On the rugged northwest tip of Newfoundland, an important archeological site tells the story of the first known European settlement in North America. L'Anse aux Meadows National Historic Site has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage site. Viking explorers called this area Vinland. Remains of their presence, as much as one thousand years ago, were discovered in 1960. Today, full-scale replicas of Norse sod huts provide glimpses into life in a Viking colony in the New World.
From the virtual tours page of the Parks Canada L'Anse aux Meadows site. The website has more about the history of L'anse aux Meadows and a few photos as well. Some of these sites have better photos, though, and some more information, too:
Discovering Vikings at L'anse aux Meadows
Vinland Archeology
photo, Viking landing craft
L'anse Aux Meadows - panoramic view
some good photos of L'anse Aux Meadows, mixed in with some other stuff.
From the Globe and Mail, Icelanders add a leaf to Viking mystery tale:
Here on this remote northern edge of Iceland, buried under a thousand years of volcanic ash and drifting soil, the second half of one of Canada's most ancient human mysteries finally is being dug up.
It is, they say, the home of Snorri Thorfinnson, famed in Viking lore as the first European born in the New World and a key family member in Eric the Red's legendary clan.
Thorfinnson's birthplace is thought to be in Newfoundland, at l'Anse aux Meadows. Discovered 40 years ago, it has been made a United Nations World Heritage Site and is considered one of the world's major archeological finds.
Besides being the only authenticated settlement of Norse Vikings in North America, l'Anse aux Meadows is the earliest mark of the sweeping role Europeans were fated to play on the North American stage.
But the question always has been: Where did Thorfinnson go from there?
The answer, it seems, is right here, to this farmer's field in Glaumbaer. At the moment, a few dozen of Iceland's shaggy sheep are grazing over what would have been Thorfinnson's sleeping quarters. [continue]
I've been snooping around the web for sites about the Occitan language. (Curiosity aroused by a book about Eleanor of Aquitaine; Langue d'Oc, the medieval version of Occitan, was probably her mother tongue.)
From the Easy Occitan website:
Our language is mainly spoken in France where it is not officialized in spite of a huge number of claims from its speakers. It is also spoken in Italy (las Valadas) and Spain (Val d'Aran), where it has an official status. The word Occitan, already in use more than 700 years ago, comes from "òc" (mainly pron. [ò]) which means "yes" in our language. Currently it is difficult to know its exact number of speakers but it's worth noting that Occitan was THE European language in the Middle Ages (remember the Trobadors). Nowadays, lots of people try to protect the original language of Occitània but the harm's already done: like other languages of the french State, Occitan is very endangered. I hope this modest page (my modest contribution to a Country I love) will bring its small brick to the wall of survival of la polida lenga nòstra. Never forget before learning our language that, despite what claims France to make a fool of us, Occitan is not a dialect or a patois of French; it is a true language with its own rules; a language written and sung much before French (French is nothing more than le patois du roi (the king's dialect) itself…)
I'm sure you'll sleep better now that you know that.
Here are some Occitan links:
Occitan language - Wikipedia
Occitan - encyclopedia.com article
Occitan Language
Occitan on the Internet
Institut d'Estudis Occitans de París
And here's a Mirabilis.ca blog entry about the Aquitaine sundial ring, which is how I came to be interested in Eleanor of Aquitaine (and hence, Occitan) in the first place.
From the Guardian: Fake Plaques Puzzle France. [Sorry, article no longer available.]
It's long been a tradition in Paris to mount a plaque on a building where a noteworthy tenant - a war hero, major writer or other luminary - lived or died.
But recently, the tradition has taken a curious turn.
Take, for example, a plaque that appeared mysteriously on a facade in eastern Paris stating: "On April 17, 1967 - nothing happened here."
Or one in the garment district paying homage to a former resident identified as, "Karima Bentiffa - civil servant.'"
This sounds like such a fun project! And a person could do the same thing in London, too.
From a Vancouver Sun article, 60-acre spider web baffles biologists: [Update: Vancouver Sun article no longer available.]
A warning: If the thought of tens of millions of tiny spiders spinning a web 24 hectares — 60 acres — in size and crawling all over it scares the wits out of you, you might want to tread carefully over the following.
