Turn the key...
Here be dragons, and also reasonably accurate coastlines
"Not all those who wander are lost -- but a surprising number of fifteenth-century navigators definitely were."
Time, measured in grains
Measuring the angle between horizon and stars
Rosa gallica
Pressed, August 1789
Dryopteris filix-mas
Male Fern
Habitat: temperate forests of Europe and Asia. First catalogued by Linnaeus, 1753. The fronds unfurl in spring with a mathematical precision that anticipates the Fibonacci sequence by several hundred million years.
Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.
Quercus robur
Collected near Sherwood, 1215
Note the remarkable symmetry of the frond arrangement -- each pinnule positioned with the precision of an architect yet the grace of a dancer.
In the year of our Lord twelve hundred and fifteen, the barons of England did assemble at Runnymede, and there did place before their sovereign a document of such consequence that its echo has not yet ceased to reverberate through the corridors of every courthouse, parliament, and constitutional convention that followed.
The Magna Carta was not, as popular imagination would have it, a declaration of universal liberty. It was a peace treaty between an unpopular king and his rebellious aristocrats, concerned primarily with feudal taxation and baronial privileges. Yet within its clauses lay the radical seed of an idea: that even a king might be bound by law.
Sigillum Regis, wax impression
3000 BCE Cuneiform
600 BCE Greek Alphabet
100 CE Roman Capitals
800 CE Carolingian Minuscule
1450 CE Gutenberg's Textura
The pen is mightier -- and considerably messier
The same stars that guided Polynesian wayfinders and Babylonian priests
Galileo's dangerous instrument
For millennia before GPS, before chronometers, before even the magnetic compass reached European hands, navigators steered by the stars. Polynesian wayfinders memorized the rising and setting points of over 200 stars, reading the night sky as a living map that shifted with the seasons.
The sky is the oldest atlas we possess.
"The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself."
Carl Sagan