Toynbee Tiles

[Whose Yur Planner]

Yesterday the Indy Star ran an article on the Toynbee Tiles. The tiles are tiles that appear in roads and link Stanley Kubrick's film "2001: A Space Odyssey" with British historian Arnold Toynbee. The article contains several links to websites that cover the topic. Does anyone have a toynbee tile in their community or have additional information regarding them? Sorry about not providing a link to the article, but I am not very good at that sort of thing.

 

[JNA]

Here is the Article Headline and link:

2006: a street oddity
Tiles with mysterious message found on Indy crosswalks and across country
http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060102/NEWS01/601020376&SearchID=73231430114693

Interesting information box:

About the tiles
Some of the cities where the Toynbee tile has been found include Baltimore, Boston, Cincinnati, Detroit, Indianapolis, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, New York and Washington.

Several Web sites are devoted to the topic including:

http://www.toynbee.net/ The main Web site devoted to the tiles and their locations.
http://www.resurrectdead.com/ More information and speculation on the tile mystery, including a message board.
http://www.crimsonmane.org/spikevision/indytoynbeetiles.html An Indianapolis site about the tiles.

 

[Maister]

Some of the links don't work for me (maybe just at work) so I'm still not sure I really understand what this is all about. What I can gather is that there are these tiles (made of a reportedly unknown material) located in urban areas in various regions of the world that have been in place for at least a couple decades that nobody knows who placed. The messages all say "Toynbee ideas in Kubrick's 2001 resurrect dead on planet Jupiter."

I am a big fan of both historian Toynbee and of film maker Kubrick, but I fail to see what one has to do with the other.

One of the most stirring passages I have ever read is in the introduction to Arnold Toynbees "Study of History" where he answers the question why we should study history. He explained how principles like 'militant nationalism' relate very intimately with our lives and gives the example how nearly all of his historian classmates died in the senseless slaughter of WWI. Toynbee was one of the first to express the sentiment that those who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it.

The Indy Star article states that the meaning of Kubricks 2001/2010 is the topic of much debate, but I don't know about that. We've heard it from the author (Clarke) himself (in 2010) that the monolith is a catalyst for evolution, so there's little mystery, to me at least, that the infamous 'light scene' in 2001 is a visual representation of astronaut Dave Bowman's quickening and evolution. Likewise, 2010 deals with evolution on a solar scale and portrays the evolution of Jupiter into a star.

Resurrection implies death and I don't see what death has to do with 2001 or 2010 - unless we take it mean that Dave Bowman and Jupiter "died" in order to achieve their higher state. Still, usage of the term 'resurrection' seems to be a poor description of 'advancement'.