todayilearned

not sure why i found this fascinating. i was working a geospatial mapping project and stumbled on this tangent

!til@lemmy.world

The Canadian Shield (French: Bouclier canadien [buklje kanadjɛ̃]), also called the Laurentian Shield or the Laurentian Plateau, is a geologic shield, a large area of exposed Precambrian igneous and high-grade metamorphic rocks. It forms the North American Craton (or Laurentia), the ancient geologic core of the North American continent. Glaciation has left the area with only a thin layer of soil, through which exposures of igneous bedrock resulting from its long volcanic history are frequently visible. As a deep, common, joined bedrock region in eastern and central Canada, the shield stretches north from the Great Lakes to the Arctic Ocean, covering over half of Canada and most of Greenland; it also extends south into the northern reaches of the continental United States. Geographical extent The Canadian Shield is a physiographic division comprising...

Little of the soil of planet Earth is older than the Pleistocene and none is older than the Cenozoic, although fossilized soils are preserved from as far back as the Archean.

They did a blood-filled record for Motley Crüe, a fly-filled record for Alice in Chains, a ring-filled record for the Sonic the Hedgehog movie soundtrack and other weird stuff. One even has scorpions inside it!

Nobody mourned.

Also, why am I the only person who ever learns anything around here?

That is not the only warning film not to do it because people were dying all the time: https://archive.org/details/more_dangerous_then_dynamite

Some headlines of people making the worst mistake of their shortened lives:

https://www.coloradohistoricnewspapers.org/?a=d&d=RMD19330315-01.2.175&e=-------en-20--1--img-txIN%7ctxCO%7ctxTA--------0------

https://www.newspapers.com/article/wilkes-barre-times-leader-explosion-caus/13045180/

https://post-gazette.newspapers.com/article/the-pittsburgh-press-gasoline-caused-two/91356754/

Occasionally, they got lucky and survived.

https://www.newspapers.com/article/hot-springs-weekly-star-cleaning-clothes/124927252/

https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2017/aug/29/100-years-ago-today-in-spokane-woman-using-gasolin/

They also produced the color purple or lavender from the murex mollusks that were found on the seacoast. Dye makers rubbed two of the mollusks together in order to extract the dye.

That sounds simple enough, but it also involved some real chemistry:

https://hal.science/hal-03202592/document

Purple was one of the most expensive and difficult dyes to acquire and process. 1 gram takes 10,000 snails. In Europe, it was solely used for kings.

Founded in 1825, Seneca Village was once home to nearly 200 residents.

Some villagers were German and Irish American.

But most of them were Black

By 1855, nearly half of them owned their own homes. They had a school, churches, gardens and voting rights because they owned land.

But in 1857, Seneca Village was torn down when the city decided it wanted to create a park.

Villagers were essentially forced to leave.

Today, researchers are trying to figure out where they went and locate their descendants.

A lot of the original landscape can still be seen in the park today.

It stretches from 82nd Street to 89th Street and Central Park West.

“We know that they used some of the stone that you see out there now to build their houses,” Marie Warsh, a historian with the Central Park Conservancy, told NBC New York.

Signs erected by the Central Park Conservancy help to commemorate and tell the story of the village and its vibrant community.

“You can really start to imagine what it may have looked like,” said Warsh.

Talks to figure out a permanent way to commemorate Seneca Village, which is not a historical landmark, are ongoing.

Those interested in learning more about the history of Seneca Village can visit the MET's "Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room" exhibition or www.centralparknyc.org.