Because that's exactly what happened last month on a farmer's field near McBride, about 220 kilometres east of Prince George.
Just what are those spiders trying to catch, anyway? Sheep? Here's more from the CBC News website: Spiders weave huge natural wonder.
A biology professor in northern British Columbia has spotted a clover field crawling with spiders and the results of their efforts.
Brian Thair of the College of New Caledonia in Prince George said he saw a silky, white web stretching 60 acres across a field.
"When you see horror movies with spider web festooned from this place to that place and so on, it comes nowhere near approaching what occurred in this field," Thair told CBC Radio's As It Happens.
A typical barbwire fence on wood posts surrounded the field about six kilometres east of McBride in the Robson Valley. Thair said it looked like the whole area was covered with an opaque, white plastic grocery store bag.The thin, elastic coasting was not soft and fluffy like webs built by individual spiders. There were about two spiders per square centimetre laying the silk, which first appeared in early October.
Thair said the web showed great tensile strength– enough to put a handful of coins on it without them falling through.
Here's the web of mystery photo gallery.
You know, I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried.
The Cistercian Order was the most important of the new religious orders which developed in western Europe in the late eleventh century in response to movements for reform in the Church. Cistercians — also known as White Monks — dominated the spread of new monastic foundations in Europe and spread rapidly from Burgundy where the order began throughout France, Britain and Ireland. In Britain, their greatest impact was in the north, where Yorkshire became the nerve-centre of the monastic life.
From The Cistercian Order page of the Cistercians in Yorkshire website. Fascinating!
There's lots of information here. Read about the history of the order in Britain, details about numerous abbeys, notes on Cistercian life, the dissolution of the monasteries in Yorkshire and throughout Britain, and so forth.
On a side note, how many times have you seen an illustration of a mostly bald monk, with just a fringe of hair left? I always thought it was because the monastery attracted a certain number of bald guys, but there's more to it than that. The clothing page points out that monks were tonsured: " i.e. the crown of the head was shaved, leaving a band of hair below the ears, to symbolise the Crown of Thorns. This rite of passage was performed after the novice had made his profession in the chapter-house, and before he took his vows in the church. Subsequent shaving occurred in the cloister about nine times a year."
Well. That explains a lot.
From a scotsman.com article, Wesley cracks ancient quest:
Wesley Bradd was in the middle of a Raleigh International trip to Africa when he discovered a clutch of rare and ancient ostrich eggs which could be tens of thousands of years old.
Archaeologists are astonished at the find by the 22-year-old from Dunbar because they have been hunting for similar prized items in vain for years.
Academics are particularly excited because the eggs carry engravings by bushmen and the shells have been expertly turned into water bottles.
Mr Bradd, who is a volunteer with youth development charity Raleigh International, was taking a break from working on environmental projects in the south-west of the country when he explored a crevasse under a rock overhang and found the three rare egg water bottles.
The bottles were used by San [bushmen] people - the original inhabitants of the area - who drilled a hole in one side of a fresh egg, cleaned it out and, once filled with water, plugged the holes with a mixture of beeswax and grass. [continue]
Now those water bottles would be so much more fun than the sort of water bottles we find in Vancouver. Anybody have a spare ostrich egg and some beeswax?
What happens when you put dry ice into an airplane toilet at 33,000 feet? One unfortunate pilot found out, and the story is priceless.
He turns and looks at the toilet. But it has, for all practical purposes, disappeared, and where it once rested he now finds what he will later describe only as a vision. In place of the commode roars a fluorescent blue waterfall, a huge, heaving cascade of toilet fluid thrust waist-high into the air and splashing into all four corners of the lavatory. Pouring from the top of this volcano, like smoke out of a factory chimney, is a rapidly spreading pall of what looks like steam. He closes his eyes tight for a second, then reopens them. He does this not for the benefit of unwitnessed theatrics, or even to create an embellishing detail for eventual use in a story. He does so because, for the first time in his life, he truly does not believe what has cast itself before him.
Drop everything and go read the rest of this Ask the Pilot story.
