The Rijksmuseum, in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, has just been reopened after being closed for ten years for renovations, which seems an awfully long time.
To announce and celebrate the reopening, a flashmob took place that recreated one of the most famous works in the Rijksmuseum – The Night Watch (or more officially The Company of captain Frans Banning Cocq and lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburch preparing to march out), by Rembrandt. This wasn’t your standard flashmob however…
It amazing what you can find when you aren’t looking for it. The other day I was perusing youtube when I noticed something in the suggested video lists – something called The Oldest Known Melody (Hurrian Hymn no. 6 – c.1400BC)
Intrigued, I clicked on the video and was met with the following.
As always I did a bit of looking up on it, and discovered a bit more. In 1950 in the ancient port city of Ugarit (preset day Syria), a series of clay cuneiform tablets were discovered which contained fragments of noted music, the Hurrian Songs. The most complete was the Hurrian Hymn to Nikkal, or Hymn no 6, the oldest surviving substaitally complete noted music in the world. It turns out that while it is notated, no one can agree as to how exactly to translate it, and their are at least 5 rival, substantially different interpretations of it.
Even so, listening to something that may have been played 3400 years ago is an amazing thing.
The oldest complete musical composition in the world is the Seikilos Epitath, from somewhere between 200BC and 100 AD.
In the image of it, you can see the notations above the lyrics that accompanied it.
It sounds like this.
March 30 sees the return of The Doctor, with the second half of the current season of Doctor Who
To whet our appetites, a new trailer has been released.
A nostalgic look back for those of who who lived in the 70s and 80s.
Now this is rather awesome.
The Grand Final of the Aussie rules footy season is almost upon us, one of the oldest sporting competitions in the world. As a reminder of just how old it is, recently footage has been discovered of it being played – from 1911. And it is actually only the fifth oldest footage known to exist.
One thing of interest is to see what the people in the crowd are wearing – women in their big hats and men in their three piece suits. It was a different time indeed.
Now this is amusing – a couple of Canadian teens have sent a lego man into space. Well, near space.
They strapped the lego man and a camera to one of those high altitude balloons and launched it, getting to the edge of space – and they were able to recover the lego when it finally came crashing back down to earth as well.
At least they can launch something into space nowadays, unlike the Australian space program, which vanished way back, or even the US one, which seems to be scrapping any prospect of manned space flight in the foreseeable future. That kind of thinking seems very short sighted.
From the 2011 Children in Need show comes a short skit involving the Doctor and also a trailer for the 2011 Christmas Special. Very obvious what it is based on.
While looking through youtube yesterday, I came across a series of videos made by the 2/95th Regt (Australia) – a group of Australian reenactors based on the famous 95th Rifles, written about by C. S. Forester in Death to the French, and by Bernard Cornwell in his Sharpe series.
In them they test the Brown Bess flintlock musket and the Baker Rifle that were used by the Britsh forces during the Napoleonic Wars, testing for rate of fire, accuracy and more. The information that I gleaned from it will be very useful – I’ll have to change a few things in the revamp of the various stories to take into account the new data I got from it.
Baker Rifle Ammunition and Accuracy
Brown Bess Musket Accuracy
Flintlock Musket Tap Loading
Baker Rifle Sustained Fire
We have a trailer now for the second half of this years Doctor Who season – can’t wait.
Lets see, we have Weeping Angels, Cybermen, Hitler, Rory punching Hitler, what looks like the eye of the Face of Boe and possibly River being eyepatch lady.
Mist and Shadows 