The making of Europe in 1453

History 5 The Making of Modern Europe, 1453 to the Present, with professor Margaret Lavinia Anderson (Peggy for some), has started. This is the best history podcast, if you can call listening in on university lectures a genuine podcast. In spite of the drawbacks of following a lecture and its audience and not have a podcaster directly speak to you, this is the best.

Lecture 1: Endings and Beginnings.
Lecture series have always parts one could easily want to choose to skip. In this lecture for example the first 12 minutes in which the graduate student instructors are introduced, or the first 14 if you are not in need of explanation about the course material. Then there are some general thoughts on history and only by the 29th minute we are really off. The effort of this lecture is to circumvent Europe; identify it as the poorest child to inherit from the Greco-Roman world. The world to become totally isolated as off the fall of Constantinople in 1453, yet the one that came to dominate the world.

Lecture 2: The Rise of the State.
To begin with a technical point again: the first 31 minutes are of low audio, but by 31:45 the sound recovers. (EDIT: the low audio has been repaired - later downloads will not suffer) We learn what sovereignty means until the renaissance and how first in Italy the State arises. But these states soon are to find themselves too small to deal with the greater scale of warfare that comes up with infantry, cannons and better fortifications. This is going to give way for larger scale states with kings who are wealthy enough to wage war.

1936 en Spanje - OVT

Wat weten we in Nederland van de Spaanse burgeroorlog? Voor mij is de eerste associatie via het stripboek van de geheimzinnige voorbijganger. Christin en Bilal kwamen ermee in de jaren tachtig en er is na vier of vijf albums niets meer van terecht gekomen, geloof ik. Ik heb ze stukgelezen, inclusief het deel De Falangisten van de Zwarte Orde - over de Spaanse Burgeroorlog.

OVT's Salon in Europa is bij 1936 aangekomen en staat stil bij de Spaanse burgeroorlog. Is Spanje al over de oorlog? Men denkt van niet; de tegenstellingen bestaan nog steeds en worden nog steeds uitgespeeld. Wat voor tegenstelling? Men wordt het er over eens dat de oorlog eigenlijk een oorlog was tussen het Katholieke Spanje en het seculiere. Een godsdienstoorlog, die nog trekken van de middeleeuwen draagt.

Tegelijkertijd is het het slachtveld dat een voorspel van de Tweede Wereldoorlog werd. Een eerste krachtmeting tussen Hitler en Stalin en ook een eerste krachtmeting tussen de democratische en niet democratische krachten. Is het daarmee misschien zelfs een voorvertoning voor de Koude Oorlog - dat is slechts mijn vraag. Daar komt het panel niet op.

Eerdere besprekingen van OVT in dit blog:
1917 - Russische Revoluties,
1922 - Walther Rathenau,
1925 - Mussolini,
1929 - Goldene Zwanziger,
1933 - Fellow Travelers.

Berkeley Spring 2008 has kicked off

Of course, I am behind on schedule with the latest Berkeley courses - how could I keep on track with about 10 hours of podcast on a weekly basis in addition to my regular listening? This means, some of my courses have already passed the overview lecture, but let's not get passed that yet. Here are the courses I have taken up:

English 117S: Shakespeare. Lecturer Charles Altieri has a voice with frequent upper pitches. He is very passionately introducing the Shakespeare course, but the high squeak is tough to suffer on an MP3-player. I like the enthusiasm, I like how he explains we must read (at least twice) in order to understand. So I will stick around and accept the pitch.

Geography 130: Natural Resources and Population. Nathan Sayre immediately enters the dialog with his audience. No hearing the students talk is not too bad, you can give a thought to the rhetoric yourself. Sayre shoots a couple of questions that challenge you to connect issues of population with resources and with other big contemporary issues such as global warming. It makes the listener very eager to get to the bottom of this.

History 181B: Modern Physics: From The Atom to Big Science. The course is delivered by Cathryn Carson who is both a historian and a physicist. Do you need to have basic knowledge in either of these disciplines to be able to follow? No, is the answer. We are expected to get some chemistry though (I am sweating already) and she may run some equations on the board (oh dear, visuals AND math). The beginning is great, let's hope this course turns out good for podcast.

On History 5 I will write in a separate post.

A funny thing with letters

Around the corner of my office, right at the gas station, there is a new restaurant which serves oriental food. Huge signs are placed and they look like this:


What does this say? I read: "jonk", but in fact it says "achsan" in Hebrew. I had the same experience when I had just arrived in Israel. The advertisements for the Israeli Lotto looked exactly like the logo of Hotel Ibis I knew from Europe. Below you can see how similar they are. Left is the Hebrew for Lotto and right is the Latin for Ibis.


When you are conditioned to read a certain script, you will always try to interpret a written piece in that script and can hardly see something else. My wife has the same problem with Latin script and will try to read it as if it were Hebrew. For example, she reads Pablo Picasso's signature as 'Sootnik' - see below.


Or is that 'Sitnoke'? I don't know, I only see Picasso.

Plate Tectonics - IOT

The wonderful quality of In Our Time is to grant access to any which subject. I have seen this in the past with Victorian Pessimism and Gravitational Waves and this week we see it with Plate Tectonics. Even these subjects technical or remote from common interest are elevated in such a way, that one is engaged. What could be interesting in Plate Tectonics apart from the nearly surreal notion that the land under our feet is like a ship sailing on the ocean of molten rock beneath?

Such a notion is hard to accept and IOT reveals it took the world of geography some time to accept the theory. Once it did, a lot was gained. The guests explain the greatest merit of Plate Tectonics: it supplied a unifying theory for the world sciences. It brought land and sea, climate and rock, bio-diversity and the flipping poles together. What Plate Tectonics shows is that this earth is one big system in which all sub-systems are integrated.

Once having established that, Melvyn Bragg advanced to the next step: of all is integrated, then what is the virtue of the next theory, Gaia Theory. This is the theory that proposes to treat the earth system as a living organism, yet another surreal notion. One of the gathered specialists knocks it as absurd and the other praises it. The discussion lits up with true controversy. Who would have expected that?

More In Our Time
The Fisher King,
The Charge of the Light Brigade,
Albert Camus,
The Nicene Creed,
Four humor medicine.

Ben Dunlap at TED

I do not usually review vodcasts. I am one of many people whose portable player carries neither the file size nor the screen to render visuals. On occasion I do however follow some video streaming on line. I still love audio better, but surely there is much to be cherished in film as well. A very good carrier is TED.com and one of its latest releases was so unbelievably good. I simply had to report it. (By the way, TED stands for Technology Entertainment and Design, as I saw explained on one of the speaker's sites, about whom more below.)

Ben Dunlap is the president of Wofford College in South Carolina. On this video he delivers a heartening speech on human nature, the human condition and reaching to an emotional plea for education and vigorous moral life. He does so by relating about three Hungarians: Sandor Teszler, Bela Bartok and Francis Robicsek.