MISCELLANEOUS

Hometown and its surroundings

• Spodnja Idrija, birthplace.
• Idrija heritage: a slightly modified unofficial text about Idrija and its mercury heritage, originally published in 2000 on the first Slovenian WWW portal, www.matkurja.com. It preceded any official or unofficial WWW presentations of Idrija, so nobody I know has noticed it.
• Idrija Municipal Museum, the principal museum in the UNESCO Heritage List Property Heritage of Mercury. Almaden and Idrija. Contributed a little to their 1997 award of Best European Museum of Industrial and Technical Heritage. Their exhibition includes six flags of countries Idrija belonged to in its 500-year history, including those of Venice, Habsburg Austria, France and Italy.
• New Idria, USA, Idrija's namesake mercury mine ghost town in Sane Benito County, California.
• Gimnazija Idrija, my high school, the first Slovenian technical high school ("Realka", "Realschule") with classes entirely in Slovenian language (within the then Habsburg Monarchy), and was built in 1901 partly with miners' personal funds. They offered excellent education in natural sciences and humanities alike (I started reading Feymnan's Lectures in Physics there as they kept a copy in their (high-school!) library). This high school could also be considered the birthplace of Slovenian aviation: the first Slovenian flyer (1909 in his self-designed and built aircraft), Edvard Rusjan from Gorica, consulted here in early 1900's with professor Julij Nardin, himself a prototype builder. The aircraft and ski-jump (Planica, world's biggest) designer Stanko Bloudek was also born here.
• The Flying Rusjan Brothers (Leteča brata Rusjan) (search for: "brata Rusjan", "any time"). A TV documentary/drama film for which I provided some narration and made the first attempted reconstruction by computer simulation of the Rusjan fatal 1911 accident in Belgrade. The simulation was based on computed physical forces including turbulence forces, and the wind field was modeled according to the actual archived meteorogical data from 1911. The data were retrieved for me by Dr. Smilja Djordjevic of the Republic Hydrometeorological Service of Serbia. I am not aware of any of the many articles and books on Rusjan accident published in the past 100 years that would provide even the actual prevalent wind speeds on that winter day in 1911, a year before the Titanic accident. According to my hypothesis both accidents were caused by the same problem: steel too brittle in cold environment due to localized sulphur inclusions, in the Rusjan's case used for the structural wiring.
• Some Idrija-related pages (mercury, lace).
• Jerusalem where I spent half a year at The Racah Institute of Physics of The Hebrew University, being among the first people to hear about the now classic COBE results on the distribution of the cosmic background radiation.
• Karsruhe where I spent a year at the Kernforschungszentrum, now part of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.
• Pittsburgh
• Some portrait drawings from old times.
• Trireme Olympias, a 170-oared working reconstruction of the classical Greek trireme like the 200 ships that Themistocles led against the Xerxes' Army at the Battle of Salamis in 480 BC. (According to the Delphi Oracle, Greece would be defended by a "wooden wall", while Themistocles proclaimed the 200 ship decks Athenian territory before the battle.) I am grateful to the Hellenic Navy for a special permit to board the ship for several hours at the Hellenic Navy Naval Tradition Park in the harbor of Nea Faliro, Athens, in August, 2016 (special thanks to sailors Tolis Anagnwstou and A. Odysseus). Permit was based on my paper Rowing Times from Athens to Mytilene: implications of misreading Thucydides for 5th-century Greek trireme speed (Int. Journal of Nautical Archaeology 45, 199-201 (2016) local). Dr. B. Rankov of Royal Holloway, University of London, the Rowing Master of the Olympias, kindly provided several details on the Olympias performance under oar.

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