537 – Siege of Rome: The Ostrogoth army under King Vitiges begins the siege. Belisarius conducts a delaying action outside the Flaminian Gate; he and a detachment of his bucellarii are almost cut off. 1498 – Vasco da Gama’s fleet visits the Island of Mozambique. 1657 – Great Fire of Meireki: A fire in Edo […]
Archives for March 2, 2017
A Quarrel of Sparrows
This gathering of sparrows, apparently seeking the fellowship of their own kind as solace against the rigors of winter, struck us as an apt metaphor for contentious times, and made us wonder whether humans couldn’t learn something from the example of feathered friendship. This, in turn, made us curious about the collective name for a […]
An Atlas That’s Nothing to Shrug About
The Downtown Alliance has created an interactive, three-dimensional map of Lower Manhattan that zooms, swoops, pivots, and performs other visual acrobatics, while also searching through multiple data sets, such as residential, office, and hotel properties, as well as restaurants, retailers, transit facilities, cultural institutions, and parks. This convergence of information and imagery, known as LM3D […]