Ralph Lauren: We are responsible
Glow in the dark mushrooms
Joshua Foer is a guest blogger on Boing Boing. Joshua is a freelance science journalist and the co-founder of the Atlas Obscura: A Compendium of the World's Wonders, Curiosities, and Esoterica, with Dylan Thuras.
Dylan's post about the Eisinga Planetarium, a 225-year-old ceiling-mounted orrery in Holland, reminded me of the weathervane at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello that made such an impression on me as a child. Jefferson, ever the clever tinkerer, connected the weathervane on his roof directly to a compass rose hanging on the ceiling of Monticello's entrance portico. Instead of having to trudge outside to find out which way the wind was blowing, he could simply look out his front window.
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You take that a step further and see he provided for leaks, otherwise it would have been upstairs in the bedroom. :)
Instead of having to trudge outside to find out which way the wind was blowing
he could have one of his slaves do it for him.
There's a lot of tech in Jefferson's home to hide the slaves from his own eyes.
Off-topic:
Small correction, the Eise Eisinga Planetarium is not in "Holland"... it is to find in city of Franeker in the province Fryslân (Friesland) of The Netherlands, not in "Holland" (technically Holland consists of 2 provinces: North- and South-Holland). The region beyond those 2 provinces may have served under the Kingdom of Holland some ages ago, but that didn't last very long, it seems Napoleon still rules in some overseas brains, LOL
That's ingenious.
BTW there is small but nicely done orrery in Jefferson's bedroom at Monticello. I suspect it was made by the eminent Rittenhouse, a correspondent of Jeffersons, but nobody at Monticello seems to know
Much better than the poor folk method of putting the weather vane on a nearby structure, like a barn. You have might have to look out a back window to see it.
You should check out the clock above the door inside the foyer at Monticello. It uses cannonballs strung on ropes to provide the power, rather than the motion of a pendulum. The ropes go out from the sides of the clocks and then over pulleys, so they can hang down. The ropes are supposed to be long enough that the clock can run for one week without needing rewinding. But Jefferson badly miscalculated the throw needed and the ropes wound up way too long. His answer was to cut holes in the floor so that now when the ropes are near the end of their travel they hang down into the cellar. Jefferson was a brilliant man in many ways but he was a little spacy. I wish I had pictures I could show you but they don't allow photography inside the house. I'm not sure if that's to prevent ultraviolet from flashes damaging things, or due to copyright issues.
Peter the Great had something like this, in St. Petersburg I think (he did build the city).
The Central Station in Amsterdam has one too.
See it here (on the left tower):
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/1283-Amsterdam%28centraal_station%29.jpg
The station was built between 1881 and 1889 by architect P.J.H. Cuypers and engeneer/architect A.L. van Gendt.
The windvane itself is actually behind the tower. If the wind comes from the south-west the windvane is in the turbulence of the tower, making the needle go back and forth wildly.
No problem for the architect: "if you cannot read the direction, the wind must be coming from the south-west"
This is how I thought all weather vanes worked. Until reading this article, I didn't know they were NOT normally connected to the inside of the house.
hmm.
Why would you NEED to know which way the wind was blowing?
because the weather channel wouldn't be around for another 200 years?