Daily Curio – College of Curiosity

I had that good fortune to visit Tulum recently. These stunning Mayan ruins command a cliff over the Gulf of Mexico, and are noted for being heavily defended not only by the sea, but also by 30 foot thick walls. It’s the most popular tourist attraction in the region, and hosts thousands a visitors each day.

If you take a tour, you’ll start at a “tourist village,” where locals sell crafts, t-shirts, and Chinese goods with the words “Mexico” and “Tulum” embossed on them. There’s even a Starbucks and a Subway if you’re afraid of local cuisine.

While this might take away from the ambience of Pre-Columbian ruins, they did a good job of separating it from the actual site. You have to walk five minutes through a wooded path to get to see ruins, and then once you’re there, there’s only minimal invasion from modern society.

Most people visit with a highly trained guide. Mexico has pretty high standards for guides, including extensive testing and licensure. Many of the guides are of Mayan ancestry, so to them, this place is more than just a collection of old buildings—it’s their heritage.

The safe landing beach.

And yet, despite all their knowledge, the two times I’ve been there, one amazing fact about Tulum hasn’t been mentioned. And I couldn’t find it on the plaques. In fact, let me read you what the plaque says for the main pyramid, known as El Castilo:

The is one of the most beautiful temples in Tulum. Neither the walls nor the door adjust to a straight vertical line. This is not a result of the passage of time, but rather the way it was originally designed. It was constructed upon another temple which was filled in, in order to serve as a base. In the recess above the door, there is a sculpture representing a personage descending from the heavens with a headdress crowning his head and holding an object in his hands. The temple was decorated inside and out with a mural painting of several representations of gods, which unfortunately, can no longer be admired.

By “no longer be admired,” the plaque means that the public is no longer admitted to this space. The language leads me to believe that it was written in Spanish and then translated to English. But what’s striking is what’s omitted: the temple was much more than that: it was a very clever light house.

The Mayans were a seafaring people. They constructed 50-60 foot long canoes and may have travelled as far as Panama and Costa Rica. Tulum was a seaport as well as a temple and fortress, and El Castillo is dramatically visible from the sea. At the top of the structure are two windows. The walls are thick, so the openings have a tunnel aspect to them. Imagine a fire burning behind each one. From the sea, there is exactly one place where you could see both lights... and that place is directly opposite a break in the barrier reef—the safest place to paddle through to the landing beach below the temple. It’s possible that the entire site was chosen because of its advantages as a protected port site.

That’s a remarkable achievement, and a fascinating story. Is it true? That’s another interesting story. All of history is “story.” In the case of the Mayans, we have very little written history, thanks to the Catholic Spaniards efforts to wipe out all but their own culture. We do have logs and reports from those Spaniards, as well as some archeological interpretations and it’s from these that we form the modern story of the area. But the lighthouse idea just seems to fit.

The real mystery for me is—why wasn’t the lighthouse theory mentioned to me on my two visits or on the official plaque?

What was mentioned was human sacrifice and astronomy. Any enclosed area is going to have points that line up with astronomical occurrences, but it seems pretty clear that the Mayans were interested in making sure the sun came back at the end of each winter. And as for the human sacrifice? One Mayan guide was adamant that it was the Toltecs who practiced that ancient art, and that the Mayans were only participants under pressure.

So it’s clear to me that the guides at Tulum and in all places, tell a narrative that’s dictated by a bit of politics and a bit of personal preference. But as I and others have noted, I can’t thi...

Take one old swimming pool, add common objects from 1940s, and fill it with an inert gas. Then cover it with a seven foot stone slab, and you’ve created “The Crypt of Civilization.”

With the discovery of King Tut’s tomb still fresh in the public’s mind and the rumblings of another world war beginning in Europe, Thornwell Jacobs thought up the idea of deliberately creating another Tut’s Tomb for future archaeologists, but instead of filling it with funerary articles, this one would be a representation of civilization at the time.

At Oglethorpe University in Brookhaven, Georgia, an abandoned swimming pool was donated to the project. Its walls were reinforced with enamel plates, covered in tar, and objects were carefully placed inside. Some of the items include: the contents of a woman’s purse, voice recordings of major figures in the impending World War II, a Lone Ranger toy, a bottle of Budweiser and even a film copy of Gone with the Wind.

Books were important, but instead of taking up a lot of space with fragile paper, 800 works of historic value were recorded on microfilm. And of course there are film readers and projectors in there as well, so future archaeologists can actually read the Illiad or watch Gone with the Wind... providing the film survives. And yes, there’s an audio recording of the champion hog caller, which is a skill that may not be needed in the future.

How long are these things expected to survive? Jacobs calculated that the Egyptian calendar began 6,177 years before the idea of his crypt, so he figured it should be another 6,177 years before it should be opened. That date is in the year, 8,113 CE.

