h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Beer flagons, wine amphora, strange creatures and DGI for elephants all mean it's time for me to claim the delirium tremens .

Travel accounts? "Look at what I saw in those faraway lands"

>>Beer flagons, wine amphora, strange creatures and DGI for elephants all mean it's time for me to claim the delirium tremens<<

Belgium?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c5/Bi%C3%A8re_D%C3%A9lirium_tremens.JPG

Oh, sorry, I got distracted. No, not Belgium, nor anything to do with delirium tremens.

Nor travel accounts. Gandalfstwin is closest, and yet so far away...

Was enjoying this thread - is it dead?

(I'm sure I recognise that 2nd picture too which is bugging me , but I don't know the answer...)

Something is stirring in my brain but I'm failing to make the connection.

It's not got anything to do with either a Rhinoceros or a Hippo by any chance has it?

No, not rhinos or hippos. Elephants.

I've by now given the presentation, and was told that these two pictures (plus the third one that I didn't add here ) illustrated the point I was making quite perfectly.

Damn. That's my inspiration exhausted then

Clue time, I suppose.

The first illustration is a woodcut published in 1485 in "Le Livre des Propriétés des Choses", the French translation of "De proprietatibus rerum", (On the Order of Things) a sort of early encyclopaedia by Bartholomaeus Glanville (Barthélémy l'Anglais), originally written in 1230.

The second is a scientific illustration made in 1572 by Jacobus Sluperius.

It all becomes clear now

*Scientific* illustration?

Yes - that's what we call a "clue" round these parts

>> ..illustration is a woodcut published in 1485 in "Le Livre des Propri�t�s des Choses" ...originally written in 1230. <<

235 years to get the artwork done!
A more leisurely age obviously.


~jwf~

they were too busy doing smileys

It was re-published with new artwork - I think (though I'm not sure) that there was a print edition, so they needed woodcuts to be printable, rather than the little paintings in the original. The medium isn't important.

>> The medium isn't important. <<



The medium IS the message.
It is perhaps not relevant to this question.
But the medium IS always the message.

http://individual.utoronto.ca/markfederman/article_mediumisthemessage.htm


~jwf~

Ah, silly semantics. And nothing to do with the medium in Paul Otlet's sense, really. It's a bit like the "form follows function" argument, which Louis Sullivan didn't mean in the way it's interpreted today.

Interestingly enough, that could be seen as relevant, though I certainly won't tell you how at this stage

Nobody going to guess? Awwww...

Does it have anything to do with Bismarck towers?

Just kidding.

So, something emergent published in some sort of encyclopedia, and a scientific illustration representing a matriarchal cyclops...

Illustration 1 represents Earth in very very old times, in a somewhat paradisiac way. Illustration 2 represents a typical inhabitant of wherever is on Illustration 1.

Curiosity cabinets? Um......

Nothing to do with paradise, no. Picture 1 is more of a diagram than a picture, really. What does it show?