly looked a bit worse for wear as the competition days wore on. But the collapse of tuna stock and concerns about wastefulness prompted the festival to work with a local artist to create comparable tunas made from polyurethane in 2007.

Okay, but what does it actually take to throw a long-distance tuna?

Matt Staunton is a four-time tuna tossing champion (he and his wife Shanell Staunton won the men and women’s titles in 2015) who credits his background as a hammer thrower with his success. Ideal tuna tossing form is so similar to hammer throwing, says Staunton, that “it’s all the preparation you need” In both cases, the ideal method seems to be spinning in a few circles to gather up some velocity and letting the tuna fly at the ideal moment. The current record-holder is Sean Carlin, an Olympic hammer thrower from Adelaide. He managed to throw a tuna 37.23 meters (or 122 feet) in 1998—a record that still stands today. 

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2015 winner Shanell Staunton. (Photo: Erin Staunton)

article-imageThe 2015 victors. (Photo: Erin Staunton)

Yet not everyone has professional training that might help them make their fish fly.

 Staunton’s family has lived in Port Lincoln for 70 years and he grew up going to Tunarama. He says that spectacular tuna blunders are kept mostly to a minimum but people commonly fall over after taking their legs out from under them. “There’s also been a lot of people who try to spin it around their heads,” Staunton adds. In 1989 the festival was actually sued when a spectator was hit by a 17 pound frozen tuna and wound up in the hospital. So watch at your own risk.

FOUND: Sharks Hanging Out in a Volcano

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A volcano—even an undersea volcano—might not seem like the best place to hang out. The water is notably hot, even when the volcano's not erupting, acidic, and bubbling with gas.

One such underwater volcano, Kavachi, near the the Solomon Islands, has not been much explored, because it's dangerous to get anywhere near it and difficult for divers to tolerate the heat. But, as National Geographic reports, recently Brennan Phillips, a oceanographic engineer, and his team used underwater robots and cameras to dive deep into the volcano, and they found something unexpected—sharks. 

“These large animals are living in what you have to assume is much hotter and much more acidic water, and they’re just hanging out,” Phillips told National Geographic.

These were hammerheads and silky sharks, and the fact that they seemed perfectly happy in the volcano's presumably scorching waters raised one pretty big and as-of-yet unanswered question: How do they do it? 

Bonus finds: Rodin statue stolen 24 years agogiant starfish

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

 

The Deck of Cards That Made Tarot A Global Phenomenon

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article-image(All photos: Atlas staff) 

Picture a deck of tarot cards. What do you see? Maybe the Magician in his rich red robes, right arm raised high above him. Or the skeleton on horseback for Death. Or maybe you think of The Hermit in grey, holding his lantern, walking with a staff, featured in the artwork for Led Zeppelin IV

The funny thing is that those images don't hail from some ancient text but from one particular deck of cards, a relatively recent one in the life of this medieval form of entertainment: The Rider (or Rider-Waite-Smith) Tarot. That you can visualize a tarot card at all is likely due to one man, an American business man named Stuart R. Kaplan, founder and chairman of U.S. Games Systems, Inc., which has been producing and selling the Rider-Waite deck since 1970.

Well, him and the artist, Pamela Colman Smith, responsible for the 78 original drawings that make up the deck. 

Tarot itself is a fairly simple game. The instructions, with each card placed in its position having a particular purpose, are strikingly simple, easy for even a first timer. With time and practice, the cards may begin to really convey meaning, asking us to look deeper at ourselves and our motives, and nudging us in the correct direction. But it took an unholy trinity to bring this to the American public. The most famous and popular tarot deck in the world, the first ever printed in English, the Rider-Waite tarot is a product of the intuitive thoughtfulness of an American-born occult scholar in late 19th century London, a British-born creative visual genius who studied art in New York City and lived in Jamaica, and a businessman whose first book was about coal mining techniques who happened upon a set of tarot cards at a toy fair in the late 1960s. These three people, essentially, are the only reason any of us know much of anything about tarot.


 

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Tarot cards have a long story and a short one. The long one begins in 15th century Europe, where the 78 card deck—four suits (Wands, Cups, Swords, Pentacles) of 10 “pip”cards running from Ace to ten, each with an additional four “face”cards (King, Queen, Knight, and Jack) plus 21 Trump cards known as the Major Arcana, plus the Fool—form the traditional tarot deck. Without the Major Arcana, the cards of Tarot are roughly aligned with a standard playing card deck, which has its roots in France a few hundred years earlier. By the 15th century, tarot cards were widely used for popular trick-taking games such as French Tarot (which is still widely played) and the Italian game tarochini.

The shorter story, however, is how Tarot came to be used in fortune telling. In 1781, when Antoine Court de Gébelin, a French Freemason and Protestant pastor published a book called Le Monde Primitif, tracing the mysticisms of the ancient world and their surviving traces in the modern. Among them, he included the famous French playing card deck, the Tarot de Marseilles, which he connected to the Egyptian deities Isis and Thoth. Though his musings on the subject haven’t been found to be based on any evidence, tarot’s association with the mystical was now set. A few other, mostly French, writers and occultists followed in writing treatises and books on the occult leanings and possibilities offered by the cards, but tarot readings were hardly mainstream.

In 19th century England, however, interest verging on a mania raged for all things occult. Suddenly, worlds of knowledge, coupled with current thinking on the psychology of the human mind opened up, and people of all walks of life became enamored with contacting the spirit world to find out the future or to commune with the dead. Christians began reading the Kabbalah. Interest in photographing ghosts rose.

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The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, devoted to study of the occult, and one of the first organizations of its type to fully admit women in addition to men, was founded with its first temple in London in 1888. Called the Isis-Urania Temple, it was founded by three Freemasons who were also members of the Rosicrucian Society of England, an esoteric Christian order. Early members of the Golden Dawn included William Butler Yeats, Aleister Crowley, and Arthur Edward Waite. Several splinter temples formed over disputes—largely seeming to do with the later famous occultist Aleister Crowley, who was infamous during his lifetime for his experimentation with drugs, his libertine lifestyle, and his outspoken minority opinion for the time that homosexual desires should never be repressed or ignored. One of the reformed orders included who would become the founding team of the modern English language tarot: Arthur Edward Waite and Pamela Colman Smith.

Arthur Edward Waite was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1857 to an American father and a British mother. Arthur’s father died before he was two, leaving his mother a widow. She returned with her family to England, where Arthur spent the rest of his life. He apparently became interested in the occult when his sister died at a young age in 1874. Eventually, he joined up with the Order of the Golden Dawn, later also becoming a Freemason and then a Rosicrucian. As far as occult topics were concerned, Waite’s interests were varied and far-reaching. He wrote books on topics such as the Kabbalah, mysticism, ceremonial magic, and the Holy Grail, beginning in the late 1880s. His work was well received in mystic and academic circles, and he was soon one of the best known authorities on such topics. One of his books, Book of Black Magic and Pacts (1898) led a very young Aleister Crowley to write to Waite for advice. Eventually, through their associations with the various societies and brotherhoods, the two sparred and became “enemies,”with Crowley attacking Waite in his writings for years. There is a hint of theatrics to all of this, and the contemplative Waite seems not to have taken the bait for the most part. Certainly it didn’t slow down the prolific output of either.

Which brings us back to the tarot cards. In 1908 the British Museum acquired black and white photographs of a full deck of tarot cards now known as the Sola-Busca deck. The deck, which dates from around 1490, was extremely special, and Arthur Edward Waite would have known that when he went to see the photographs on exhibition at the museum soon after their arrival.

It is, first and foremost, the earliest extant complete tarot deck. It is also, significantly, the first deck to illustrate all of the “pip”cards: previous decks had all had a 2 of Swords, but instead of a full illustration, there would simply be two swords on the card. This deck illustrated all cards equally, with fully realized illustrations, setting its suits apart from regular old playing cards, and thereby also obscuring their relationship to the layman’s eyes. The Sola-Busca deck would prove to be inspirational to Pamela Colman Smith, the artist Waite chose to draw his deck, and in fact several of the cards in both decks are almost identical in design.

Smith’s story begins in London, where she was born to an American father and a Jamaican mother. She travelled between Jamaica, London, and New York as a child, and eventually studied art at the Pratt Institute in New York City under Arthur Wesley Dowell, though she didn’t earn a degree. She set up shop as a commercial illustrator in London and did the art for a volume of William Butler Yeats verse, several magazines, and eventually illustrated Bram Stoker’s last published work, The Lair of the White Worm, in 1911. Smith’s art was colorful and unique, and in 1907 Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer (and eventual husband of Georgia O’Keefe) gave Smith her own show at his Photo-Secession Gallery, in his first non-photographic exhibit. Like Waite, Smith’s interests were varied, and she published her own books on Jamaican folklore, as well as (briefly) her own magazine, The Green Sheaf, each issue of which bore the words, “my sheaf is small, but it is green.” Smith was known in her own time to have a “second sight,”and to paint pictures based on visions she saw while listening to music. She was ushered into the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn by Yeats, which she joined in 1901. She splintered off with Waite when he left the Order to form his own incarnation.