Related:
Techno-toilet
From the Sunday Herald: Egypt's secrets are revealed ... in five seconds.
Cracking the ancient code of hieroglyphics was once considered one of the greatest feats of cryptology. But thanks to a group of academics from Scotland the secrets of the Pharaohs are set to be revealed in a matter of seconds.
In a bid to replace the time- consuming techniques currently available to translate the ancient scripts, computer experts at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen are developing a program that will allow tourists and archaeologists to understand the texts from inside the tomb itself.
A digital photo of a hieroglyph can be taken with a mobile phone, sent to a computer and translated into English in seconds. Previously Egyptologists have had to manually match each hieroglyph with a translation using word-processing materials. Because there are more than 4700 known glyphs -- including almost 800 basic ones, of which some 400 are considered common -- this has always been a lengthy and laborious task.
'We are taking one of the oldest languages in the world and turning it into the newest -- that of the computer,' said Dr Nik Whitehead, head of the research team.'Once it is in the computer you can translate it instantly, making it accessible to everyone. The potential for academics -- or whetting people's appetite for ancient Egypt -- is huge,' she added. [continue]
In England last winter I discovered all sorts of misericords like this one. For some reason misericords popped into my head today, and I set off to find some on the web.
A misericord is a little carved ledge on the underside of a flip-up seat. Monks had to stand for a long time during services, but they could at least rest a bit on the misericords. Decorative carvings on misericords are the fascinating part - some of them are very playful, and not at all religious in nature.
Dr. Eric Webb's page, The Misericords of Wells Cathedral, has a more detailed explanation. The misericords page at reep.org is good fun, and perhaps I could tempt you to the attractive and informative Misericords Lecture. Oh, and then there's the Misericord Tour at the Virtual Museum of Educational Iconics, too.
Related Links:
definition and etymology of misericord
Oak Apple Designs offers reproductions of medieval wood carvings. Good photos here.
Books:
A Little Book of Misericords
A guide to church woodcarvings: misericords and bench-ends
Medieval woodwork in Exeter Cathedral
Mark Pilgrim has provided us with a good blog-finding tool. At his Recommended Reading page, plug in the URL of some blog. Click the recommend button and - poof! - up will come a list of 20 blogs you might enjoy reading, based on the URL you specified. Every time you click an "already reading" or "not interested" link, the list will regenerate.
I tried this with Mirabilis.ca, and here's the list of blogs I got. I'd love to see the algorithm behind this thing. On what basis does the program choose its links?
Meanwhile, Google thinks these sites are similar to Mirabilis.ca.
A biological reactor that converts a slurry of food waste into a biodegradable plastic has been developed by scientists in Hawaii, providing a use for the obscene quantities of food rich countries throw away every year.
The polymer created could be used to make greener packaging, disposable products such as bottles, or even pills that dissolve slowly to release drugs in the body.
From Food scraps make perfect plastic, an article at New Scientist.com.
Egg tempera painting is recognised as the second oldest medium after encaustic. It was used by the ancient Egyptians and Greeks and perfected by the icon painters during the last 100 years of the old Byzantine Empire (400 AD-1202 AD). After the fall of the Byzantine Empire, egg tempera flourished for about 200 years in the hands of the early Renaissance artists.
In the 16th century, oilpainting was perfected and nearly all painters embraced the new technique. However, icon painters of the Orthodox Church never broke the tradition and are still practicing egg tempera today.
That's from the Historical Aspects of Egg Tempera page at eggtempera.com. The site has directions for making tempera paint, a techniques page, and so forth.
If I were a painter, I'd rush off and try this.
Related links:
Egg Tempera Fine Art
Simple Egg Tempera Paint
The Practice of Tempera Painting
Here's today's silly flash amusement from the Sveriges Televison (Swedish public service television) website. Click a horse and. . . . (Requires flash, of course.)
Remember the story about the 700 year old fresco that looks like Mickey Mouse? Well look, it gets better! From an Ananova article: Austria launches bid for Mickey Mouse copyright.
Austria has launched a tongue-in-cheek attempt to claim the Mickey Mouse copyright after discovering a picture of the Disney character on a medieval fresco.
