The blog about things that should not be forgotten
~ Saturday, October 17, 2020 ~
About 12.85 metres from one edge to the other, the labyrinth fills the nave of Notre-Dame de Chartres almost from pillar to pillar. It was laid in white limestone from the Berchères quarries and dark stone from Senlis, sometime in the early thirteenth century. No document from the chapter of Notre-Dame records why it was built, or what it was for, or what its builders called it.
~ Monday, September 28, 2020 ~
Before December 1945, the argument that the early church had systematically suppressed competing apostolic traditions was a theological inference drawn from the shape of the canonical record — from what the canon excluded rather than from any surviving evidence of the exclusion. After a sealed earthenware jar was opened in the Egyptian desert near the town of Nag Hammadi, the inference became a documented finding.
~ Saturday, June 20, 2020 ~
The question the 1947 Røros log entry raises is whether earlier accounts of unusual lights in the Hessdalen area exist in pre-modern sources. This is a straightforward historical question, and the answer is mixed: there is relevant material in the Norwegian clerical and parish record tradition, but most of it is ambiguous enough to require caution.
~ Friday, February 14, 2020 ~
Earlier this year, while requesting digitised historical weather data from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute for a separate project on atmospheric baseline conditions, I received a batch of scanned observation logs from the Røros station. Røros is a mining town approximately fifteen kilometres northwest of the Hessdalen valley. The station has been operating since the nineteenth century. I was looking for temperature and precipitation records. What I found, in a log entry dated February 14, 1947, was something else.
~ Tuesday, October 8, 2019 ~
There are currently five competing physical explanations for the Hessdalen lights, all with peer-reviewed literature behind them, none of which accounts for the complete observational record. This is not a failure of science. It is a description of where the science stands. I am going to set out each model, note what it explains well, and note where it runs out.