Thursday Things: Quarantine Edition
19 March 2020. Vol 2 No 12. By Dan McGirt. #32
Welcome to Thursday Things! The world is grounded, but Thursday Things is here for you!
My humans are home all day to play with me! Yay! Photo by Jonathan Daniels on Unsplash
Do you feel cooped up and isolated? Well, just be glad you’re not this poor little dinosaur! Smallest known dinosaur found trapped in 99-million-year-old amber.
Secret Scottish Bunker Revealed! Sure, we’re all in lockdown, secure in our bunkers. I hope your accommodations are a little more comfortable than these: “The bunker space was formed by an arch of riveted corrugated iron sheets over a cement floor measuring only 7 metres in length by 3 metres wide. It would have contained bunk beds, a table and cooking stove and all the equipment needed.” Here are more details about the bunker’s history:
It is thought that the small bunker in Craigielands Forest, near Moffat, was used as an operational base for an Auxilliary Unit, a secret branch of the Home Guard, often known as “Churchill’s secret army”.
These specially trained teams were often made up of local estate workers who knew the land like the back of their hand.
FLS archaeologist Matt Ritchie said:
“This discovery gives us an insight into one of the most secretive units that were operating during WW2.
“It’s quite rare to find these bunkers as their locations were always kept secret – most were buried or lost.
Well, yes. That’s why they call it a secret bunker. I presume Churchill’s secret army was a precursor of Dumbledore’s army. Or of the SAS. One or the other.
I often wonder what treasures of otherwise lost history are preserved — as if in amber, like a tiny dinosaur — in VHS tapes, photo albums, old school home movie reels, etc. gathering dust in attics, basements, garages, drawers, and closets around the world. Here is one such story: The Remarkable Story of a Woman Who Preserved Over 30 Years of TV History
ABOUT 71,000 VHS AND BETAMAX cassettes are sitting in boxes, stacked 50-to-a-pallet in the Internet Archive’s physical storage facility in Richmond, California, waiting to be digitized. The tapes are not in chronological order, or really any order at all. They got a little jumbled as they were transferred. First recorded in Marion Stokes’s home in the Barclay Condominiums in Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, the tapes had been distributed among nine additional apartments she purchased solely for storage purposes during her life. Later, they passed on to her children, into storage, and finally to the California-based archive. Although no one knew it at the time, the recordings Stokes made from 1975 until her death in 2012 are the only comprehensive collection preserving this period in television media history.
Marion Stokes is a hero of history. I used to record occasional episodes of The X-Files and a few other shows on my VCR back in the day, before streaming and on-demand were a thing. I still have the tapes in a closet, because I’m a borderline hoarder. Obviously, I now can watch X-Files in much better quality online or on DVD. But what the DVDs don’t have are the original commercials, the local news teasers, the promos for other Fox shows of the era (Manimal!) and so on. So before you toss your old tapes, maybe play them one more time for memory’s sake. And also see if the Internet Archive wants them.
Our mind-blowing physics article of the week: The universe may be conscious, say prominent scientists:
What consciousness is and where it emanates from has stymied great minds in societies across the globe since the dawn of speculation. ... There are a few prevailing theories. The first is materialism. This is the notion that consciousness emanates from matter, in our case, by the firing of neurons inside the brain. ...
The second theory is mind-body dualism. This is perhaps more often recognized in religion or spirituality. Here, consciousness is separate from matter. ... Then there's a third option which is gaining ground in some scientific circles, panpsychism. In this view, the entire universe is inhabited by consciousness.
A handful of scientists are starting to warm to this theory, but it's still a matter of great debate. Truth be told, panpsychism sounds very much like what the Hindus and Buddhists call the Brahman, the tremendous universal Godhead of which we are all a part. In Buddhism for instance, consciousness is the only thing that exists.
Trippy. And only the beginning of how weird this article gets. Read it all!
Plastic is back, baby! Plastics Had Been Falling Out of Favor. Then Came the Virus“The virus plays right into the industry’s strong suits: disposability and hygiene.” Because you know what doesn’t give you germs? That single-use disposable container, package, or straw that you use and throw away. Stay healthy, my friends!
Thank you for reading Thursday Things! See you next Thursday!