The 700-year-old Austrian Mickey Mouse was uncovered in a church in the village of Malta in the province of Carinthia.
Siggi Neuschitzer, manager of the local tourism office, confirmed that the legal process to claim the copyright had already started.
He said: "I visited Vienna and had a long meeting with our legal team. They have been instructed to demand Disney return the mouse to its rightful home here in Austria.
"Anyone who has seen our fresco can see it proves that Mickey Mouse is a true Austrian - and was not from Hollywood."
From an article at SignOnSanDiego.com, Boy opens never-before-seen 'window into autism':
Experts on autism are getting a better view of the condition by studying a 14-year-old boy who has severe autism, but can explain his disorder in great detail.
Tito Mukhopadhyay sits in a darkened laboratory, pointing at flashes of light on a computer screen. On his right is a neuroscientist, one of several who are testing Tito's ability to see, hear and feel touch. At his left, Tito's mother, Soma, watches quietly.
Tito often stops the testing with bursts of activity. His body rocks rhythmically. He stands and spins. He makes loud smacking noises. His arms fly in the air as if yanked by a puppeteer. His fingers flutter.
Everyone waits.
Tito reaches for a yellow pad and writes to explain his behavior: "I am calming myself. My senses are so disconnected, I lose my body. So I flap. If I don't do this, I feel scattered and anxious."
Severe autism occurs when the brain mysteriously fails to develop normally in infancy and early childhood.
Tito, who was born and raised in India, speaks English with a huge vocabulary. His articulation is poor, and he often is hard to understand. But he writes eloquently and independently, on pads or his laptop, about what it feels like to be locked inside an autistic body and mind. [continue]
Related links:
Tito's website(requires flash)
Interview with Tito
Why technologies for autism?
There's a website called I used to belive, which is "a collection of ideas that adults thought were true when they were children". Much of it's pretty boring, although I'm glad to know I wasn't the only kid worried about getting sucked down the bathtub drain when the plug was pulled.
The religion section does have a few gems. These are the entries I like best:
Here's your chance to do a bit of reading up on ancient Egypt. Maybe you'd like to start with beautifully illustrated articles about tomb digging and cutting techniques, decorating the tombs, and funerary compositions.
It's all part of the Theban Mapping Project website, which is detailed and informative. There are more articles, resources, and the interactive atlas of the Valley of the Kings even has video clips. (You'll need Flash for that part.)
From the About the Theban Mapping Project page:
With its thousands of tombs and temples, Thebes is one of the world's most important archaeological zones. Sadly, however, it has not fared well over the years. Treasure-hunters and curio-seekers plundered it in the past; pollution, rising ground water, and mass-tourism threaten it in the present. Even early archaeologists destroyed valuable information in their search for museum-quality pieces.
Today, however, we realize that the monuments of Thebes are a finite resource. If we fail to protect and monitor them, they will vanish, and we and our descendants will all be the poorer. The Theban Mapping Project believes that the first and most essential step in preserving this heritage is a detailed map and database of every archaeological, geological, and ethnographic feature in Thebes. Only when these are available can sensible plans be made for tourism, conservation, and further study.
During the last decade, the Theban Mapping Project has concentrated on the Valley of the Kings. Modern surveying techniques were used to measure its tombs. From the data collected, the TMP is preparing 3-D computer models of the tombs. And of course, the TMP is continuing its excavation of KV 5. For the TMP staff, sharing their work with the interested public is just as important as what they do in the field. This has been done through a series of publications and this growing website.
I have been waiting for this news for years. The Toronto Star has an update on the British pet passport program: U.K. to admit Canadian pets.
Dogs and cats from the United States and Canada will be allowed to enter Britain without enduring the dreaded six-month quarantine, and just in time for Christmas travel. The government announced today that from Dec. 11 its "pet passport" plan for vaccinated animals from western Europe and some other countries will be extended to cats and dogs from the United States and Canada. The strict quarantine, long-established to keep rabies out of Britain, was lifted in 2000 for pets from western Europe that were tagged with an identifying microchip, vaccinated and blood tested before they travelled to Britain. In 2001, the plan was extended to more countries, including Japan, Australia and New Zealand. Bahrain joined this year.