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It was, then, through their association with one another that Waite came to commission Smith to create 78 original drawings for the new tarot deck, the first one in English, which he wished to create. Unlike most previous decks, Waite's tarot would be primarily for divination and so the images would be intentionally laden with meaning. In six months, Smith completed the work, seemingly from written instructions by Waite for the Major Arcana, letting her imagination fully guide the rest of the deck. The Rider-Waite deck, as it came to be known, was published in 1909 by Rider Company in England. The next year, Waite published a small guide to reading the cards for Rider, and in 1911 he published his full book on the subject, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot. 

Smith’s drawings, under the guidance of Waite—who proposed a thoughtful way for everyday people to read the cards years before the industry of professional tarot readers sprang up—are vibrant and intuitive, and though Waite’s aim was to produce a beautiful, art-minded deck (success!) what happened was that the two created a deck capable of passing, eventually, into the mainstream consciousness.

Each of Smith’s drawings conjures enough of Waite’s key phrases—the divinatory meanings of the cards—that the pure novice is likely to guess at them on a cursory peek at the image itself. Take the Nine of Swords, for example. The image, on a stark black background, nine swords in parallel behind a figure, sitting up from the covers in bed, head in hands. The image is desolate: something awakens him or her (and so many of Smith’s figures are androgynous) in the dead of night. Is it worry or fear, or is it both? One looks at the card and sympathizes: we have all had such sleepless nights of pondering, either over the past which cannot be changed, or the present, which is confusing. You can see this in the card without ever glimpsing Waite’s accompanying text.

But here is his text:

Divinatory Meanings: Death, failure, miscarriage, delay, deception, disappointment, despair. Reversed (when the card appears upside down in a reading): Imprisonment, suspicion, doubt, reasonable fear, shame.”

A complete newcomer to the tarot, if asked to describe the emotions the card generates might not come up with these exact words, but the meaning is certainly apparent, and obvious. And so goes each and every card, even the ones which describe more abstract thoughts and feelings. It was this mind-melding of Waite and Smith which produced the deck of tarot cards which most of us now know as “the tarot.”

When Arthur Waite died in 1942, his obituary, published in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, called him the author of “many books on occult phenomenon.”There was no mention of his tarot deck. When Pamela Colman Smith died 16 years later... well, I can find no obituary for Smith. Tarot cards, never mainstream, didn’t exactly disappear, but they also did not flourish by any means.


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Enter Stuart R. Kaplan, a graduate of the Wharton School of Business in 1955. “I’m all yours,”he tells me after a few weeks of missed connections on the phone, before launching into his personal history. Kaplan was working in New York City in the late 1960s, managing mines in West Virginia and Pennsylvania when he went to Germany on a business trip in 1968, ending up, out of curiosity, on his free time, at the Nuremberg Toy Fair. He wasn’t completely unknown in the world of games: he’d created his own Student Survival board game in the U.S., and it had seen moderate success. Still, when he happened upon the exhibition booth of the Swiss AG Müller & Cie, he found an odd deck of cards, and he was intrigued.

Kaplan didn’t know much of anything about tarot at that point, but cut a deal to import a few thousand of the decks—known as the Swiss 1JJ tarot—to sell in the United States. Kaplan targeted large bookstores such as Brentano’s, and was successful enough in his efforts that he began looking for other tarot decks to import. In the meantime, he wrote the first of his many, many books on tarot: Tarot Cards for Fun and Fortune Telling, published in 1970. In 1971 he began to sell a Marseilles-style tarot deck, and wrote a second, more detailed book, Tarot Classic. This book delved into the history of tarot, and for the first time Kaplan wrote about Arthur Edward Waite. Soon after, Kaplan negotiated with the British company that held rights to the Rider-Waite deck, which he says wasn’t selling decks at that point. Kaplan wouldn’t import the cards. Working with Rider and the blessing of Waite’s only surviving heir, his daughter Sybil, Kaplan would own the rights to publish them in the United States.

The Rider-Waite tarot, and tarot generally, had never been widely in circulation. But Kaplan had now been, for several years, selling hundreds of thousands of tarot decks quietly from the offices of his new company, U.S. Games Systems, Inc. in Stamford, Connecticut. And when he began selling Waite’s deck, there was a slow but sure explosion. “I think the full illustrations of all the cards, including the pips, is the key to the deck’s longevity and popularity,” Kaplan says. U.S. Games, which currently has about 50 decks in print and has published hundreds over the years, prints decks for a few years and then refreshes. Only the Rider-Waite decks have never gone out of print, and demand for them, Kaplan says, is always consistent.

By the mid-1970s, tarot was on its way to becoming popular in the mainstream, and almost everyone’s tarot cards came from the same place, U.S. Games Systems, Inc. “We have prevailed because we have devoted all of our attention to tarot cards,”Kaplan says. “Companies come and go: they’ll print one deck and then be gone. We have never given up,” he goes on, and because of Kaplan and his company, tarot cards are widely available and cheap. “If I see a deck on sale on eBay,” Kaplan, also an avid collector of games, rare tarot cards, and books says, “and it’s $100 or something, that upsets me. If there is a demand for an old deck that’s out of print then we’ll just bring it back. The decks aren’t supposed to be so expensive.”

Kaplan sold parts of his own personal collection of rare tarot artifacts at Christie’s in 2006, with some individual cards selling for thousands of dollars. U.S. Games sells new decks for $20. “I think tarot is popular because each deck is an unpaged book," Kaplan says. “Shuffle them and you’ll get a new story every time.”

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Inside The Colorful, Hypnotic World of Textile Mills

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article-imagePolartec, Lawrence, MA. (All photos: Christopher Payne)

In one textile mill, the floor shudders as clanging, oily machines churn out dainty, colorful fabrics. In another, sheets of lace are quietly created on century-old looms. Welcome to the wide-ranging world of American textile mills, circa 2015.

Photographer Christopher Payne has spent the last five years exploring mills from the Carolinas, where the largest number of textile manufacturers are based, to New England, where some of the mills date back to the time of the American Revolution. According to Payne, many of the older mills are “still functioning as they have for decades, using vintage equipment,” while newer mills have become increasingly automated.

In this glorious series of photos, Payne takes us inside the intriguingly varied factories that create the textiles that get shipped all around the globe with “made in America” on their labels. 

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 Creel with tubes filled with woolen yarns for a carpet loom, Bloomsburg Carpet Industries, Bloomsburg, PA.

What specifically attracted you to document textile mills?

In 2010, I discovered an old yarn mill in Maine that reminded me of the state hospital workshops I had photographed for my book, Asylum. While those places had long been abandoned, this mill was fully operational, a scene from the past miraculously coexisting with the present. Given my background in architecture, I have always been fascinated by how things are made, and textiles are another form of construction, albeit on a human scale.

I am also deeply concerned about the loss of craftsmanship and manufacturing in the American workplace. We don’t make anything anymore, and in this era of service jobs and office work, most of us have never been inside a factory. Several decades of overseas competition, unequal trade policies, and a flood of cheap imports have decimated American factories.

Since 1990, job losses in apparel and textiles have been greater than those in any other type of manufacturing, and today we have little idea where, or how, the shirt on our back is made. Taking on a project about this iconic industry seemed like an effective way to tell the story of American manufacturing as a whole—how it has changed, and what its future may hold. 

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 Bartlettyarns, Harmony, ME.

Are there particular aspects of working mills that may surprise people?

What photographs cannot convey is the visceral raw energy of a working factory. The floors vibrate, the machines run at insanely fast speeds, and the noise is deafening. Stepping through the front door, onto the mill floor, is like walking into a giant engine room—something you can’t get from your iPhone or computer screen. And yet, from the street, a passerby might never know what’s going on inside.

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Gerber conveyor, Sterlingwear, East Boston, MA. 

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Braiding machines, Conrad-Jarvis Corporation, Pawtucket, RI.

 Are any mills in particular more interesting to shoot?

Whether a mill is old or new, I never know what I will find, and each has its challenges. Some are completely modern, with state of the art equipment, while others are dirty and cluttered from decades of constant use. In general, the mills I enjoy shooting the most are those that make something I haven’t seen before.

Recently, I visited a mill in Rhode Island that produces lace on century-old looms. The complexity of these machines is mind-boggling, and yet they’re really just simple computers using punch cards to instruct bobbins of yarn to move over or under each other to form the filigree patterns.  

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White yarn bobbins on a beaming creel, Langhorne Carpet, Penndel, PA. 

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Picker and duster for separating and cleaning raw wool, Bartlettyarns, Harmony, ME. 

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Circular knitting machines for Darn Tough socks, Cabot Hosiery Mills, Northfield, VT.

Is there anything that has changed in mills like that since their heyday?

Walking into one of the older mills is like stepping back in time. Visually, nothing has changed. Even the offices look like they’re right out of the 1960s, with wood paneling, typewriters, and heavy steel furniture. Workers have kept old machines in service by cannibalizing parts from shuttered mills. What has changed, however, is the industry, and the sense of community it engendered. One veteran employee recalled how it was possible, in the 1970s, to quit a job at one mill, walk down the street, and get a job at another mill in the same day. These kinds of factory towns no longer exist.

