Thirty five years ago, on March 13, 1989, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation National News reported “Early this morning six million people across Quebec woke up to darkness and disbelief…the entire province had been hit by a power failure." The people of Quebec were victims of what Dr David Boeteler, head of the Space Weather Group at Natural Resources Canada, called "the biggest geomagnetic storm of the Space Age."
One of the great questions of antiquity is what ancient knowledge might have been lost with the destruction of the famed Great Library of Alexandria. We can only guess at the answer, but the question itself reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the library- what it was, where it was, why its was, and what happened to it.
In the US alone souvenir shops sold more than 21 billion dollars of merchandise in 2022. It is human nature to try and preserve memories, and one of the many ways we do that is to purchase keepsakes, mementos, or souvenirs - that remind us of where we’ve been. And evidence of that human instinct goes way back, well before anyone “exited through the gift shop”.