Written by DCist contributor Paul Ghosh-Roy. The aboriginal culture of Australia is said to date back 50,000 years — the longest continuous culture of any people on earth. Dreaming Their Way, an exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, celebrates this tradition and the contributions that contemporary female aboriginal artists have made to the various styles of aboriginal painting. Among this variety of styles, the “dot style” depicts both figures and abstract…

Today the whole world counts lines of longitude away from Greenwich, England. But the globally accepted prime meridian running through the Royal Greenwich Observatory is a relatively new development. At one time, most every important city had its own line: Rome, Jerusalem and St. Petersburg, among others. Of course, for a meridian line to be taken seriously by navigators and mapmakers, one had to publish an ephemeris, viz. an almanac of points on the ground…