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Burling and mending, Woolrich Woolen Mill, Woolrich, PA.

What is the community like in different factories? How do the workers feel about you coming to photograph? 

The workplaces contain a cross section of young and old, skilled and unskilled, recent immigrants, and veteran employees, some of whom have spent their entire lives in a single factory. It is still common for a mill to draw its workforce from the surrounding neighborhood. Almost everyone at a mill in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, is Cape Verdean, and they speak Portuguese, while workers at another mill in Fall River, Massachusetts, are from the Azores, and they also speak Portuguese.

The people I’ve met are proud of the work they do, and eager to tell their story. Whether they want to pose for a portrait is another story! I try not to be too distracting because they’re on a tight production schedule, and a delay in one area affects others down the line. They’re also shutting down a machine so I can take a shot.

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Warp knitter, Darlington Fabrics, Moore Company, Westerly, RI. 

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Leavers Lace, West Greenwich, RI.

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Circular knitting machines, Fall River Knitting Mills, Fall River, MA.

What do you find most compelling, visually, about the mills? 

What I find most compelling is the visual contrast between the rugged, oily machines and the delicate, beautiful fabric they produce. It’s a surreal juxtaposition that can make or break a photograph. If necessary, I’ll wait months until a mill is running bright colors.

One of my favorite shots is of the pink wool being carded. It looks like cotton candy. For most of the year this mill spins a monochromatic mixture of grey and black yarn, used for fill inside the official major league baseballs, or for the U.S. Navy pea coat. And then for a few weeks, they run a rainbow of bright colors, and the place is transformed into Willy Wonka’s factory. I’ve never seen anything like it.

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Wool carders, S&D Spinning Mill, Millbury, MA.

What Does It Take to Rename a Building?

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The James A. Farley Post Office (Image: Charley Lhasa/Flickr)

The decision to change the name of the United States' busiest rail station was made in a day.

On March 26, 2003, former Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan died. For years, Moynihan had been pushing to expand Penn Station into the building next door, the Farley Building. Originally used as a post office, it's a soaring, grand space designed by the same team that had created the original Penn Station, long since lost to mid-century urban development.

When Moynihan died, his plan to annex the Farley Building as part of New York's central station was just starting to gain traction. And at that time, one of his closest aides, Kevin Sheekey, was working in the mayor's office in New York City. Quickly, he put together a deal, and on March 27, Michael Bloomberg, then just two years into his 12 year mayoralty, announced that, one day, when the train station expanded, "We will honor [Sen. Moynihan's] larger than life dreams and their ultimate realization by naming the Daniel Patrick Moynihan Station in his memory."

More than a decade later, though, there is no building (or even part of a building) named Moynihan Station. What's the hold up? How do you rename a building, anyways? 


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Inside the 30th Street Station in Philadelphia, another renaming imbroglio. (Photo: By Cornellrockey/CC BY-SA 2.5

The main ingredient in changing a building's names seems to be the will to do so. In theory, since there are few formal laws governing the process, it should be relatively simple. But in practice, in some cases, it can be much more complicated. If a building is named at all, that name is usually tied up with either money or honor. And those connections can be tricky to undo.

Any building that's being re-named, first of all, is likely to have more than its fair share of love and money invested into it. Most buildings don't have or need or want names. But there are certain places in the world that named buildings occur more frequently: on the shore or along a mountain lake, on college campuses, along the poshest streets of New York City. The names of vacation homes might denote pride, or a terrible talent for puns (SEA-esta, Wild Thyme, All Decked Out, Breeze On Inn, Just Beachy, Knot 4 Sail). In the highest end of high rises, they are a marketing tool, agreed upon by a committee of developers who want to make potential buyers feel like they'll be living somewhere special. (Rutherford Stuyvesant pioneered the idea when he introduced apartment housing to the upper class in 1869.) 

For private buildings, the naming process is simple enough: pick one, and tell people that's what the building is called. The process of picking might take awhile, but once a name has been settled on, there are few barriers to execution. Get a sign made, carve it in stone above the entrance, print up some marketing materials, and hope it catches on.

This all gets more complicated when some combination of nostalgia, money, ego or politics enters in. On college campuses, buildings are often named after a person who donated a large amount of money to its construction or renovation. But how long does that gift hold for? What if the building needs to be renovated again, 20 years later? What if the person who the buildings was named after was a terrible racist or a defender of human slavery? No matter what, as UNC law professor Alfred Brophy writes, "expectations have grown around a name and any such move invites, at the very least, confusion and lost goodwill." (No one's saying you can't rename your grandparents' beachhouse with your own very clever idea, but probably you're going to fight with some distant cousins about it at the next family reunion.)

Renaming a government building has another layer of complication. Usually, the name needs to be approved by a governmental body. Naming a county courthouse, for instance, often requires a vote from a county legislature. Recently, both in Philadelphia and in Washington, D.C., politicians have tried to rename train stations that are owned by the federal government, which requires Congress to pass a bill. The push to rename 30th Street Station "William H. Gray III 30th Street Station" after a local political legend went through. (One headline: "Train Geeks Freaking Out Over 30th Street Renaming.)  The push to rename Washington's Union Station after Harry Truman did not.

Whenever a building is renamed, there's also the question of what people will actually call it. The building that could one day be the primary regional rail terminal for New York City is officially, today, the James A. Farley Post Office. Tell a New Yorker to meet you at the Farley Post Office, though, and you'd probably get a blank stare.


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One day, Moynihan Station, maybe? (Image: H Finkelstein & Son/Wikimedia)

The Penn Station mystery name situation has complexities most other names don't have to contend with. For starters, this building officially already has more than one identity. In 1973, it was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. On that list, says Alexis Abernathy, who works on the National Register, "it's called the U.S. General Post Office." That's the name it had at the time it was listed and no matter what anyone does in the present or future, "that's what it'll stay listed as." It was renamed the James A. Farley Post Office in 1982, after a local politician and postmaster. At the time, the building was owned by the federal government, which means Congress would have had a hand in the name change.

Since 2007, though, the building has been owned by New York's Empire State Development Corporation. In 2003, the deal was in the works, and there existed a state-run "Penn Station Development Corporation." That name was changed, within a year or so, to "Moynihan Station Development Corporation."

But naming any train-related place out in the real world of Midtown Manhattan after Daniel Patrick Moynihan has proven a much longer process. "It's not yet clear what the scope of the renaming is—what's actually going to be renamed Moynihan Station," says Dan Schned, a senior planner at the Regional Plan Association, connected to the group Friends of Moynihan Station. Part of the difficulty is that it's not still clear what the expansion of Penn Station will look like, how it will work, or when it'll be complete. “At this time there is no plan to change the name of the historic James A. Farley building," an Empire State Development official said, in a statement.

The bottom line, for most New Yorkers, though, has nothing to do with the name. Free us from the crowded and badly lit halls of the current Penn Station, and we'll call the new train station whatever anyone tells us to. 

 

Livin' On The Edge: The Precarious Architecture of 7 European Cliff Cities

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(Photo: Maria Rosa Ferre/Flickr)

Long before overcrowding and overpopulation was forcing humanity to think about building vertically, Europeans were already building in, on, and even over the edge of sheer cliffs. But forget simplistic dugouts and cliff caves. Across Europe there are towns and even portions of cities that are as precarious as anything built by ancient peoples simply looking for shelter.

Check out seven places where the structures seem as though they are practically asking to fall off a cliff.


1. SUSPENDED HOUSES OF PONT-EN-ROYANS

Pont-en-Royans, France

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(Photo: Laurent Espitallier/Flickr

Built in the 16th century, the suspended homes in the small French town of Pont-en-Royans are a great example of Are-You-Sure-This-Is-A-Good-Idea architecture. The colorful array of homes on the cliff side of the town hang out over craggy rocks, lush foliage, and the river below. There is a popular bridge near the top of the town where visitors congregate to take pictures of the questionable, but beautiful edifices, because apparently in Pon-en-Royans, one must always be suspended over open air. 

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(Photo: Patrick Gruban/Flickr)

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(Photo: Eric Huybrechts/Flickr)


2. SETENIL DE LAS BODEGAS
Setenil de las Bodegas, Spain

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(Photo: José Luis Sánchez Mesa/Flickr)

It seems that there have been people living in the region of Setenil de las Bodegas for at least 2,000 years, but it was not until the 12th century or so that they took to building their dwellings right into the cliffs. The Moors who built the original cliff settlement dug deep lanes into the rock to fortify their dwellings within from Spanish attacks. Eventually the settlement was taken by the Spanish, but it continued to grow, expanding the original cliff constructions and building a small city on the top. Today visitors can still take to the winding, cliff-bound lanes and see the lovely white houses inset into the cliff wall, not dangling over a void, but sitting beneath a shelf of dangling rock.

