ballast and binnacle

An 1815 travel guide to Madeira and the Caribbean is illustrated with a series of supplemental plates that contain sort of a first-mate’s log and the account of parallel trade voyage pictographically—with hieroglyphs, as the author states. These little drawings that capture the day’s events (or lack thereof) is a rather a novel story-telling device for the time and of course prefigure the idea of scripting oneself in emoji. Be sure to visit Public Domain Review at the link above to browse the full volume and to discover more antiquarian delights.

garden variety

Housed in a deconsecrated church and owing its existence to landscape artist, botanist and curio collector John Tradescant the Younger who designed the surrounding gardens and was entombed there along with twenty-thousand other souls, London’s unique Garden Museum is reopening after a year and a half of careful renovation that protected the character of the medieval structure.
The structure was abandoned and slated for demolition in the early 1970s until it was saved and converted into a celebration of garden design and history by an impassioned couple, with exhibits on the social and practical aspects of the craft. Tradescant (1608*-1662†) frequently made excursions to the new world and introduced many new varieties of plant-life (the taxonomy of many flowers are so named in his honour) to England and acquired in his travels new artefacts to add to his familial cabinet of curiosities—the Ark, which was the first collection of its kind put on public view in England and included a specimen of the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary. The Ark was also seed that germinated into the Ashmolean collections of Oxford but has been reunited with its curator and is now also to be found in a niche of St Mary-at-Lambeth’s.

crest and trough

As Kottke informs, during one of its final passes of the Saturn system, the Cassini probe (previously) delivers an image of a spiral density wave in one of the planets rings that illustrates the complexity and nuance of gravitational relationships. The ripples are caused by the waltz of two satellites, Janus and Epimetheus, which share the same orbital path and trade places as leader and follower with a period of four years. Like extracting historical data from tree growth rings, gauging the distance between the waves reveal details about past trajectories.

plane-spotting

Hurricane Irma is still unleashing her wrath and is leaving a path of destruction in her wake including the famed Maho Beach of Sint Maarten, where visitors could formerly watch the aircraft take-off and land on the nearby runway of the Princess Juliana International Airport. Directly under the flight path of aircraft, airliners passed just thirty metres overhead but the spectacle was not without its dangers and risk to observers.