truppenübungsplatz

Earlier in the week, I was visiting the NATO training grounds and mission support installations at the northern and southern boundaries of the two hundred and thirty square kilometre base in Grafenwörh in the Oberpfalz in eastern Bavaria. Conducted under the auspices of the US Seventh Army since 1945, Prince-Regent Luitpold designated the land outside of the village as the best-suited terrain for the principality’s soldiers to drill in 1907 and commissioned the construction of the reserve.
The water tower remains the landmark of the post—Tower Barracks, and the village is pretty charming as well. Luitpold, who presided over Bavaria in the name of his nephews Ludwig and Otto who were both deemed unfit (mad) to reign due to mental incapacitation, made several miscalculations and miscarriages including the military build-up that made the Great War an inevitability, eventuality instead of an possible outcome which are certainly of immeasurable geopolitical importance.

Included in that registry of miscalculations too was perhaps the royal decree that denied Friedrich Trump repatriation to his home in Kallstadt near Darmstadt for his failure to  discharge his military obligations to hearth and Heimat back in 1905 (Austria had ceded the western part of the Palatinate to Bavaria in 1816 and remained part of that kingdom then Bundesland through 1946).  Dear Leader’s grandfather had to once again leave his roots in Germany (after petitioning for the right of residency) and return once again to America to realise his own destiny.

and many pleasant facts about the square of the hypotenuse

Via TYWKIWDBI, we discover that a century of study and conjecture mathematicians have teased the secrets from a thirty-seven-hundred-year old Babylonian clay tablet and revealed that not only were the fundamental principles of the Pythagorean theorem known and applied earlier than expected, that indispensable ratio among the sides of a right-triangle providing that c²=a²+b², but moreover the artefact represents not only the world’s first trigonometric table and also the only completely accurate one—owning to the way the Babylonians counted in base-sixty instead of base-ten number-systems, which we retain in the way we reckon time and the degrees and minutes of longitude and latitude. This anonymous tablet predates the work of Hipparchus of Nicaea by more than a millennium, whom history has called the father of the branch of mathematics and credits with the invention of such preternaturally useful navigation and surveying tools like the astrolabe and the first star charts. The discovery is not just a revelatory in that it shows that these underlining principles were known to architects and astronomers far earlier than we believed, but there’s also the insight that these triads, the values of the sides of triangles, were derived ratiometrically—that is without inscribing a right-triangle in a circle.

cross-over episode or malleus maleficarum

I’ve been enjoying listening to the History of Ancient Greece podcast researched and presented by Ryan Stitt that reminds me very much of the History of Rome series that got me back into the genre in the first place.
Recently, one of Stitt’s presentations on classical tragedians ended with a short introduction from fellow-blogger Samuel Hume on his project The History of Witchcraft: A Podcast History of Magic, Sorcery and Spells. I’ve been enjoying the first few episodes and look forward to progressing through the catalogue for this series as well. Listeners will get their share of bewitching, possession, curses and rites, but only a witch-hunt can uncover witches and the anecdotes and institutions portrayed are a fascinating, sorrowful look at how societies can punish those who don’t know their place and how the chauvinistic male psychic is particularly affronted by strong women.

psa

The US National Archives and Records Administration of course has an extensive collection of preserved films—including a sub-genre of instructional animation—from which our friends over at Muckrock have plucked their nominees for the most surreal out of over a century of bizarre cartoon-making. Including Private Snafu but mostly comprised of non-canon After School Special characters I’ve never heard of, it’s an interesting and indulgent way to examine how state-controlled messaging and motivation has changed and evolved over the years.  Watching one video of course cues up related items, so you can compose your own highlights reel.