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(Photo: José Luis Sánchez Mesa/Flickr)

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(Photo: Samu/Flickr)


3. CASTELLFOLLIT DE LA ROCA
Castellfollit de la Roca, Spain

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(Photo: Maria Rosa Ferre/Flickr)

This medieval Spanish village looks like something straight out of Tolkien. Originally settled around a thousand years ago, the village sits on a tall, thin strip of volcanic rock with a 160-foot on either side. The rivers Fluvià and Toronell flow at the bottom of each respective cliff but at the top, rows of historic Spanish houses have been built right up to the edges, looking like they might crowd each other right off. The tight streets in the town seem to have barely been pried open between the buildings, just wide enough that none of them are shoved out into the abyss. Good luck finding parking.

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  (Photo: SBA73/Flickr)

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(Photo: Ferran Cerdans Serra/Flickr)


4. HANGING HOUSES OF CUENCA
Cuenca, Spain

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(Photo: elainne_dickinson/Flickr)

Starting in about the 15th century, space in the hilly city of Cuenca, Spain began to run out. Over the next 300 hundred years or so, as Cuenca continued to grow, the builders began to get a bit more creative in finding space, by constructing their buildings to hang out over the edge of cliffs. Many of these hanging houses would contain seven or eight stories, all stacked atop the air above the valley below. In the modern day, many of the hanging houses have been taken down, but a few stunning examples still remain, most notably one that now contains the Spanish Abstract Art Museum.

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(Photo: elainne_dickinson/Flickr)

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(Photo: orvalrochefort/Flickr)
  

5. THE VILLAGE OF CRACO
Craco, Italy

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(Photo: Martin de Lusenet/Wikipedia)

Moving over to Italy, maybe the only rival to Spain's cliff-built dominance, there is the village of Craco, a jumbled stone ghost town that looks like it might just slide down a cliffside. Built in the 8th century, the chaotically-stacked dwellings were created to be easily defensible from a barbarian horde. While this strategy was effective against raiding barbarians, it was less so against attacks by Mother Nature, and in 1991, the historic town finally suffered a landslide that forced the remaining inhabitants from the site. It is now a precarious ghost town that still sees tourists and religious festivals using the crumbling streets.

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(Photo: Andrea Tomassi/Wikipedia

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(Photo: Wallora/Wikipedia)


6. NEBIDA LAVERIA
Iglesias, Italy

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(Photo: Atlas Obscura)

While this was originally a processing plant built on the steep slope of an Italian sea cliff, the site is now being turned into a picturesque tourist town. Today the mineral plant is abandoned, but its slowly decaying remains are still clinging to the cliffs and have become a popular spot to come and gaze out at the pristine waters with nothing to obstruct your view. It may not be the largest cliff creation around, but It certainly offers the best view of the Italian sea.

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(Photo: /luca/Wikipedia)


7. SANT'AGATA DE' GOTI
Sant'Agata de'Goti, Italy

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(Photo: Kris De Curtis/Wikipedia)

Down by the ankle of the Italian "boot," the medieval town of Sant'Agata de'Goti ends in a sheer cliff that extends well above the natural summit thanks to the rows of buildings built flush with the rocky face. The long, flat side of the city rises above a river gorge below, and the inward side of the city is a full of cramped lanes and historic buildings. Sant'Agata de'Goti has managed to stay relatively unchanged from its old world roots thanks to the streets mainly being too narrow even for vehicles. But this is still most apparent in the view of its unreal bulwark of cliff-side architecture.

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(Photo: Pierluigi Peperoni/Flickr)


Curiouser and Curiouser: The World's Most Unusual and Beautiful Maps

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The Lion of Holland, from 1609, by Claes Jansz Visscher. (All images The British Library Board/Courtesy The University of Chicago Press

Even though without them we’d be lost, laypeople often take maps for granted. And, really, who can blame us? Rand McNally editions get mashed up in backseats and directions magically appear on screens. The maps most of us interact with don’t have much flair. But our blasé attitude is undeserved. Over the years mapmakers have blurred the lines between art and cartography, crafting strange, funny and surprising works.

In The Curious Map Book, co-published this year by the British Library and The University of Chicago Press, London-based map dealer and researcher Ashley Baynton-Williams presents a treasure trove of such cartographical wonders. Largely culled from the British Library’s vast collection, there are maps shaped like winged horses and lions; maps on teacups and blankets. Far from merely relics, Baynton-Williams includes examples from the present day.

Baynton-Williams answered questions about the book over email. 

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A 1655 untitled map of the 'Land of Tenderness', by Madeleine de Scudery, London. 

What makes an antique map unique and remarkable, or sets it apart from other antique maps?

The vast majority of antique maps are actually simply copies of existing material. The publishers were unable to afford their own surveys - we're in the days well before satellite photography—and geographical advances were a slow process, so they simply copied an existing map, disguising the fact by changing the decorative features.

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'A Humorous Diplomatic Atlas of Europe and Asia', 1904, by Kisaburo Ohara, Tokyo.

 What sets these curious maps apart (with the exception of the “Leo” maps of the Low Countries and a couple of others that caught mainstream attention) is that they represent the individual (unique) artistic talent of the maker, who created the image—and the range of items illustrated in the book is limited only by that imagination.

The Sleigh Fairyland Map is one item that I could simply look at for days and see different little elements. It's an amazing map—and design.

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'Geography Bewitched! Or, a Droll Caricature Map of Scotland', by Robert Dighton Sr 1793. 

How did you come to be interested in maps and what continues to fascinate you? How has the field of map study changed since you first started?

I was lucky; my grandfather and father both dealt in maps and prints. I was surrounded by them from an early age and loved it. I think I knew my career path from about 11 and I've never regretted it. Every day is different; almost every day I see something new, and pretty much every day I find out how little I really know. It's a bit humbling, but I love the idea that forty years in I'm still on an upward learning curve.

How has study changed? There are two ways; the first is the internet; I'm not sure I recommend the internet for the written word, but the availability of images is a huge help to researchers and writers like me. The American libraries have led the way in the digitisation of map images; the Library of Congress, the John Carter Brown Library, Yale, Harvard, the American Antiquarian Society and the Boston Public Library and the collector David Rumsey out in California (to name sites I use regularly) are making available amazing quality images that are freely downloadable. What previously might well have been days or hours of travel converted into minutes of download time.

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William Matthias Spooner's 'The Cottage of Content or Right Road and Wrong Ways.  A Humorous Game', 1848.  

The other way that study has changed is that it has become more academic; the great reference books from the past were about the maps themselves and the way the information they showed changed.

More recently (relatively speaking) the focus became more about the underlying philosophy / symbolism in the map, and the intent of the maker, begun by the late, great, J.B. Harley, who was founding editor, with David Woodward, of The History of Cartography project. While I think there is a valid argument—demonstrated, for example by Peter Barber and Tom Harper in Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art, a BL exhibition and accompanying book—I think that Harley, in his later writings, and his followers overstate the case, particularly with talk of "subliminal" symbolism.

As someone interested in "nuts-and bolts mechanics" of making a living in the map trade, I am un-persuaded.

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Map of Spain and Portugal, 1868. 

What do these curious maps tell us about the people who made them and about the times they were made in?

A difficult question to answer. My view is next to nothing about the makers; as I suggested above, others would disagree (profoundly, perhaps). To use an analogy, if you are a baker and love marzipan but your customers don't, do you make your next batch of cakes with or without marzipan? I'd suggest that maps by commercial publishers, who are trying to make a living, tell us a lot about the buyer, and the period they live in and the environment they are familiar with, but not the author. The author / mapmaker is trying to produce maps that sell, so targeting (marketing to—which is by no means a twentieth century invention, whatever some of the books say) his audience, the market place, and that marketing is direct and not subliminal—whether the Leo maps celebrating Holland's successful struggle for independence, the many British game maps of the late eighteenth century, with their imperial view, the jingoistic maps of the first year of the First World War or the Geographia game “Buy British” from the 1930s.

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'United States, a Correct Outline', 1880, by Eliza Jane [Lilian] Lancaster

 The fascinating thing about curious maps is that, unlike geographical maps which have a defined structure and boundaries, they are really about the maker's imagination—the mapmaker at play, as I like to say—and that's why they stand apart from other maps.

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An 1899 map 'Angling in Troubled Waters. A Serio-Comic Map of Europe'.

But, they exist because the publisher, with his investment in producing the maps, saw a market for it. And, fortunately for us, they appealed sufficiently to a buyer to be acquired and then kept, when so many maps of this ephemeral time simply were not, before finding their way into the BL (as one of any number of treasure houses of such things) to be preserved for previous, current and future generations to admire (and covet).   

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'An Ancient Mappe of Fairyland Newly Discovered and Set Forth', 1918, by Bernard Sleigh

Your Ticket to the 1893 Columbian Exposition

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This ticket to the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition showed a Native American chief. Actual American Indians were "displayed to fairgoers as objects of anthropological inquiry." [All photos: Tom Hoffman]

This story was sponsored by the fine folks of Enjoy Illinois.

