Beginnings of Western Art: Stonehenge

Artists: Possibly created by pagan druids.  Evidence shows that it had undertaken various structural changes throughout its existence, undertaken by a number of different societies.  
Time period: (2000BC)

Location: English county of Wiltshire

Thanks to Wikipedia for this image!

Stonehenge is considered to be one of the British Isles' greatest landmarks.  What amazes people about it is its immense size for the time period in which it originates from.  Nothing before it was built with solid stones quite the size of those that compose much of the circular ring at Stonehenge.  It is a mystery as to how it was built, (for the most part) and there are several creation stories attributed to it.  One of such stories even suggests that aliens had a hand in lifting the stones for the druids, but, as to how creditable that theory is… Well, you could guess that there would be a great deal of speculation about such claims.



Interesting Facts:
Besides the fact that the stones are huge, they are actually constructed to be in-tune to the sun’s yearly patterns!  When the sun rises on the summer solstice (June 21), the light coming from the northeast shines its way past the heel stone, which sit outside of the main ring, through an archway, and lands directly on the altar stone close to the centre of the ring.  A similar thing happens upon the setting of the sun on the winter solstice.  How cool!

Some of the stones at Stonehenge came from Wales, which is more than 200 kilometers away!
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Further Reading: 

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonehenge
2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&feature=endscreen&v=_pXtHqAGN6E

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This is the same video as the one that is listed in the "Further Reading" section above.  If you wish to watch the video directly from YouTube, then click on the link provided.  

I had to do a full-on assignment about Stonehenge: it's creation, modern significance, etc., for my grade 10 history class and after sifting through numerous web-sources and library books (yes, because there still are some of us left in the school systems that do such a primitive thing) I found this one to be the most helpful in my studies of the ancient, historical landmark.  

"Gee, I hope this helps!" -LEN 

Greek and Roman Art: The Clouds

Author: Aristophanes, a comedian from Athens. 

Time Period: (450-388BC)

Location: Written/preformed in Athens, during the festival paying tribute to the god Dionysus, who was the divine god of most Greek recreational activities. 

Yes, this is my own photo. (I worked
so hard to make this one just perfect!)

The Clouds is considered, by many scholars who study on the subject of historical drama, to be the first play ever written where the central purpose is to achieve the crowd’s laughter all the way through its duration, or simply put, a comedy.  The story is an almost textbook case of irony, as the main character’s motives end up being the result of his own misery in the end.

Interesting Facts:

The play, believe it or not, actually has nothing to do with clouds at all!  The word clouds is used in place of the word gods, and implies that the gods are against the main character in the story and only want to punish him for sending his son away to the Thinkery for his own self interests.  How sad. 

Although the play has been translated into many international & non-Greek languages, there is no written copy in existence of the original ancient Greek text before it was revised.  It is thought that some of the things had to be reworded in order for it to make sense to foreign audiences, so a few minor details of The Clouds may have been lost in translation.  

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Further Reading: 

1. http://ablemedia.com/ctcweb/netshots/clouds.htm
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clouds

Atomic Bomb: the beginning

How the Atomic Bomb came to be:
According to Dictionary.com, an online resource for finding the meanings of words or phrases, defines an atomic bomb as being the following:

Google and Dictionary.com sometimes do funny things!   Just look at
what I discovered while searching for this definition on the net'! 

A nuclear reaction occurs when a nucleus of an atom is altered in some way, either trough fission, fusion, or radioactive decay, that causes it to release its mass-worth in energy as the atom flies itself apart in a massive explosion.

Radiation was first discovered back in 1895 when Antoine Henri Becquerel, the inventor of x-ray technology and the first man to photograph an x-ray image, just so happened to place a packet of photographic plates in with a small amount of the element uranium before closing his office one night.  He had originally believed that a radioactive material’s energy had to come from an alternative source such as the sun.  He felt that this energy was only stored in the material and that the material’s slow release of the energy was what he had first been picking up in his initial tests on fluorescence.  But when he got the photographic plates developed, he was surprised to find that they were showing that they had interacting with radioactive material that had not been out in the sun!  His discovery in the properties of uranium marks the beginning of the nuclear age.

Becquerel’s research later held the interest of German scientists in high regard.  Right before the start of WWII, Germany began looking into the possibilities in the implementations of nuclear energy in warfare.  The information about their theories was kept quiet, only disclosing it to the number of people involved.  However, there were those among the group who feared that the research was too malicious in nature to be kept secret, and thus pasted it on to others in seeking to hear their opinion of it.

Albert Einstein, who had good ties to the United States and their people, was one of the first individuals to relay the message of what the Germans had come across in their research to the continent of North America.  On August 2, 1939 in a letter to the President, who at that time was F.D. Roosevelt, he said…

Einstein had immense knowledge about the make-up of the Universe, so if he was concerned about this new discovery, then so too should the United States.

The USA then went on to undertake what was known as The Manhattan Project, in which their main goal was to produce and test a viable atomic bomb.  On July 16, 1945, the first atomic bomb, whose codenamed was Gadget, was detonated in Northern New Mexico, at a safe distance from any residential homes.  However, the light from the explosion was so large that people in a faraway community swore the sun had risen twice that morning.  It was so intense that even a blind girl who happened to be facing the direction of the explosion said she saw a glimmer of light in her dark field of vision.

After the Manhattan project had been successful, there was nothing to stop the USA in their race to produce more nuclear warfare and as much as possible.
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"The Atomic Bomb of Hiroshima"
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