Nelson Mandela Digital Archives Now Online
Via Memeburn:
Google and the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory (NMCM) have created a new Nelson Mandela Digital Archive on the web that is freely accessible to the world.
Google donated about US$1.25-million to the Johannesburg-based Centre in 2011 to help preserve and digitise thousands of archival documents, photographs and videos about Mandela.
Along with historians, educationalists, researchers and activists, users from around the world now have access to extensive information about the life and legacy of this extraordinary African statesman.
The new online multimedia archive includes Mandela’s correspondence with family, comrades and friends, diaries written during his 27 years of imprisonment, and notes he made while leading the negotiations that ended apartheid in South Africa.
The archive will also include the earliest-known photograph of Mandela, rare images of his cell on Robben Island in the 1970s, and never-seen drafts of Mandela’s manuscripts for the sequel to his autobiography “Long Walk to Freedom.”
Nelson Mandela Digital Archive.
Image: Warrants of Commital (document #1 front), 11/7/1962.
This item consists of 1 Warrant of Committal issued to Nelson Mandela by the Magistrate’s Court of South Africa. The warrant contains Nelson Mandela’s fingerprints. Via the Nelson Mandela Digital Archive.
(via discoverynews)
These images are from National Geographic’s gorgeous gallery of New Aurora Pictures: Huge Solar Blasts Spark Rare Colors. Their brilliant and unusual colors are the result a particularly intense solar storm triggered by titanic eruptions on the sun a couple of weeks ago over Crater Lake, Oregon.
The Four Ages of the Universe — What’s Next?
The Greek poet Hesiod described the Five Ages of Man in mythology.
They progress from the Golden Age, when people lived among the gods, through the warlike Bronze Age and on to the Heroic Age. His narrative ends with the Iron Age, a period of toil and misery for mankind.
Science has now replaced these mythologies. We are at the point where we look at the entire universe as a grand series of game-changing leaps toward our emergence as an intelligent species. It is an epic story more compelling than anything from creation mythology.