Chicago fought hard to host the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. The competition was steep—New York and D.C. were also top contenders—and the city was still recovering from the Great Chicago Fire two decades earlier. But after they won the bid, city organizers pulled out all the stops. The "White City" they built on six hundred acres of filled-in swamp ran for six months and drew people from 46 countries. Overall, 27 million people came through its turnstiles and ticket booths to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus landing on American shores.

After it was over—when the temporary buildings began to come down, the sounds of the demonstrations died away, and the birds picked at the concession crumbs—fairgoers just had a few tokens to remember it by. Luckily, they were very well-designed tokens, taking the symmetrical, grandiose aesthetic of the entire fair and shrinking it down to pocket size. Below, a collection of 1893 World's Columbian Exposition souvenirs that might have ended up in your memory box, had you been a 19th-century fairgoer.

Portrait Tickets

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George Washington hopes you have a good time at the fair, seriously.

Out of the tens of millions of people who attended the fair, only a lucky 60,000 managed to get their hands on a "portrait ticket." These detailed notes served as season passes for exhibitors, organizers, press members, and other insiders. Engraved with great detail to prevent counterfeiting, each ticket featured either Washington, Lincoln, Columbus, or a stereotypical American Indian chief—figureheads who, taken together, were meant to represent various stages of the country's history.

article-imageGerman composer George Frideric Handel also got his own ticket, because his music was played throughout the fairgrounds.


One-day Tickets

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Tickets were about the size of a playing card.

Before the fair even started, people paid 25 cents to watch the fairground construction. Once it opened, single tickets cost 50 cents, the equivalent of about $14 today (kids got in for half price). "A great army" of workers manned the hundreds of ticket booths, windows and turnstiles, led by Department of Admissions Superintendent Horace Tucker, whose signature was printed on every ticket. Wide-ranging "special days," named after states and countries, and more esoteric themes ("Bohemia Day"; "Stenographer's Day") got their own collect-em-all ticket designs. 

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This ticket belonged to a construction worker, and was stamped with the relevant date.


Exciting Infrastructure

article-imageMr. S.H. Hale's Vertical Transit Co. installed a bank of eight elevators in the Transportation Exhibit. One guidebook wrote that the elevators "naturally form a part of the exhibit... as they also carry passengers."

Many inventions that now seem utilitarian had their first large-scale deployment at the fair—supporting such a large number of people required banks of elevators and the first-ever moving sidewalk (along with the first-ever pay toilets). One whole hall was devoted to electricity, which was so new and exciting that one of the more popular exhibits was just a mockup house with enough electrical appliances to ensure "no occasion for lighting a match in it for any purpose whatsoever."

article-imageWhen it wasn't suffering one of its frequent breakdowns, the Moveable Sidewalk went six miles per hour, and carried people from the end of the pier onto the fairgrounds.

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James B. Clow provided a cleaner experience than public toilets (and this florid ticket) in exchange for five cents.


 Collectible Coins

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The Air-Ship Chicago, also known as the Captive Balloon, gave guests an aerial view of the fairgrounds until it was brought down by a gale.

Savvy fair promoters offered collectible medallions to help fairgoers remember their experiences. (The Expo also marked the invention of elongated coin machines that print designs onto flattened pennies.) Other medals honored particular events or organizers—though most just sported the face of the Expo's namesake, Columbus. 

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A medal honoring Bertha Palmer, the president of the Expo's Board of Lady Managers. The Board was in charge of putting together the Women's Building, which was designed by Sophia G. Hayden, the first female graduate of MIT's School of Architecture.  

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The "Champion Load of Logs" medal commemorated one of Michigan's contributions to the Expo—a 33-foot-tall log pyramid considered "one of the wonders of the world."


 Midway Tickets 

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Of all the inventions displayed at the Columbian Expo, the Ferris Wheel was the flashiest. Fifty cents got you two revolutions, and a certificate asserting you had really ridden it.

The fair was laid out according to its designers' ideas of the progression of civilization: the grandiose exhibition palaces, like the Agricultural and Machinery Buildings, were built along the shore of Lake Michigan, while the "less evolved" Midway—a riot of amusement park rides, concessions, and corporate-sponsored ethnographic exhibits—jutted out from the main fairgrounds like a crank handle. Most Midway attractions had separate admission fees, and some fairgoers mortgaged their homes in order to finance the complete experience.

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The Ice Railway was originally meant to be a fairground transport system, but was turned into an amusement park ride.

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A concession ticket for the "Wild East," an ethnographic exhibit staffed by Bedouin horsemen and the most direct competition for the Wild West show Buffalo Bill set up just outside the fairgrounds.

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Chocolate companies went a little nuts at the Expo—the Stollwerck brothers of Germany built a 38-foot chocolate temple, and a Dutch company served free samples out of a windmill. Chocolat Menier stuck with a regular old pavilion.


Advertisements In Disguise

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Columbus shills for soda water.

Other medallions were just as shiny and collectible, but served as advertisements for the many things guests could buy at the Expo. Dozens of new products were introduced to a mass audience, including Hershey's chocolate, hamburgers, spray painting, picture postcards, zippers, and carbonated diet soda. 

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Joseph Nason invented steam heating, which experienced a popularity surge in the 1880s.

article-imageA medallion that advertises for itself. "The wonderful metal aluminum" was being touted as the next big thing American stuff could be made out of.

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FOUND: A 14th-Century Golden Dragon Ring

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St. George ring (Image: Portable Antiquities Scheme)

Not so long ago, in Norwich, England, a man with a metal detector found a ring that's now officially been declared "treasure." The ring is about 600 years old, which is incredible enough. But it's also a dragon ring—it depicts St. George spearing a dragon.

The ring, experts say, would have been enameled, so this scene was likely originally depicted in bright colors. In medieval England, there was a guild of St. George in Norwich, a group that required its members to pay a weekly subscription fee. The fee covered weekly offerings to England's patron saint, a yearly feast, and some basic health care.

In Britain, "any object containing more than 10% silver and gold and more than 300 years old" can be classified as treasure, the BBC explains. And it actually is worth something: This piece of official treasure is going to be acquired by the Norwich Castle museum, and the finder will receive its market value. Also, how cool is it to be able to say "I found a dragon ring"?

Bonus finds: A huge python, WWII-era bombs...in Mountain View, Calif., a $10 million sculpture, and a cluster of 50-million-year-old volcanoes

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

Grasshoppers Are Pink, Lobsters Are Blue, These Off-Color Animals Will Make You Rethink Everything You Knew To Be True

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article-imageAn albino alligator at the California Academy of Sciences. (Photo: Brocken Inaglory/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

Grasshoppers are supposed to be green. Or, depending on where they live, brown, grayish or a dull ochre. They're trying to blend in. They're not supposed to be pink. But sometimes they are.

So are katydids, which are part of a family sometimes called "long-horned grasshoppers," even though they are not grasshoppers, but a different sub-order of animal. Even so, they're usually not pink.

Or orange.

Or yellow.

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A pink katydid at the Audubon Butterfly Garden and Insectarium. (Photo: Jayme Necaise/flickr

Early on in life, we're taught to associate colors with animals. Bears are brown, or else they're black. Frogs are green, and lizards often are too. Tigers are orange. Lions are tawny yellow. Elephants and rhinoceroses are grey. Flamingos are pink. Grasshoppers and katydids are not.

But sometimes, through a genetic aberration, animals are born a different color. The condition that makes grasshoppers and katydids pink is called erythrism, which essentially just means that they're redder than they should be. But there's a whole rainbow of off-color animals, from snow white alligators and pink elephants to bright blue crabs and lobsters, birds split into green and blue halves, and jet black guinea pigs.

article-imageAn albino elephant at Kruger National Park, South Africa. (Photo: Yathin S Krishnappa/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

Albinism is perhaps the best understood aberration, although there's not one genetic mechanism that robs creatures of their melanin. But there are albino squirrels, lions, kangaroos, monkeys, deer, possums, gators, and more. Albino elephants aren't exactly white; they're lighter and pinker in color, and when they're wet, they turn particularly pinkish.

Sometimes, though, animals can lose most but not all of their melanin. In this condition, leucism, the animal's skin might be stripped of pigment, but their eyes will still be dark.

Lobsters are a good example of how dramatic these little genetic changes can be. Usually, before they're scalded bright red, they're a mottled brown. But they can be bright blue. Or albino. Or split right down the middle into two different colors.

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An orange and black split lobster. (Photo: Courtesy New England Aquarium)

"We know most about the blue lobster as we have bred them," says Dr. Bob Bayer, the director of the Lobster Institute. "If you breed a blue male to a blue female you get all blue offspring." But mostly, the exact genetic changes that change a lobster's color are mysterious.

"I suspect they are variants of the same gene, but I don't think this has been studied," Bayer says.

Lobsters aren't the only animals that can be split into two differently colored halves. These "chimeras" occur in many species, not because certain genes change but because two different sets of genes are fused into one being early on in development. The two halves of the creature could have, potentially, become two unique individuals. Instead, they combine into one.

It's even possible for one side of an animal to be one gender and the other side the opposite: that's one reason why chimeric birds can have dramatically different plumage.