Concerned that treasure hunters might seek to enter the crypt before its time, Jacobs left a message at the door, which included the following lines:

This Crypt contains memorials of the civilization which existed in the United States and the world at large during the first half of the twentieth century. ...No jewels or precious metals are included. ...we beg of all persons that this door and the contents of the crypt within may remain inviolate.

Jacobs, it seems, didn’t know about the value of collectibles.

It’s a safe bet that 6,000 years from now, the English language will not exist. Because we found the Rosetta Stone, we can read Egyptian Hieroglyphics. But without that find, we’d likely still be baffled by that elaborate pictographic language . What will future archaeologists use to decipher what we’ve written? And how can they appreciate that this preserved moment in time, was but a moment? Even 80 years later, we might struggle to recognize many of the objects inside. Technology is moving so quickly that any time capsule can’t possibly speak for a period of more than a few years. With the Egyptians, we had a written language to decipher. In the future, archaeologists will be looking at iPhones, where nothing is apparent unless it’s powered on. Will they be able to plug it in and read its contents? A Kindle can hold thousands of books, but will anyone in the future know that?

And more important, will they even care to? Or will curiosity about the past go the way of flivvers and buggy whips?

Some of the objects sealed inside the Crypt of Civilization.

No. Not the forgotten Nicholas Cage movie. I’m talking about Der Zauberlehrling, a poem by Goethe written in 1797. You may know it better as the bit from the original Fantasia (both, actually) that featured Mickey Mouse. That version was based on Paul Dukas’ symphonic poem, and featured the wizard Yen Sid (think about it) who, after performing alchemical miracles, retires for the evening, leaving his lab in the hands of his young apprentice. This apprentice apparently suffers from the Dunning-Kruger effect. In no time, he conjures up way too many demonic assistants, who wreak havoc until the wizard returns and sets things straight. You should watch it if you haven’t seen it; it’s a triumph of mid-century animation.

What’s interesting is that there’s a lot of accuracy depicted in the piece. Ok, we’ll forgive the anthropomorphic rodent and broomsticks, but overall, what’s depicted there has roots in the history of alchemy.

Most of our “Al” words stem from Arabic, with “Al” simply meaning “The.” “Chemy” comes from the Arabic word for the “art of transmuting metals.” While we think of alchemy as the forerunner of chemistry, it’s perhaps better to think of it as the forerunner of metallurgy. Chemistry branched off some time later.

In the ancient world, blending metals was hugely important. There’s a very good reason we had a “bronze” age. Learning to combine copper and arsenic into a new metal changed the world by allowing societies with that technology to make better tools, weapons and art. Alchemists were the people who learned how to make these metals, and through experimentation, improve them. Arsenic gave way to tin, bronze gave way to iron, which gave way to steel and so on.

It was difficult to learn the specifics and intricacies of proper metal production. It was also extremely valuable, and only the chosen few were allowed into the guilds and given access to the formulas and techniques. These few were apprentices, just like Mickey.

Mickey would have been given the drudge work, such as grinding materials or stoking the fire and keeping it hot with bellows. His pay would be learning valuable skills, which he would protect from outsiders just as his master did. This gave the entire practice an air of “secrecy,” which in some societies was seen as unholy.

Common symbols used in alchemy and then, in other crafts.

To the outsider, alchemy seemed like pure magic. Not only were common metals “changed” or “transmuted” into something more valuable, it was done while the practitioners combined precise and sometimes odd ingredients into crucibles, followed by specific chanting in strange clothing. Things glowed (molten metals) while producing strange smells and colorful smoke. Jars, vials and manuscripts marked with odd symbols filled the lab, and the whole scene may have seemed similar to religious rituals, which are often followed without explanation. This all contributes to the idea that somehow, alchemy and religion are related. Just think of turning water into wine and you can see the connection.The

In the animation, you see a man in a protective robe and cap standing over a cauldron. In reality, it probably would have been a crucible, and wearing protective clothing around molten metals is wise. As for the chanting, the mixing of metals requires precise timing. Reliable alarm clocks hadn’t been invented yet, so timing was done with hourglasses or, by the reciting of poems and songs. Each spoken bit of prose took a certain amount of time, so if you needed to wait one minute, you’d recite the poem that took one minute. It may have been in a classic language unfamiliar to the commoners of the time, so it sounded strange and mystical. The words weren’t doing anything other than tellin...

Over the last couple of days, my social media feeds have been filling up with short articles and witty headlines pointing at the people of Woodland, North Carolina, who are reportedly afraid that solar panels will drain the sun.

A pause.

One oft-cited source is the Independent UK, a fairly respectable paper who ran the story in their “Americas” section with the headline “US town rejects solar panels amid fears they ‘suck up all the energy from the sun’. As of this writing, the article has been shared more than 148,000 times. (In the time it took to create this article, that number jumped to 167,000.)

