Ghost town spirit alive
QUESTION
What is the story of the deserted town near Chernobyl, which features in the video for Life Is Golden, the new single by the pop group Suede? LIFE is Golden is the first official single from Suede’s forthcoming eighth studio album The Blue Hour. The video used footage of the Ukrainian ghost town of Pripyat, 95 kilometres north of the Ukrainian capital of Kiev on the Belarus border. It was filmed by documentary maker Mike Christie.
Pripyat was founded on February 4, 1970. It was the Soviet Union’s ninth ‘nuclear city’, built to serve the Chernobyl power facility, known as the V.I. Lenin Nuclear Power Plant.
Pripyat was built in tandem with the power station’s construction to house the workers of the Chernobyl plant. It was completed in 1977, with over 13,000 apartments, almost 100 schools, a hospital, and a central administration.
The town bore the hallmarks of intermodal Soviet modernist architecture. Within the generic, concrete street-space lay subtle flourishes of uniqueness, such as the Prometheus cinema’s stained glass windows, and a still intact Ferris wheel.
Pripyat was devastated by the April 26, 1986 Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster, when the explosion of Reactor 4 caused the direct deaths of 31 people and spread radioactive clouds across Europe.
Following the disaster, Pripyat was evacuated and remains empty. Olivia Edwards, Oxford.
QUESTION
Why did the French entomologist Antoine Magnan argue a bumblebee’s flight is aerodynamically impossible? THE theory that a bumblebee’s flight was aerodynamically possible emerged in the Thirties. The story goes that during a dinner party, an aerodynamicist, in discussion with a biologist, did a quick calculation about the insect’s flight.
They assumed a rigid, smooth wing, estimated the bee’s weight and wing area, and calculated the lift generated by the wing. Not surprisingly, there was insufficient lift. Some accounts associate the story with the German physicist Ludwig Prandtl (1875-1953); others identify the Swiss gas dynamicist Jacob Ackeret (1898-1981).
In 1934, French zoologist and aeronautical engineer Antoine Magnan (1881-1938) included the following passage in the introduction to his book Le Vol des Insectes: ‘I applied the laws of air resistance to insects, and I arrived with Mr St Lague at the conclusion that their flight is impossible.’ Magnan was actually referring to a calculation by his assistant André Sainte-Lagué, and commenting on the fact that he had applied the same fix winged aerodynamics to the bumblebee and had concluded that flight was not possible for such a system.
So the urban legend was born that became the basis of an inspirational poster which carries the absurd quote: ‘According to the theory of aerodynamics, as may be readily demonstrated through wind tunnel experiments, the bumblebee is unable to fly. This is because the size, weight, and shape of his body in relation to the total wingspread make flying impossible. But the bumblebee, being ignorant of these scientific truths, goes ahead and flies anyway – and makes a little honey every day.’
The problem of insect flight was solved by Danish scientist Torkel Weis-Fogh (1922-1975), professor of zoology at Cambridge University in the Seventies. He explained how an insect’s wing works by encouraging air to flow over it in such a way that when the air leaves the rear edge of the wing it moves downwards. The resultant eddy produces an upwards thrust on the wing.
Dr Ken Warren, Glasgow.
QUESTION
Was Adolf Hitler’s policy of lebensraum – colonising other countries – influenced by Andrew Jackson’s treatment of American Indians? WHILE Hitler was writing Mein Kampf (My Struggle), he discovered the word lebensraum meaning ‘living space’ and adapted it to his own purposes. It provided ‘justification’ for territorial expansion into Central/Eastern Europe. People deemed to be part of inferior races, within the lebensraum expansion, were subjected to expulsion or destruction.
Some modern historians have linked lebensraum to ‘Manifest Destiny’, a phrase coined in 1845. This expressed the philosophy that drove the tough Democrat President Andrew Jackson’s westward territorial expansion in the 1830s. Manifest Destiny held that the US was destined – by God, its advocates believed – to expand its dominion and spread democracy and capitalism across the North American continent.
Tracing the path of Manifest Destiny across the West would highlight destruction of Indian tribal culture, expulsions, and confinement of Indians to reservations. It was often brutal. One of the most heart-breaking examples is the Trail of Tears, in which Jackson used the force of the government to expel the Cherokee Nation from their home in the southeast and relocate them to the West. Nearly 4,000 people died. Such similarities have led to historians directly comparing the two.
The Pulitzer-Prize winning biographer John Toland goes as far as to state that Hitler was inspired by the Indian reservation system. ‘Hitler’s concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history,’ Toland wrote in his book, Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography. Archie D Wiseman, Seaham, Co. Durham.
QUESTION
Did the US lumber industry use giant log flumes to transport wood? FURTHER to the earlier answer, 20 years ago my wife and I travelled from Kamloops to Vancouver on the Rocky Mountaineer train.
For much of the second day, the train ran alongside the Fraser River, which, as it approaches the Pacific ocean north of Vancouver, becomes ever wider due to being swelled by three merging rivers.
This natural watercourse is used as a giant log flume to transport thousands of tons of lumber down to the saw mills and timber product factories, and also for export from the port of Vancouver.
The huge tree trunks are chained together to form large floating rafts that make their way down to the sea without any man-made power being required. Lyn Pask, Gwent.
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