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A bright blue lobster. (Photo: Sschemel/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0

Sometimes, animals simply have too much pigment, and they turn dark black—melanistic. Small rodents, including squirrels and guinea pigs, are some of the more commonly seen melanistic animals. They're even seen as valuable, sometimes. Edmundo Morales reports in The Guinea Pig that some folk doctors in the Andes prefer to use black guinea pigs in healing rituals.

The varied genetic mechanisms that create these surprising changes are rare, and they're even more rarely seen by humans: a pink grasshopper has less chance of surviving life in a field than a green grasshopper. But they're out there, and there are enough of them: Every year or so, a pink grasshopper or blue lobster is briefly famous when some human finds it, a local newspaper takes its picture, and those who see the story wonder how such a creature came to be. 

article-image "Spots", the Leucistic alligator at the Audubon Nature Institute. (Photo: Audubon Nature Institute/flickr)

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A Kingfisher with Leucism. (Photo: Ian White/flickr)

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A Leucistic peafowl at Scone Palace, Scotland. (Photo: John Mason/flickr)
 article-imageA pink dragonfly. (Photo: Aleksei Semenov/shutterstock.com)  

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A grasshopper with erythrism. (Photo: Mauro Rodrigues/shutterstock.com) 

article-imageA blue red king crab (Photo: Courtesy Scott Kent/Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game)

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A chimeric mouse with its pups. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)  

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A chimeric parakeet.  

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A melanistic guinea pig. (Photo: Rotatebot/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

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A melanistic Caiman Crocodilus. (Photo: Jason L. Buberal/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 1.0)  

FOUND: The Pentaquark, a New Form of Matter

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An illustration of a pentaquark (Image: CERN/LHCb collaboration)

Scientists at CERN have announced that, using the Large Hadron Collider, they've discovered a new type of particle—the elusive pentaquark.

The pentaquark, which is made of four quarks and an antiquark, was first predicted to exist in the 1960s, when the theory of subatomic physics was just taking shape. But for years, scientists have been unable to find it. It was actually discovered once before, but subsequent studies showed that the signal some scientists thought was the pentaquark was another sort of particle.

This time, though, the scientists at CERN think they've got it for real. They were studying the decay of a subatomic particle called a Lambda B baryon, and during the process they observed states that "must be formed of two up quarks, one down quark, one charm quark and one anti-charm quark." That's five quarks—a pentaquark. They hope to publish their results in Physics Review Letters.

What exactly holds these things together? "Studying its properties may allow us to understand better how ordinary matter, the protons and neutrons from which we’re all made, is constituted," a spokesman for the project said. In other words, the pentaquark could help us understand the very basis of the stuff that makes up the entire world.

Bonus finds: Brightest ever supernovatyrannosaurus teeth

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

The Tycoon Who Planned His Very Own Island Utopia in the 1970s

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The Floating City Project Design from The Seasteading Institute. (Photo: Courtesy The Seasteading Institute)

When governments buckle, stock markets collapse, and clowns run for president, a billionaire’s thoughts turn naturally to a favorite fantasy: private utopia. The Seasteading Institute, funded by PayPal founder Peter Thiel, recently announced it intends to launch floating cities by 2020. Thiel, the closest living embodiment of an Ayn Rand character, longs for libertarian territories, untrammeled by big government regulation. Google’s Larry Page also says he wants to “set aside a part of the world” for free experimentation. What’s not to love about the DIY nation? No meddling regulators, no patent trolls, no privacy hawks, no taxes!

Plus, you can design your own flag.

Today’s gazillionaires are not the first rich guys to dream of perfecting the ugly world around them. (See especially company towns such as Pullman, Illinois.) Their most direct ancestor may be one of the strangest tycoons of the 20th century, and his curious, failed scheme of the 1970s. 

Robert Klark Graham invented shatterproof plastic eyeglasses in the 1940s, and was worth $100 million by the early 1970s—back when $100 million was real money. An ardent conservative, Graham was obsessed with the idea that America was being overrun by morons: Smart people were having too few children and stupid people were having too many. This genetic suicide would lead the nation to catastrophe, Graham believed, and ultimately doom America to communist dictatorship. (Graham imagined the world of Idiocracy 40 years before the movie.) 

But Graham, like his modern day counterparts, also brimmed with cheery technological utopianism. He was an inventor, and believed that science could prevent the genetic doom, and perfect humanity.

article-imageRobert Graham, from an undated photo. (Photo: Geni)

So in the early 1970s, Graham tried to start a country. Of course he thought an island would be best. Graham instructed George Michel, a vice president at his eyeglasses company, Armorlite, to locate an island that Graham could buy and flag as a sovereign—or at least semi-sovereign—nation. Graham told Michel that the island should be at least five miles wide and 15 miles long.

Michel enlisted several Los Angeles real estate agents, and they eventually located four or five promising candidates, mostly small islands in the Atlantic Ocean that Great Britain might surrender for the right price. Graham was thrilled. Next, he assigned Michel and several Armorlite colleagues to design the island’s living and working quarters. Graham decreed that the island had to be completely self-sufficient, and that no cars would be permitted on it. Michel drew blueprints for prefabricated living saucers that could be stacked on land or in the sea. He designed a futuristic sewage system, greenhouse, and food factories. His masterpiece, Michel recalled fondly, when I interviewed him several years ago, was a vacuum-tube-driven transportation system, in which gyroscopically balanced pods would zip passengers from one part of the island to another. (Elon Musk surely dreams of gyroscopically balanced, vacuum pods!)

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Another tech utopia: The Blueseed Project wants to build a floating island near the Bay Area. (Photo: Blueseed Project)

Graham intended to create an elite research colony. The world’s best practical scientists would come to the island, enticed by lavish living conditions, and the fanciest laboratories money could buy, and they would start inventing. Grahamland would support itself: when scientists produced something valuable, they and the colony would share the royalties. The inventors would get rich, and Grahamland would prosper. Graham was convinced that scientists would flock to his island, because he was sure they also desired an escape from the morons, weaklings, and imbeciles who increasingly dominated the rest of the world. Science would be Grahamland’s god and its law. It would be a rational empire, Graham’s own private Atlas Shrugged

Alas, Grahamland never progressed beyond the planning stages. Michel quit Armorlite in a stock dispute. Graham got distracted and never managed to buy the island. But the private nation was pure, distilled essence of Robert Graham: the entrepreneurial vigor; the cockamamie grandeur; the unshakable faith in practical science; the contempt for the pig-ignorant, lazy masses; and the infatuation with finding—and claiming—the world’s best men.

Undeterred by the project’s failure, Graham remained determined to stop genetic doom and raise an army of geniuses. So in the late 1970s, he launched the Repository for Germinal Choice, a sperm bank for Nobel Prize winners, whose clients would be women who belonged to Mensa. The Repository would operate until the late 1990s—I wrote this book about it—and produce more than 200 children, the largest, oddest experiment in human genetic engineering in American history. If seasteading fails, will eugenics be Peter Thiel’s next stop? 

 

How to Harvest a Library in Just 100 Years

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A forest in Norway. (Photo: Ernst Vikne on Wikipedia)

Literature is available in many forms these days. You can buy a paperback, a hardcover, or a digital book to download. Or you could plant your own forest, let it grow for 100 years, and then harvest the trees for the pages of an anthology.

Katie Paterson, a Scottish artist, has opted for that last approach. In 2014 she launched Future Library, a public art project that begins with a thousand trees planted in the Norwegian forest of Normarka. After a century of growth, these trees will be cut down, pulped, and turned into a collection of books to be housed at the New Public Deichmanske Library in Oslo, which is scheduled to open in 2019.

During each year of the forest’s growth, one writer will contribute a text to be published in the anthology. The writing will be unseen by the public until the book collection is created in 2114. So far, two prominent writers have announced their involvement: Canadian author Margaret Atwood and British novelist David Mitchell. Both authors have either won or been shortlisted for the Booker Prize on numerous occasions.

On May 26, 2015, Atwood handed over her text, a manuscript entitled Scribbler Moon, during a ceremony held at the forest. Mitchell will submit his in 2016. All manuscripts will be kept in sealed boxes at the New Public Deichmanske Library until 2114. 

Barring great leaps in cryogenic technology, Paterson and early contributors to the project will not be alive to witness its conclusion. But personal satisfaction at the outcome is hardly the point. In inviting writers to be part of the anthology, Peterson aims, in her words, “to conceive and produce a work in the hopes of finding a receptive reader in an unknown future.”

In the May 2015 announcement of his involvement in Future Library, Mitchell detailed his own enthusiasm: "The project is a vote of confidence that, despite the catastrophist shadows under which we live, the future will still be a brightish place willing and able to complete an artistic endeavor begun by long-dead people a century ago."

Though the public is not permitted to see any of the manuscripts, you are are welcome to visit the Future Library forest, which is located just north of Oslo. An official Google map provides the exact coordinates.


100 Wonders: The Great Glowing Ocean

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There is something magical about bioluminescence. 

