Tuesday and News of the Cool

Warm and humid after thunderstorms rolled through last night, but we did (and do) need the rain.

Saw this on my Twitter feed this morning (retweeted by Neil Gaiman) -- ancient cave paintings show moving animals. Now, I think we'd actually known that before now, but here's something that was new to me: thaumatropes were discovered in the caves. What's a thaumatrope? It's like a button or a coin -- a disk of thin stone or bone, with a different image carved on each side. A hole was drilled through the middle, and a bit of twine or sinew threaded through, and then when you pull on or twirl the string, the "coin" flips back and forth, and ... the two images "move." It's animation, on a very small scale. Here's the Wikipedia page on thaumatropes, with a 19th-century example, and here's a tiny little video (page down) of a paleontologist making and demonstrating a copy of one of the ancient thaumatropes. The video is in French, because that's who's been doing the research, but it's pretty easy to follow. *g*

Anyway. Thousands of years ago. Thousands of years ago, animation. Animals standing, running, leaping, by the light of flickering torch strobes. The persistence of vision in little bone buttons. So much beautiful wonder. :-D