The Sea and Stars

 


For my next idea I wanted to keep with the theme of the sea, but this time I decided to see if I could connect it with my interests in space. When I was thinking about this topic I began to think about stargazing and how sailors used to use the stars for navigation, this really interested me and made me think if this type of navigation was still being used.


Doing some very quick research on this subject I found some fascinating information, before accurate navigation, navigating the high seas with no landmarks was extremely difficult and caused many ships to be wrecked and lost. In 1714 after the loss an entire British fleet due to navigation errors the British government passed the "Longitude Act" that authorised money prizes for anyone who could solve sea navigation. 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Folk Tales - England

Image
  I think it will be good to look more at the relationship people have with the sea and how it changes their way of life, I found this book about folktales in England. Because England is an island nation I want to see if I can find any folktales in it that may be about the sea and give me a better understanding of the relationship with it in the past. Within the book, I only really found two examples of folktales that were about the sea which was pretty annoying but anyway. The first one I found was called The Sea Morgan and The Conger Eels where a mysterious creature called a "sea morgan" would sing and draw people out into the mudflats once the tide had gone out. Once out there the victims would be sucked down into the mud and eaten by eels, the creature is killed by a deaf boy who goes out on the mud in a sled to kill the "sea morgan". This story reminded me a lot of the sirens and mermaids I had been reading about however a Sea Morgan was never mentioned. Doing
Read more

Rising Sea Levels - Flooding Costs

Image
  Having looked at the impact of the sea level rise I wanted to see how much insurance for flooding would cost someone, I checked GoCompares website and there they listed this information which gave an estimate based on distance from water how much flooding insurance would cost a homeowner. I would have thought that proximity and price would have changed a lot when further away from the water however it seems to stay pretty close to that £193 figure, along with this flooding insurance isn't as expensive as I thought it was however it's still something that anyone living near a body of water will have to consider as it is now a real possibility that flooding will become less and less rare. Looking at countrywide cost estimates for the damage flooding can cause is very scary, seeing that in 2015/16 flooding caused £1.6 billion worth of damage is crazy and that between November and March flooding caused around £333 million worth of damage just makes me even more scared for the imp
Read more

Begining Ideas

Image
  Our first task was to create a set of mindmap ideas that we are interested in and could do for our Masters, for this task we had to avoid using words and rather focus on using images to not cement our ideas. I have never done this type of ideation before, trying to keep my ideas free-flowing and open, I think I'm going to find this hard as I keep finding myself wanting to finally decide on an idea but hopefully if I force myself to keep this open type of ideation then I will be able to create a stronger project. This is the first of my mindmaps, focusing on mental health and the focuses around it, this was the first mindmap I created and at first, it was hard to start but once I found my rhythm I was able to just find images and place them onto the page without much issue. My thoughts began to diverge from just mental health to the hospitals that deal with it and how many of us suffer from mental health and how invisible it is. The second of my mindmaps was focused on global warm
Read more