Fish, insects, plants, even the parts of ocean itself all glowing from within, creating their own internal light, it feels like something from a fantasy novel made real. So it is no surprise that Jules Verne, lover of all things strange and wondrous, would be intrigued by the phenomenon. However it was regarded as pure fantasy when, in 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, Verne wrote of a vast area of the ocean that glowed from horizon to horizon:

“It is called a milk sea,” I explained. “A large extent of white wavelets often to be seen on the coasts of Ambouna, and in these parts of the sea... the whiteness which surprises you is caused by the presence of myriads of infusoria, a sort of luminous little worm.”

Just a bit more imagination from a man whose characters tunnel into the earth only to find herds of mastodon grazing in the center. However in 2005, thanks to the devoted efforts of a curious scientist and satellite imagery, we discovered that Verne's milky seas had been squarely grounded in reality all along. 

Exile off Main Street: 8 Historical Options for Deposed Rulers

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Napoleon in exile on Saint-Helene, by Francois-Joseph Sandmann (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons) 

You’ve just overthrown the leader of your country. Now what? You can’t execute him for risk of stirring up a civil war, and you can’t keep him around for fear he’ll regain power. In the past the most politically expedient option would have been exile, sending your former supreme commander to a terrifyingly isolated spot many miles away from civilization where his influence would ebb away as he lived an unremarkable, uncomfortable and unmartyred life.

However in recent years the punishment of exile has lost some of its sting. As countries’ fortunes have become increasingly intertwined and Swiss bank accounts evermore accessible, a toppled despot is as likely to end up in a luxurious apartment in Saudi Arabia as on the storm-tossed, god-forbidden promontory he deserves. But, still, should one be looking for a spot to send a deposed despot, let us explore some of history’s greatest points of exile.

1. Traditional Exile (Anywhere that is not Athens)

In ancient Greece exile was perceived as the ultimate penalty. So tightly bound were people’s lives with the city of their birth that being cast out from and denied your city’s gods’ protection was akin to a death sentence. The exile couldn’t hope to be accepted fully as a citizen in another place and in the words of the orator Antiphon, became “a beggar in a strange land, an old man without a city.”

At least that was the theory. One of the earliest recorded exiles was the 6th Century BC tyrant, Peisistratos, who was banished to northern Greece by his enemies in Athens. Rather than wandering like a beggar in a strange land, Peisistratos raised an army of mercenaries, defeated the Athenian forces, and returned himself to power.

Modern-day equivalent: Terminal 1, Charles De Gaulle airport, where the passport-less Mehran Karimi Nasseri was forced to live for 17 years because he could not leave without travel documents.

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An aerial view of Gyaros Island, Greece (Photo: Olaf Tausch/WikiCommons CC BY 3.0)

2. Craggy Exile  (Greek Islands)

Nearly 6,000 islands and islets dot the Aegean and Ionian seas and the Greeks and Romans have been banishing political dissenters to them for millennia. Indeed so many Romans were sent to the islands in ancient times that the Roman poet Juvenal described them as, “rocks crowded with our noble exiles.”

Most infamous as a place of exile was Gyaros, an unpopulated, waterless strip of land, some five miles long by three miles wide that the Roman historian Tacitus described as “harsh and devoid of human culture.”

Modern-day equivalent: Greek islands. Gyaros was recently used to exile leftist political dissidents during the Greek civil war and during the years of the military junta.

article-imageThe lighthouse at Ventotene, formerly known as Pandataria. (Photo: CiroA/shutterstock.com)

3. The Wives and Daughters Exile (Pandataria, Italy)

Lying twenty-five miles off the west coast of Italy, the tiny island of Pandataria (known as Ventotene today) was often used as a place of exile for Romans of distinguished rank. Augustus exiled his own daughter, Julia, there because of her lascivious proclivities. The emperor Tiberius exiled Julia’s daughter, Aggripina, there and ordered her tortured, which led to her starving herself to death. And Nero exiled his wife, Octavia, to the island so he could marry another. When her exile proved unpopular with the masses, Nero had her tied up and her veins opened. Her head was then chopped off and returned to Rome. Pandataria is nowadays a popular destination for holidaying Italians. 

Modern-day equivalent: The women-only Luthan Hotel and Beauty Spa in Riyadh, where all female guests are expected to curl up and dye.

article-imagePrinces Islands, Turkey. (Photo: Igor Simanovskiy/shutterstock.com)

4. The Commuter Exile (The Princes’ Islands, Turkey)

In the Sea of Marmara, twenty kilometers off the coast of Istanbul lie the Princes’ Islands, so-called because they were once the place of exile for scores of deposed Byzantine princes, archbishops and aspirants. The Byzantine empresses Irene and Zoe were exiled to convents on the islands in the ninth century, and the Ottoman sultans later exiled family members there too. Extremely difficult to get to during the winter, the islands provided a place of exile that was far enough way from the capital to diffuse any political influence, and close enough that continuing troublemakers could be dispatched without too much trouble.

Modern-day equivalent: Guantanamo Bay: close enough for regular interrogations, far enough for plausible deniability of U.S. and international law.

article-imageThe Emperor Go-Toba, who was exiled to the Oki Islands in the 12th century. (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

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 Nishinoshima Island, which forms part of the Oki Islands. (Photo: GanMed64/flickr

5. The Creative Exile (Oki Islands, Japan)

The volcanic Oki islands located some forty kilometers off the Japanese coast in the Sea of Japan have played host to over 2,000 exiled nobles since the 12th Century AD including two emperors. The first of these was the 82nd Emperor of Japan, Go-Toba, who had ascended to the Chrysanthemum Throne at the age of three in 1183 and had been forced to abdicate by the time he turned fifteen. He was exiled to these remote but hospitable fishing islands where he wrote poetry and even invented a unique form of bullfighting in which two bulls lock horns and battle each other like bovine sumo wrestlers.

Modern-day equivalent: Going on vacation without your cell phone and awakening untold creative depths.

article-image Illustration from 1872 of "The Man In The Iron Mask." (Photo: Public Domain/WikiCommons)

article-imageThe Fort at Ile St Marguerite. (Photo: Qypchak/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)

6. Exile Within an Exile (Ile Sainte Marguerite, France)

This tiny island lies just half a mile off the shore of Cannes in the South of France, but it was here in the late 17th century that the prisoner known as The Man in the Iron Mask was held, an exile not just from the mainland but from all human recognition. It was Voltaire who first floated the idea that the prisoner was the older, illegitimate brother of Louis XIV. The writer Alexandre Dumas extrapolated this further, writing in his essay, “The Man in the Iron Mask”, that the very fact that the man was not executed but surrounded with “numberless precautions and such sleepless vigilance” made it almost certain he was an exiled noble.

Modern-day equivalent: Wearing the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset without batteries.

article-imageThe Andaman Islands. (Photo: Venkatesh K/WikiCommons CC BY 2.0

7. The Journey as Exile (The Andaman Islands, Myanmar)  

For his part in the failed Indian Rebellion of 1857, Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal Emperor, was exiled to Rangoon in Burma. However his family members suffered a worse fate, being exiled to the Andaman Islands hundreds of miles from the Indian shore. This exile proved particularly horrible because in Hindu culture there is a taboo about travelling across the ocean known as the Kala Pani (“black water”). Any righteous Hindu who separates themselves from the waters of the Ganges is said to lose their caste status. Thus traveling across the ocean was as feared as the exile at journey’s end.

Modern-day equivalent: The China National Highway 110 traffic jam of 2010, that stretched for 62 miles and lasted for twelve days.

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The volcanic coastline ot Saint Helena. (Photo: Darrin Henry/shutterstock.com)

8. Remote Exile (Saint Helena, British territory)

The quintessential place of exile, Saint Helena is over 1,000 miles from both Africa and South America, and over 700 miles from the closest island (Ascension Island to the north). Windswept and almost unfathomably secluded it proved the perfect place to confine the emperor Napoleon and prevent him from disturbing the repose of Europe.

Having already escaped from one place of exile—the island of Elba in the Mediterranean—he would not be able to do so here, dying in exile in 1821. But he was not the last exiled leader to end up here. King Dinuzulu of the Zulu nation was also exiled to St Helena in 1890 for high treason against the British. Unlike Napoleon, King Dinuzulu took to his confinement extremely well, taking part in the Island Games—most notably the tug-of-war—and learning to play the piano.

Modern-day equivalent: Outer space.

 

LOST: The Skull of Nosferatu's Director

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Count Orlok creeps up the stairs (Image:Nosferatu/Flickr)

F.W. Murnau, the German director whose 1922 film Nosferatu created one of the most iconic depictions of Dracula, is buried in a family plot not far from Berlin. Earlier this week, the cemetery's manager found that Murnau's grave had been disturbed, and not for the first time. In the past, as the Washington Post reports, his coffin was damaged; this time, though, the visitors made off with Murnau's skull.

It's not clear who the thieves were or what their purpose was; some wax drippings were found by the gravesite, so there's speculation that the theft is connected to some occult ritual. 

Murnau died in California at 42, in a car crash. He made 21 films, but the silent, expressionist story of "Count Orlok" in Nosferatu is his best known, and also deeply creepy. 

