Tuesday, July 14, 2015

History of Pluto and France and the monster zombie statue and historical publishing and...


"So can I be a planet again?"


  • This morning the New Horizons spacecraft went past Pluto like a bat out of hell... a bat with a camera and a hard drive and some kind of wireless that gets signal at 5 billion km. (Photo credit Emily Lakdawalla).  And the history of our knowledge of the solar system is being transformed before our eyes, if we care to watch.
  • Today is also Bastille Day+226 years.  (And my nephew's birthday -- Hey, Alan!)
  • Just sayin' -- Tina Loo's recent essay on the wrongness of the Mother Canada zombie monster proposed for Cape Breton Highlands National Park is the best thing on the subject I have seen in any media. It may be that the whole thing is running on fumes and hype, rather than real dollars.(CBC News"To complete the first phase of the project by the planned deadline of 2017, the foundation needs $25 million. It ended the year with $6,000 in the bank.") Peter Mansbridge has backed away, which is a straw in the wind.
  • Also at Active History, Ian Milligan, one of the founders, is retiring from that blog. His own blog, I might say, is ground zero for Big Data History -- history that mines the internet for digital sources, more or less. 
  • Historiann has a new post up on writing and publishing an academic-trade book crossover, an notion that seems to tantalise a lot of scholars. And it's on a Canadian subject (also feminist, First Nations, francophone...). Note: the current post is only part I, and most of the payoff looks to be in part II. Update, July 16:  actually II is a bit of a letdown: not really goin' cross over, after all.
 
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