Translated material
Heads in the clouds
The project of the British journalist Gavin Pretor-Pinney at first looked like idle fun: an adult and seemingly busy man organized the Society of Cloud Lovers, registered the corresponding website on the Internet (www.cloudappreciationsociety.org <http://www.cloudappreciationsociety.org>) and began to wait, when a crowd of madmen with membership fees in their pockets flocks to his idea. One could have made fun of the romantic islander for a long time if Gavin’s call to “rehabilitate the clouds” had not been responded to by many eccentrics from all over the world, who literally inundated the enthusiast with photographs, video clips, drawings, scientific research and philosophical reflections on the topic of clouds, cloudiness and related natural phenomena . Fortunately, the professional reporter Pretor-Pinney was smart enough not to transfer this network dump into a book, so the “public” project lives on its own, and the “paper” one is something completely separate.
Pinney's book, if it happens to catch your eye, is absolutely impossible to ignore. In conditions when the shelves are literally bursting with a variety of book products, it is no longer possible to attract the attention of consumers either with witty advertising slogans or “magic” spell names - Murakami, Dan Brown, Coelho. There is only one practically unrealistic way left - to surprise the seasoned reader. Having discovered a textbook entitled “Entertaining Cloud Science” on a shelf, the average city dweller, deprived of the sky, stars, space and mistaking factory smoke for thunderclouds, involuntarily experiences a pang of curiosity.
Behind the blue facade of the cover there really is a textbook, after reading which you can safely demand a certificate of a professional “cloud scientist”, since the “transcendental” topic is covered here in all aspects, from meteorological to fantastic. Also published here are tablets that are completely nostalgic in appearance, similar to those that were given in the natural history textbook and served to classify clouds - cumulus, cirrus, rain, stratus, thunderstorm. Natural science knowledge is complemented by useful travel tips - how, for example, to determine an impending hailstorm or, worse, an earthquake, by a slight nebula at the edge of the sky. Physical data is confirmed by examples from literature: for example, since childhood, I have been haunted by the episode with the prediction of a snowstorm from Pushkin’s “The Captain’s Daughter,” and Gavin Pretor-Pinney appeals to information gleaned from textbook English literature. Clouds are considered both from the point of view of Greek mythology and as inspiration for modern designers: there are clouds as gods, and there are clouds as lamps and clouds as trademarks; all this heavenly army found a place in the crazy book of Praetor-Pinney. And it’s not at all necessary to read this unusual textbook from beginning to end, it’s just good to have such a book at home, so that if you accidentally lift your head off the ground, you’ll have something to refer to. However, as network practice shows, “cloud science” is a contagious science. Its adherents choose a certain minute of the day every day to collectively break away from all their activities and look at the sky, and record the readings in an observation diary.
Hermann Kern. Labyrinths of the world. Per. from English A. Rudakova, L. Shvedova. St. Petersburg: ABC-classics, 2007.
If the British journalist Pretor-Pinney is crazy about clouds, then the German explorer Hermann Kern collects labyrinths. For the last twenty years, his book about labyrinths has inspired computer game creators and film scriptwriters. It was from this monograph that director Guillermo Del Toro drew information for his “Pan’s Labyrinth,” and John Romero created his cult Quake-1 based on Kern’s data.
Hermann Kern’s collection includes data on all labyrinths known to science, built and drawn on five continents: starting with mysterious Paleolithic structures and ending with links to company websites where you can order a labyrinth for your “six hundred square meters.” Kern collected, described and inventoried all the surviving cave paintings, all the manuscripts depicting labyrinths, without exception, all the structures of the Mayans and Incas, all the structures built in the image of the creation of Daedalus and the tombs of the ancient Egyptians, all the labyrinths and tangles laid out in the parks of the Old and New Worlds . Labyrinths made of stone by the ancestors of the Vikings and the builders of medieval cathedrals. Musical and literary works written according to the labyrinth principle. All kinds of seals, symbols, allegories, signs, charades and riddles. When asked why he undertook to study labyrinths, the meticulous German researcher dreamily answered: “People spend their entire lives looking for a way out. I offer them thousands of options to choose from.”