Bonus finds: Dinosaur eggsancient worm sperm

Every day, we highlight one newly lost or found object, curiosity or wonder. Discover something unusual or amazing? Tell us about it! Send your finds to sarah.laskow@atlasobscura.com. 

Tiny Skateboards and the Fast Fingers that Ride Them

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article-image A fingerboarder shredding a finger-sized skatepark. (Photo: Mathias Genterczewsky/Flickr)

Fingerboarding: It's so much more than just using your hands to play with a diminutive skateboard. 

Although, technically, that is its definition.

Fingerboards arrived in the 1980s, when skate shops began selling them as novelty keychains and hobbyists constructed their own tiny boards at home. Textbooks, rulers and writing utensils became fodder for elaborate miniature skateparks. Sliding tiny boards over school desks, or along the walls of a bedroom on rainy days, was a way for skateboarders to keep practicing tricks when weather or circumstances prevented them from jumping onto a full-sized board and hitting the half-pipe. 

Over the last ten or so years, fingerboarding has developed from a do-it-yourself hobby to a full-on industry. The best fingerboarders—mostly guys in their late teens and early twenties—even have full brand sponsorships. They receive free gear and are flown around the world to events and meet-ups as fingerboarding ambassadors.

The competition scene is huge, with events in locales as diverse as the Czech Republic and Mexico City. The crown jewel in the fingerboarding world is the Fast Fingers tournament in Germany, where 64 invited riders compete for a $1,500 cash prize. 

In the 1990s, as the classroom variety of fingerboarding became more popular, companies like Tech Deck improved upon the original keychain fingerboards, designing mass-produced, purpose-built platforms for tricks. With better boards, the discipline of fingerboarding evolved. Now people could perform standard skateboard tricks, like ollies, shove-its, and kickflips, on mini-boards anywhere they wanted.

There are myriad companies involved with the fingerboard ecosystem at all levels of the supply chain. Start-up companies provide the "decks" (the wooden platform for the board) while other companies build the wheels, trucks, grip tape, and bearings. There are even dedicated ramp manufacturers, which build and ship jumps, rails, and half-pipes to fingerboarders all over the globe.

A whole fingerboarding set easily cost over $100, a steep increase from the few dollars that a novelty keychain once went for.

To get the lowdown on the fingerboarding scene, Atlas Obscura spoke to Mike Schneider, a 22 year-old from Andover, Massachusetts, and the owner of FlatFace Fingerboards—a company that hand-makes fingerboarding decks, wheels, and ramps, and even organizes events. Schneider is something of a celebrity in the online fingerboarding world, and running FlatFace is his full-time job.

Schneider first started fingerboarding the same way most kids do. "I got into fingerboarding in fourth grade," he says. "I had just started skateboarding and really enjoyed it. I saw a lot of my friends in class playing with tech decks and I absolutely loved it."

The key was persistence: it took months for Schneider's mom to finally buy her son a board. "It was definitely the most important toy I ever got because in a chain of events it completely changed my life," he says

Schneider started FlatFace shortly after getting his first fingerboard. At first, the company was just Schneider himself modifying boards. As his modifications started to become more popular among his friends, he decided to develop the company while still living in his mom's house.

Discussing the early days of fingerboarding, Schneider says there was no real space for fellow fingerboarders to discuss their passions with each other.

"We would all share videos on YouTube, and mail each other our own handmade items, trading or selling them. Everything was very basic, cheap and handmade—although most still is handmade, but to higher standards now. There were always little companies popping up and disappearing after months or a year or two. Some lasted a bit longer, but most were unsustainable."

FlatFace aimed to change that, starting the Fingerboard Rendezvous event in the driveway of his mom's house in Massachusetts. What was once a meet-up of 10 to 15 friends is now a global event attracting 300 to 400 people, held at the combination home and FlatFace office he purchased with revenue from the company. 

According to Schneider, a good fingerboarding setup will probably run you "between $30 to $140.... depending on the quality of products you want to go with. Ramps start around $15 or so, the biggest ones can be over $100, and full-sized parks can be around $2,000 but are generally not for sale often." Certainly not chump change. 

But, Schneider stresses, you pay for the same quality that you'd expect out of a skateboard.

"All of our decks are handmade in the U.S.A. I used to make all of them myself, but I needed help to keep up with demand, so they are molded in California and shipped to me for the rest of the process." Schneider spares no expense in the process: the wood veneers come from U.S. and England, the boards are pressed in a mold that is a miniature version of an actual skateboard mold and a "special kind of glue" ensures durability and waterproofing. "We have precision technology that ensures that every board is perfectly drilled and shaped, and the edges are rounded by hand and sanded smooth," he says.

Courtesy of Mike Schneider

Beyond developing incredible hand-eye coordination (and equally strong fingers), the benefits of fingerboarding lie in its accessibility. 

"Fingerboarding can take you across the world or you can enjoy it in the privacy of your own home," says Schneider. "It doesn’t matter what country you’re from or even really what language you speak." In fact, it's much like the sport that it is based on. "Anyone can do it," he says, "and many describe it as therapeutic."

 
Courtesy of frenchmefrenchyou

Man-Made Animal Crossings, from Bat Bridges to Toad Tunnels

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article-imageLook out. (Photo: Dennis Desmond/Wikipedia)

Unfortunately for makers of gifs and memes, animals can’t drive. But that doesn’t mean they don’t have their own highways.

Roads, of course, pose dire threats to both man and beast as they cut through the natural world—and not just common roadkill victims like deer and squirrels. The hazards to wild animals posed by speeding cars (and vice versa), has become a serious problem in some places and an increasingly popular solution is to fight fire with fire. To keep wild animals off of our roads, many problem areas have begun building them their own.

Collectively, these eco-friendly thoroughfares are known as “wildlife crossings” or “ecoducts,” although their design and construction differ a great deal depending on what type of animal the builders are trying to keep off the streets.

Possibly the most common variety of wildlife crossing is the animal bridge, found all over the world, with most of them in North America and Europe and some in places like Kenya where they allow elephants to pass under roads. These highway overpasses (and underpasses) look very much like the same overpasses that humans might drive or walk over, except they are covered in foliage and ground cover so that they appear to be just another portion of the landscape. These kinds of regreened bridges cater to all sorts of animals, especially larger beasts like deer, bears, elk, moose, wolves, and all other woodland creatures that would rather not play chicken (pun intended).

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The animals are none the wiser. (Photo: Doug Kerr/Wikipedia)

Famously, Canada’s Banff National Park installed 24 wildlife crossings over portions of the Trans-Canada Highway, a busy four-lane blacktop that runs through the park. The 22 overpasses and two underpasses were built in 1978, and by the 2000s they were being used by at least 10 different species who were estimated to have cumulatively crossed the road around 84,000 times.

The Netherlands also created a successful system of woodland highways to save the dwindling population of European badgers. This expansive network of overpasses, underpasses, and ecoduct tunnels is comprised of over 6,000 crossings that have managed to end up saving not only the badger, but other species such as boar and deer who started using the badger paths.

The Netherlands is also home to the Natuurbrug Zanderij Crailoo, the largest wildlife crossing in the world. Completed in 2006, the ultra-long animal road extends over 2,600 feet over a river, roads, rail lines, and even a golf course.

article-imageToad tunnel entrance. (Photo: Phoenix Hacker/Wikipedia

And it’s not just the big animals that are getting their own Routes 66. Smaller tunnels, often referred to as ecoducts, are often built under roads to cater to all the critters that skitter, squirm, and crawl. A prime example of this type of creature crossing is the Davis, California Toad Tunnel. This amphibian alley was built in 1995 to keep the local frogs from getting squashed on a newly built overpass.

At first the six-inch-wide ecoduct didn’t seem to attract many frogs so lights were installed in the tunnels, but these were said to have heated the frogs to death. Despite this setback, the frogs eventually did begin to use the little road, however this simply provided the local birds with the equivalent of a frog vending machine. Eventually the Davis postmaster built a group of small buildings around one end of the tunnel, and named the settlement Toad Hollow. Today it is a regularly trafficked animal thoroughfare.

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An English bat bridge. (Photo: MikeCalder/Wikipedia)

Most wildlife crossings are built to provide a path for a specific species, but end up getting co-opted by whatever other animals are just passing through. But there are other, more exotic wildlife crossings as well that cater very specifically to certain animals. There are squirrel bridges, like the Nutty Narrows Bridge in Washington, which are usually thin rope spans built to allow small woodland critters to cross busy roads; fish often need tiered ladders to help them swim up and around man-made barriers like dams, as is the case at Fish Ladder Park in Grand Rapids, Michigan; even airborne bats need a little help crossing busy roads and avoiding speeding cars, so bat bridges have begun popping up all over Europe in the form of nets and wires that are said to keep the bats from flying too low, strung high above busy roads. The efficacy of this last one is spurious at best.

Just like human roads, wildlife crossings provide a safe and orderly way for our animal friends to get where they need to go. And just like our highways all we can do is build them and wait to see how much traffic they get.

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