Category: History

Posted on

Turning stories into data

Seeds

We have a new time-waster to share. Global Giving, a meta-NGO we’ve raved about before, has just launched its globalgiving storytelling project. Why?

We’re trying to break through the self-report bias that often prevents international development from having a larger impact.

With this community-based beneficiary feedback we’re identifying community-focused organizations, good listeners, potential innovators, and we’re breaking through the self-report bias that often prevents international development from having a larger impact.

It will be interesting to see how this effort develops, and what uses are made of it. Meanwhile, it is easy to emerge from a rabbit-hole to find that half an hour has vanished from your life. We searched on “seed” to get the Wordle picture above. If you find any really great stories that deserve a wider audience, why not share them in a comment here?

Posted on

Brainfood: Roots, Ethnopharmacology, Heat tolerance, Food origin myths, Trees outside forests, Wild fruit tree agroforestry, Viruses in genebank, Reintroduction

Posted on

Corn conspiracy

I too am back from my summer holidays, but with a somewhat smaller haul of goodies. Two items only, and this is the first.

Take a look at this carving, part of the arch around a window in Rosslyn Chapel outside Edinburgh, more formally known as the Collegiate Chapel of St Matthew.

Maize? in Rosslyn Chapel

Do those things in the wider arch look to you like ears of maize?

And how about this? Do those stylised, possibly spiky three-leaved things look like an aloe, or, as the Rosslyn Chapel Photographic CD would have it, a cactus?

Aloe? in Rosslyn Chapel

If they did, that would be a mystery indeed, because the chapel was completed in 1484, eight years before Columbus sailed to the New World, source of cacti and maize. There is, of course, a simple explanation: Henry I Sinclair, Earl of Orkney and grandfather of the Rosslyn Chapel’s founder, William Sinclair, sailed to North America in around 1398, brought back samples (or at least depictions) of maize and aloe (or cacti), which the chapel masons 1 incorporated into these carvings, all subsequent history of the incident being scrupulously hidden from history’s view.

Not having read or seen it, I was unaware that The Da Vinci Code makes much of Rosslyn Chapel and its Masonic and Templar associations, but frankly, I’m not in the least bit convinced that those carvings are what people say they are. And in that, I’m not alone. The BBC pours cold water on the idea too.

Undaunted, however, I’ll be scrutinizing the son-et-lumiere at Machu Pichu for evidence of neeps among the tatties.