History Survival Guide

Wish (2023)

Watching this movie in theaters for the first time I was so distracted by this strangely accurate and oddly familiar astronomical diagram in the first two minutes of the film I missed the movie’s exposition and spent the entire rest of the time playing catch up

A lot of the magic in this movie is shown with beautiful esoteric diagrams reminiscent of an old style of illuminated manuscripts.

They even use a simple orrey and armillary sphere to fill out the set when the characters enter the tower for the first time

The music was probably the weakest part of the movie despite the overall good cast. If you want some good classic Disney music, I was sent this song “Snuff out the Light”. It is Eartha Kitt, her masterful self, as Yzma with her villain song that was never used in the eventual movie

"The first-ever Scientific American Summer Reading Challenge begins on June 1 and ends on August 31. We challenge you to read along with the staff and check off boxes on the bingo card below"

If you need some inspirations, I have collected a list of my personal favorite science and science history books into a reading list based on topic

History of Astronomy and Space

History of Physics

History of Medicine

History of Mathematics

History of Biology, Chemistry, and Genetics

History of the Natural World

Found my new favorite tool for organizing concepts for projects

It is a free software that works a lot like Wikipedia, by letting you organizing ideas into pages and cross-referencing them. It was designed for D&D and world building for novels but is surprisingly flexible

Ever wonder what Sputnik was doing in space?

The new video I researched and co-wrote with the Hoog team is up. It is all about Sputnik! It wasn’t actually called Sputnik, since that would be calling it “satellite”, so its official name is Sputnik-1

It was the first artificial satellite and began the dawn of the Space Age in 1957, more than a decade before humanity landed on the moon 🛰️ 🚀

Sputnik is a good story with a lot of colorful characters. However, in my research I was annoyed how often its launch was framed as an American failure rather than a Russian success. So this story focuses on the Russian side of things

The best nuggets of research came from this delightfully janky website and also this enormous tome of a book which focuses on Russian history:

Found this surprisingly excellent and simple breakdown about how shadows on the moon appear different in different hemispheres

(The comic in question is Oddity Woods by Kay Davault)

It’s a bit hard to imagine but depending on your hemisphere you can literally be upside in perspective. This can create all sorts of weird behaviors with the sun (and defined what we mean when we say clockwise)

Today’s image is actually a video which shows what simulated waves on Titan look like compared to Earth

Warframe (2025)

Warframe has been running for over a decade now, but this is specifically from the "The Old Peace" release

It is commonly known as the "ninjas-in-space" game, but I have always been fond of its extremely weird and very busy art style. This particular part of the trailer caught my attention. It shows a moving ceiling with a clear astronomy-based design

Very beautiful, but also, very clearly inspired by astrolabes (which appears to be a common source of inspiration). You can compare it to this 1558 astrolabe (in Latin)

At some point I think this series should just be "astrolabe inspired design"

The Hangman written by Maurice Ogden

Into our town the Hangman came,

Smelling of gold and blood and flame-

And he paced our bricks with a different air

And built his frame on the courthouse square.

The scaffold stood by the courthouse side,

Only as wide as the door was wide;

A frame as tall, or little more,

Than capping still of the courthouse door.

And we wondered, whenever we had the time,

Who the criminal, what the crime,

The Hangman judged with the yellow twist,

Of knotted hemp in his busy fist.

And innocent though we were, with dread

We passed those eyes of buckshot lead;

Till one cried: “Hangman, who is he,

For whom you raise the gallows-tree?”

A Popular History of Science by Robert Routledge (1881)

A Popular History of Science by Robert Routledge (1881)

The previous parts have covered the front limb and latitude plate. Unlike the latitude plate, the main body of the astrolabe (the mater) is the same across all astrolabe

The various rings on the back of the plate determine the altitude and calendars (civil and zodiac)

This is a step-by-step guide to the complete construction of an astrolabe that I think might exist. At least, in any accessible form

As always, my goal is for this to be as accessible as possible for any kind of reader, so if there are any questions, please feel free to reach out

Assuming I don’t drop my computer into a food processor, Part Seven will be out this week (see here for previous sections or don’t, if you like a challenge)

I have lost track of how many diagrams I’ve made for the How to Build an Astrolabe series. My final diagram PNGs are about two hundred but between notes and experimenting it is probably closer to double that. I shudder to imagine how many hours it has taken—I don’t want to guess

It is hard to believe but I honestly thought this would be a quick project, maybe two months

I’ve said it before, but honestly I am almost done. The remaining sections are:

Star chart/rete

Declination ruler (will be very short)

Alidade and pin (will be extremely short)

Optional parts: shadow square, equation of time, unequal hours diagram, sin/cos scale

But then I am finally free…

Eventually I’ll return to make a page about using the thing, but only after I’ve had a chance to work on any of the dozen other projects I have sitting in my notes