Most people who are aware of this story know one more fact from the article “A retired science teacher said she was concerned the panels would prevent plants in the area from growing.”

And with that, people are having a Ha Ha! at Woodland, North Carolina. Folks in the North point to the South and say “Look how dumb they are.” People in the world, point at the US and say “What a ridiculous country.”

Here’s a representative comment from the Independent UK article:

“This is wonderful! Another laugh out loud too crazy to make it up goofy story from Amurica . It’s like the light hearted story segment at the end of the news – problem is, these are the majority of the news stories coming out of this literally joke nation.” (sic)

And when you look at the facts with curiosity, you find that those blanket assessments were based on the statements of two people, who may be married.

Sharon Hill of Doubtful News looked into this story, using the same articles that people were sharing around, except that she actually read them. The short version is this: there was a town planning meeting where public comments were accepted. Two people made unscientific complaints against the project, and one of them is a retired science teacher. Other people complained that there were already solar plants in town, and that these new plants weren’t a good enough reason to change zoning on this one parcel of farm land.

When I shared the Doubtful News article this morning, I’m not sure everyone read it, as some of the replies continued to make fun of people who are afraid of solar power. Again, those “people” were two individuals who were possibly married and had a political agenda against solar panels. Their comments are silly, but silly comments from two unknown citizens aren’t newsworthy.

Sharon’s article gives a MUCH better picture of the story. And it’s actually not much of a story: people at a town meeting voted down a zoning change for a variety of reasons, and two people said some laughable things during the comments portion.

So was the Independent UK just lazy? No, they wanted to write an article making fun of Americans. And while there’s plenty to make fun of, this doesn’t really qualify. Thankfully, some local papers reported the story factually. Keith Hoggard in the Roanoke-Chownan News-Herald reported a very matter-of-fact account of the meeting. His headline: Woodland rejects solar farm.

That’s the truth, but that doesn’t sell papers or online ads.

If you’re a curious person, and you see something and wonder “How could that be?” It’s ALWAYS worth it to take a deeper look. We live in a world where content creators are clamoring for your attention, and they know that if they skew a story in certain ways, you’re more likely to click. But that skewing does curiosity a disservice when it tells a story that isn’t there. And it ignores some truly interesting parts of the story, like the fact that fire departments need special training to deal with solar panel fires. That’s a fact I didn’t know today, and it’s not a fact I would have learned from the Independent UK.

Kudos to Sharon Hill for trying to bring the truth to light. She’s performing a service for curious people, everywhere.

You may have heard that major auto manufacturers such as Toyota, Honda and GM are starting to make hydrogen fuel vehicles for production, and not just as experiments. This could spell the end of the hybrid fuel vehicles or it could be just another failed attempt to get us off of fossil fuels. But there’s something interesting about hydrogen as a fuel source: it’s not technically a fuel.

Hydrogen does not exist in nature in any appreciable quantities. We can’t mine it or harvest it: we have to create it. And the way we create it is through a process known as a electrolysis. No, this isn’t the zapping of unwanted body hair, instead it’s a very simple electrochemical reaction where DC current is applied to water, and the water breaks down into its constituent components, H2, diatomic hydrogen, and O, oxygen. This is something you can do at home, or may have done in school chemistry class. But there’s one thing that’s always true about this reaction: it takes more energy to create the hydrogen than the hydrogen will give off.

Fossil fuels are very dense energy stores, and they store energy that ultimately came from the sun, in some cases millions of years ago. And while it’s true that the sun gave more energy than we can get out of fossil fuels, WE, that is humans, don’t have to put very much energy into the equation in comparison to the energy we can extract. With hydrogen, we have to put in ALL the energy we can extract, and then some. Energy is always lost when hydrogen is created and used as fuel. Because of this, it’s best to think of hydrogen as an energy conveyance medium rather than a fuel. It’s a bit like a battery made of gas, in practical terms.

But that doesn’t mean hydrogen powered cars are a bad idea. Though it is extremely flammable, and thus dangerous (see airship Hindeburg), so is gasoline. And unlike gasoline, burning hydrogen whether directly or in a fuel cell, produces only one “waste” component, and that is – you can figure it out – water, or most likely water vapor. It would even be possible to store this water in the vehicle and use it for cooling or windshield washing. Hydrogen fuel cell have been used for decades on human-inhabited spacecraft for this reason.

There’s a lot of debate over the so-called “hydrogen economy” and we’ll leave that to experts.

You may or may not be driving a hydrogen powered car in a few years. But one things for certain: if hydrogen powered cars hit the mass market, it won’t be long for someone installs a device that shoots flames into the air. Count on it.

The hydrogen production cycle for power grid usage. (Photo by Delphi234)