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carbonface's Journal
Created on 2005-09-12 19:09:28 (#8277828), last updated 2009-11-21
269 comments received, 432 comments posted
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Basic Info| Name: | carbonface |
|---|
Bio In Moscow a Christian church, built on the banks of the Moscow River in the middle of the nineteenth century to celebrate the victory over Napoleon, was pulled down in the 1930s. An old Russian proverb says that a holy place can never be empty and will always be occupied by people. In place of the destroyed church, the Communist Party decided, in the 1920s before the old one was torn down, to erect a temple of their new religion. The new atheistic temple for large congresses, to be called the Palace of Soviets, was desigend to hold twenty thousand people in a lower meeting hall and five thousand in an upper hall, with many smaller rooms and halls.
The Communists arranged an international competition for designs, and two hundred architects contributed plans, mostly Soviets but even some Americans. The winning design was a combination of ziggurats each 230 meters high.
A picture of Brueghel the elder of the Tower of Babel shows the same design. The final plan was a tower that stood 415 meters high with a statue of Lenin at the top 80 meters high. It would have been the highest ziggurat in the world.
In some Russian spiritual opinion, this monument could not exist because God exists. To these thinkers the designers didn't understand that the temple was a moral perversion-- an affront to God. Other, more scientific, thinkers realized that the statue of Lenin, because it was so high, could not be observed without distortions. It would have needed to be built with distortion in order to make it observable without distortion. But which point of view would be correct? Would some viewing points be forbidden?
The cost of this temple would have been enough to build a few small towns. Like the construction of the Tower of Babel, the project was endorsed and the builders began to build by first making a huge hole for the foundation. In 1941, the second year of construction, work was halted with the outbreak of World War II. As the war went on, the idea was abandoned.
However, by the end of the war, the hole remained and was used as an open-air swimming pool.
--The Dreaming Universe, Fred Alan Wolf, Ph.D.
--
'One time I went to buy some ice cream... I walked over to the vendor and asked her what kind of ice cream she had. 'Fruit ice cream,' she said. But she answered in such a tone that a whole pile of coals, of black cinders, came bursting out of her mouth, and I couldn't bring myself to buy any ice cream after she had answered in that way ...' [2]
His mnemonic associations were so strong that it is said he could recall them after many years. After he discovered his own abilities, he performed as a mnemonist but this created confusion in his mind. He went as far as writing things down in a paper and burning it, so he could see the words in cinders, in a desperate attempt to forget them. Reportedly, in his late years, he realized he could forget facts with just a conscious desire to remove them from his memory, although this isn't well verified.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.V._Shereshevskii
The Communists arranged an international competition for designs, and two hundred architects contributed plans, mostly Soviets but even some Americans. The winning design was a combination of ziggurats each 230 meters high.
A picture of Brueghel the elder of the Tower of Babel shows the same design. The final plan was a tower that stood 415 meters high with a statue of Lenin at the top 80 meters high. It would have been the highest ziggurat in the world.
In some Russian spiritual opinion, this monument could not exist because God exists. To these thinkers the designers didn't understand that the temple was a moral perversion-- an affront to God. Other, more scientific, thinkers realized that the statue of Lenin, because it was so high, could not be observed without distortions. It would have needed to be built with distortion in order to make it observable without distortion. But which point of view would be correct? Would some viewing points be forbidden?
The cost of this temple would have been enough to build a few small towns. Like the construction of the Tower of Babel, the project was endorsed and the builders began to build by first making a huge hole for the foundation. In 1941, the second year of construction, work was halted with the outbreak of World War II. As the war went on, the idea was abandoned.
However, by the end of the war, the hole remained and was used as an open-air swimming pool.
--The Dreaming Universe, Fred Alan Wolf, Ph.D.
--
'One time I went to buy some ice cream... I walked over to the vendor and asked her what kind of ice cream she had. 'Fruit ice cream,' she said. But she answered in such a tone that a whole pile of coals, of black cinders, came bursting out of her mouth, and I couldn't bring myself to buy any ice cream after she had answered in that way ...' [2]
His mnemonic associations were so strong that it is said he could recall them after many years. After he discovered his own abilities, he performed as a mnemonist but this created confusion in his mind. He went as far as writing things down in a paper and burning it, so he could see the words in cinders, in a desperate attempt to forget them. Reportedly, in his late years, he realized he could forget facts with just a conscious desire to remove them from his memory, although this isn't well verified.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.V._Shereshevskii
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