About time, eh?
Well, what do you know? Just the other day I blogged about the two Canadian naturalists, Charlie Russell and Maureen Enns, who spend their summer hanging out with bears in the Kamchatka wilderness. (You did go see those amazing photos, didn't you?) Today the new issue of Maclean's magazine hit the stands, and they've got an article on the topic: Living with Grizzly Bears.
Related Mirabilis.ca entry:
Ruskin meets a bear
From today's National Post article, Savages? Not to Jesuit missionaries they weren't.
In the movie Black Robe, 17th- century Jesuit missionaries are portrayed as viewing Canadian Indians as superstitious, pagan savages with no redeeming culture who can be saved only by baptism.
New academic research, however, suggests that the early Jesuits are simply victims of bad press. According to a fresh analysis of their Latin dispatches to Rome, the Jesuits regarded native people with admiration and respect.
"In Black Robe you get the stereotype of the almost rabid religious fanatic. There is the good savage and the rest are sort of cruel and horrifying and there is no middle ground," says Haijo Westra, a professor of Greek and Roman studies at the University of Calgary.
After studying the Latin dispatches sent from Canada by French Jesuit missionaries, Dr. Westra concludes that the image of the "black robes" has been unfairly distorted by the English translations of their field reports, which he says missed sympathetic nuances derived from classic Latin texts the Jesuits studied.
Here's the rest of the article.
Related Links:
Black Robe page on the Internet Movie Database
Brief Sketches of the Jesuit Martyr-Saints from jesuits.ca
Jesuits of Upper Canada - history from jesuits.ca
The Holy North American Martyrs from magnificat.qc.ca
The Jesuit Relations (1632-1673)
From a Smithsonian magazine article, Inscribing the Word:
At a small scriptorium near Monmouth, Wales, several calligraphers and artists are bent over drafting tables. They are working on the first Bible to be written and illustrated entirely by hand since the invention of movable type more than 500 years ago. Worktables hold the tools of the trade: small piles of gold leaf, brushes to apply it, blunt hematite burnishers to polish it, jars filled with quills, bottles of soot- black ink, small tins of brilliant hues.
The project is the St John's Bible, a collaboration between Saint John's Abbey in Minnesota and a scriptorium team in Wales. Saint John's is raising money and providing illustration ideas. Meanwhile, the scribes and artists in Wales are producing the Bible, working with traditional materials and a computer layout program.
If this sounds interesting, do visit the St John's Bible website. A person could spend hours browsing there! The see and hear pages offer photos of the text, illuminations, and marginalia... and there are even streaming video clips to watch. The why and how section has details on the layout and design process, and on the tools and materials.
Related Links:
St John's Bible Illuminates the New Millennium
An Ancient Art Recreated for Today
Copying the Bible like a medieval monk
Bible Scribe
New Bible
Exhibit marks progress in illuminated, calligraphic Bible.
The Word made Art
Saint John's Abbey
Hill Monastic Manuscript Library
Mission: spend summer hanging out with bears in Russian wilderness. Raise orphaned bear cubs. Develop friendship with bears. Fish with bears, hike with bears.
Two Canadian naturalists, Charlie Russell and Maureen Enns, have spent the last six summers doing just that with their Kamchatka Grizzlies of the Far East project. The goal of the research is "to demonstrate that people can live closely and peacefully with grizzly bears while sustaining their respect indefinitely."
Check out their stunning bear photo gallery, and perhaps some of the diary entries (see links at bottom of home page) like this one, which is about trust and fishing with the bear they call Biscuit.
Here's part of another journal entry - Charlie's story about showing Chico the bear a better place to fish:
Of the experiences over the five years we have spent here in our wind swept cabin, I just had the most incredible day of all yesterday. I found Chico in a unfavorable place down the river where she was getting a few salmon but not near the numbers that could be available to her in another creek. This was no big deal because she was likely to soon realize her mistake but I saw it as a chance to push forward our understanding of each other and if you look at our goals on the home page and the 2000 Goals you can see this is what I wanted to spend time doing. If you read the last entry, it was us who showed them the fish in the river.
