Monthly Archives: March 2025

Playing at Theatre In The Round is Legacy of Light by Karen Zacarias. This is a production that explores disparate questions of gender role crossing; the realities of being a pregnant woman and having a child in the era of Voltaire; the connections between generations that are deeply separated by time; sexual freedoms then, the costs now; how the stretch for roles that are non-traditional can damage one’s sense of capability in traditional roles; and even something as trivial as the difference between stuffy old American accents, and, I presume, the translated French dialog from Voltaire’s era.

For all those themes, maybe that last one struck me most forcefully. Sometimes, it’s the visceral which catches one’s attention, isn’t it?

And how do they do? I was fascinated by the portrayal of Voltaire, famous polymath, and mathematician and scientist Mme Émilie du Châtelet, who was romantically involved with Voltaire. From their spoken dialog, to the revelation that Mme Émilie du Châtelet was a historical personage, and a scientist, made them all the more fascinating.

But not far behind are the modern American couple of a schoolteacher, Peter, and his wife Olivia, an astrophysicist, who happen to be infertile. They are looking for a surrogate mother to carry a child for them, and find her in twenty year old Millie, who recently lost her mother and is trying to pay off various debts owed by herself and her brother, Lewis.

Less inspirational, mostly due to the doctrinaire positions given them by the playwright, and not the capabilities of the actors, are the young lover of Mme Émilie du Châtelet, Saint-Lambert, who is distracted from his impregnation of Châtelet by the honors recently bestowed upon him by the King, and Millie’s brother Lewis, who is positively grating in his interpretation of what passes for informal traditional American morality; surrogacy basically breaks his brain.

Is it perfect? No. But, then, neither is life. In some ways, this is a lesson in living with the limitations of our fellows, whether they’re lovers, family, friends, or biology. And ourselves, even with death in the wings.

It’s worth the price of a ticket or two.

Portolan:

Portolan charts are nautical charts, first made in the 13th century in the Mediterranean basin and later expanded to include other regions. The word portolan comes from the Italian portolano, meaning “related to ports or harbors“, and which since at least the 17th century designates “a collection of sailing directions”. [Wikipedia]

A bit of a foreign import into the English language, which I’ve not seen before. Noted in “The Pizzigano Portolan: A Cartographic Mystery at the James Ford Bell Library,” Dr. Marguerite Ragnow, UMN Libraries:

Hand-painted on a single piece of parchment, Pizzigano’s map is what we call a portolan chart: a manuscript map that emphasizes the sea and the ports of call that dot the surrounding coastline. As Tony Campbell, former Map Librarian of the British Library, once put it: “portolan charts preserve the Mediterranean sailors’ firsthand experience of their own sea, as well as their expanding knowledge of the Atlantic Ocean.” The word “portolan” derives from the Italian word “portolano,” a collection of written sailing directions. These texts list places, with distances and directions to reach them. For example, the James Ford Bell Library has a fourteenth-century Italian Portolano del Adriatico e Mediterra, which gives sailing directions from Constantinople to Lisbon, from the Adriatic Sea through the Mediterranean (Bell call #: 1300 Po).

Samples and discussion of the subject portolan provided at the link. If you enjoy mysteries, this might be fun.

Replacing chemistry with biology:

Back in 2013, [Jim] Ajioka was looking at ways of monitoring water pollution with another researcher, Orr Yarkoni. When the pair realised that much of the water pollution in Nepal and Bangladesh came from the dyeing of textiles, they started thinking about how to reduce it.

Their solution is to use genetically modified bacteria or yeast to “grow” dyes, instead of manufacturing them from chemicals derived from fossil fuels. Ajioka and Yarkoni founded Colorifix in 2016 to commercialise the process.

Some of the colours produced by the modified microbes are pigments long used for dyeing, such as the indigo that gives denim its colour. Others are novel dyes never used before, such as a reddish pigment found in a mould [sic?] that can grow in showers. [“Dyes made by microbes could reduce the environmental impact of clothes,” Michael Le Page, NewScientist (22 February 2025, paywall)]

Fascinating stuff from a science perspective. But they mention Bangladesh, where traditional methods, deadly as they may be, also provides employment for a large sector of the company:

In 2012 the textile industry accounted for 45% of all industrial employment in [Bangladesh] …

The NS article doesn’t address how a microbe-driven dyeing industry would affect employment.