Day: April 25, 2018💾

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The local and mythic roots of Irving’s timeless tale

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Rip Van Winkle: The local and mythic roots of Irving’s timeless tale

"When I moved to Saugerties, one of the first places I explored was the old library. At the far end of the room, hidden behind the shelves, there was a reading alcove with some wooden chairs gathered around a fireplace with a tiled mantle. The tiles, with their sculpted relief in the historic arts and crafts style, illustrate what is probably the most famous fable to come out of the Hudson Valley, Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle. Here in a series of images, we find the familiar tale of a henpecked husband, who, looking for peace of mind, hiked with his dog, Wolf, and his fowling-piece to the mountain source of Kaaterskill Creek. Once there, he met the short, stout ghosts of Henry Hudson and his men and accepted an evening drink that took 20 years to sleep off. "

If we weren’t the first industrial civilization on Earth, would we ever know?

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If we weren’t the first industrial civilization on Earth, would we ever know?

"In any case, say Schmidt and Frank, the fraction of life that gets fossilized is tiny. Dinosaurs roamed Earth for some 180 million years, and yet only a few thousand near-complete specimens exist. Modern humans have existed for just a few tens of thousands of years. “Species as short-lived as homo sapiens (so far) might not be represented in the existing fossil record at all,” say Schmidt and Frank. What of human artifacts—roads, buildings, baked-bean tins, and silicon chips? These, too, are unlikely to survive long, or to be found even if they do. “The current area of urbanization is less than 1% of the Earth’s surface,” point out the researchers. “We conclude that for potential civilizations older than about 4 million years, the chances of finding direct evidence of their existence via objects or fossilized examples of their population is small,” they say."