to boldly go

The always engrossing Futility Closet podcast introduces us to the eminent figure of the Swiss physicist, explorer and aviation and submarining pioneer Auguste Antoine Piccard (*1884 - †1962) who along with his twin brother and collaborator Jean Felix were the inspirations and the namesake first for Professor Cuthbert Calculus in The Adventures of Tintin and later for Gene Roddenberry’s character, Jean-Luc Picard, implying that the captain is one of their descendants, with their actual lineage continuing in the spirit of exploration and adventure. Within the decades of the 1930s (with some years to spare), Piccard remarkably designed both a pressurised aluminium gondola that allowed him with a hot-air balloon to ascend to an unprecedented altitude of fifteen kilometres above the Earth, taking ground-breaking measurements on atmospheric conditions and newly discovered cosmic rays, and six years later, a bathyscaphe, a free-diving, self-propelled deep sea submersible, ferrying its crew down to a depth of over four-thousand metres and observing some of the alien denizens of the deep in proper context.

zwischenstopp: urspringen

Incorporated as a district of market town Ostheim vor der Rhön, I had passed by the village of Urspringen several times, noting the stone, Gothic Revival steep that dominates the fields and forest from an impressive distance but unable to find much information on it was never drawn to explore.
I ought to know better (by now) that the lack of scholarship or research is never a sign that a place isn’t worth investigating and was pleased that I stopped the car and took a look past the façades of half-timbered houses that line either side of the main street. Referred to as Villa Urspringa for the first time in church records from 811, it is the site where the tributary of the Streu, the Bahra branches in two and is itself the sources of three powerful natural water sources—Quellen or rather Springen, the strongest of which flows from under the church mount and through the village under a covered promenade.
The church itself, which was probably finished at the turn of the last millennium, was rebuilt after it was destroyed in a fire in 1841 and two neighbouring buildings were added, reflecting the architecture of the time, a school house and the parsonage. The village contains far too many historic cross-timbered farmers’ homes (Fachwerkhäuser) to list and along the Hauptstraße and down hidden alleys and would more than merit a follow-up tour, better-armed next time with more history.

drawbridge

Emboldened by geopolitics elsewhere, Saudi Arabia, we learn via Super Punch, is entertaining bids to terraform its escalating, long-standing tensions with neighbouring Qatar (previously) by turning the peninsula the country occupies into an island in the Gulf of Bahrain. The Saudi government plans to dig a two hundred metre wide moat along its sixty kilometre border, at an estimated cost of three-quarters of a billion dollars.

bowiebranchia

Via fellow internet-caretakers the Everlasting Blört, we find a selection of nudibrachia or other species of marine opisthobranchia (sea slugs, from the Greek for naked gills, having shed their shells after their larval stage) fastidiously matched to the various outfits and personæ of the transcendent Sir David Bowie. All of these side-by-side comparisons (there are over three thousand known varieties though many are endangered) are amazingly elegant, spot-on and very satisfying.