British Tree Gallery

Here's a good reference site: the British Tree Gallery lists about 130 trees, each with one or more pictures and some basic information. All native British trees are included, as well as many introduced trees. There are also much longer essays on some of the trees, including facts, traditions, legends and herbal lore.

The Tree Gallery is part of a larger site which is worth a browse - The Tree - which, as you can imagine, is all about trees. It's a varied and funky site with lots of interesting branches, such as a page of Welsh tree names.

Dance in the Book of Kells

According to a Sunday Times article, "a folk-dance tutor claims he has solved the mystery of illustrations in the Book of Kells that has puzzled historians for generations. Alan Nowell claims the interwoven patterns depict monks performing ancient mystical dances."

The Book of Kells is an ornately illustrated manuscript containing the four gospels of the Bible. It was produced by Celtic monks around AD 800.

Alan Nowell's website explains how he interpreted some of the designs as stylized illustrations of dance positions, using his background in folk dance.

Even more interesting is a video of an experimental dance based on the Book of Kells after Alan Nowell's ideas, performed by The Kells dancers in Skerries, Ireland.

The Mystery of Dark Matter

We live in a big and mysterious place. I still haven't come to terms with the theory that most of the universe is made up of dark energy and dark matter, things that we cannot perceive directly. We can only see dark matter by its effects, such as ever-so-slightly bending beams of light.

This image shows the aftermath of a complicated collision of galaxy clusters, some of the most massive objects in the Universe. The colour red is used to show normal matter heated to millions of degrees, and blue shows the location of dark matter, detected by tracing the subtle light-bending effects on distant galaxies. The original photo is from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory. This photo is also shown, along with many other amazing ones, in the Top Ten Astronomy Pictures of 2007

Gloucestershire Cheese Rolling 2007

Mad British pastime No. 1: chasing a cheese downhill. Tactics ranged from dainty shimmying on the backside to head over heels tumbling that resulted in surprisingly few casualties – with only 20 minor injuries treated by St John Ambulance on the day. Twisted ankles, broken wrists and bloody cuts were all regular sightings on the bedraggled competitors as they limped, smiling, back to the crowds. Watch the video, it's worth it! More info here.

Tyger

Here's a wonderful short film by Guilherme Marcondes which captures something about living a magical life. Make sure your sound is on to catch the great soundtrack. Based on the William Blake poem The Tiger.

What did Orion mean to a stone-ager?

Orion is my favorite winter constellation - easy to spot even in London, and somehow a comforting presence on clear winter nights. It seems that our ancestors also thought Orion was important, because they aligned several prehistoric sites with the constellation.

Sigurd Towrie at Orkneyjar has an interesting theory about the layout of three henges in Orkney. The relative position of the three sites mimics the layout of the three stars in Orion's belt. He also observes that in midwinter, Orion would have risen and set with a similar alignment to the sun, suggesting that perhaps Orion can be linked to another local monument, Maeshowe, already famous for its alignment to the setting mid-winter sun.

In Egypt, the pyramids are supposed to have been laid out according to Orion's belt. Frank Dörnenburg's website links Orion to the Egyptian god Osiris.



Another site linked to Orion is the Thornborough Henge Complex in North Yorkshire, which is almost 1000 years older than the pyramids. According to BBC News, the henges are thought to have been built to mirror Orion's belt for its religious focus.

Sigurd Towrie's article also discusses stonehenge, and the theory that it may be associated with a mid-winter healing deity. Did Orion represent this ancient prehistoric god? A deity who presided over the darkest time of the year?

Platonic solids from the stone age

Hundreds of carved stone spheres, roughly three inches in diameter, believed to date to around 2000 BC, have been found over the years in Scotland. Many are carved with lines corresponding to the edges of regular polyhedra. Some of these depict the five platonic solids, as illustrated, long before the greeks wrote about them. As to the purpose of the stone balls - no one knows. Perhaps they were used as weights, as dice for oracles, in ball games, or just as 'prestige objects'. Or maybe the neolithic people were interested in sacred geometry.

More from wikipedia here. There's also an interesting article on THE GEOMETRY OF CREATION, Plato's Timaeus and the Regular Polyhedra here, and more stone balls from the University of Aberdeen's Marischal Museum here.