August is the beginning of a very critical time for all bears to put on weight and Biscuit was getting fat while Chico's feet were getting sore from futilely chasing fish over boulders. I spotted her with the Kolb, landed back at the cabin and then hiked down the river to her and suggested that she follow me to a place she would like much better. After two false starts, she figured out that I was really serious and decided to come. In the process of going to the other creek, we left the river and covered about one and a half miles.
At one place, I had to crawl through some twisted and bent over alder bush on my hands and knees while following a heavily used bear trail and Chico was following with her oversized canines only a foot from my butt. Needless to say I was a bit nervous and thought, this was carrying our trust too far. I rolled to the side and asked her to lead, which she did but rushed through to the clearing ahead and sat waiting for me to extricate myself from the tangle, then we continued across the tundra.
Several times she tried to guess what it was I going to show her and rushed off ahead towards the lake shore or another creek and I had to get her back on track by calling her name in a special way that we have worked out for these purposes. Finally we came to the stream which was full of pink salmon and she could see them but the water was deep there so I called once more and we continued upstream to where a riffle was loaded with spawning fish. She looked at me with her ears up and a wonderful expression of something I could well imagine was appreciation and then jumped in and easily filled up. I saw her eat six salmon in a few minutes before I left.
What an experience.
Charlie and Maureen have written a book, Grizzly Heart: Living Without Fear Among the Brown Bears of Kamchatka. It's available at Amazon and the usual places.
Related links:
The bear whisperer - Canadian Geographic
Living with grizzlies - Canadian Geographic
Kamchatka Wildlife Tours in the Russian Far East
Kurilskoye Lake Brown Bear Viewing
Related Mirabilis.ca entries:
Ruskin meets a bear
Living with grizzly bears
Oh! Wired has an interesting article today, The Pope's Astrophysicist. Here's the first part:
We have come to meet the Pope. It's tourist season, and the Sistine Chapel is punishingly full. Visitors from around the world crowd together, ogling Michelangelo's ceiling. At the back of the chapel, our little group of scientists and theologians has gathered, a small knot trying to cohere against the jostling throng. Our audience with John Paul is the culmination of a weeklong conference on science and religion convened by the Vatican Observatory. Host and guide Father George Coyne glances nervously at his watch, then shepherds us through a hidden door and into a private chamber beyond — backstage at the Vatican.
For nearly a quarter century, Coyne has been the director and senior scientist at the Vatican Observatory, the Roman Catholic Church's beachhead on the shores of astronomical research. The Church's interest in the stars dates back to well before Galileo's time. Five hundred years ago, papal astronomers in charge of fixing Easter's date noticed that the Julian calendar was getting out of sync with the stars, and in 1582 they replaced it with the Gregorian. In 1891, long after the Church had accepted the heliocentric universe, Pope Leo XIII officially founded the Observatory so that "everyone might see clearly that the Church and her Pastors are not opposed to true and solid science."
Today, the Vatican Observatory Research Group boasts 13 professional astronomers and cosmologists, all of them Jesuits. The group specializes in fields like galaxy formation and, to quote from their latest annual report, "the dynamics of inflationary universes with positive spatial curvature."
En route to His Holiness, we're led through endless miles of corridors, every yard the work of Italian master craftsmen. Around one corner, an entire wall erupts with rococo excess as, in front of us, Christ rises into the heavens, his feet hovering yards above the ground. "They really knew what miracles were back then," quips the English cosmologist Paul Davies. We walk on, marveling at the might of the Catholic Church congealed into aesthetic overload. Cardinals swoosh by swathed in deep-red satin. Bishops shimmer in rose-colored silk. Swiss Guards stand watch in multicolored velvet pantaloons.
Here's the rest of the article.
What appears to be a 700-year-old picture of Mickey Mouse has been discovered on a church fresco in Austria.
Walt Disney first sketched his character in 1928 but an Austrian art historian spotted an uncannily similar drawing.
The painting, which has been dated back to the early 14th Century, is in the Community Church in Malta, Carinthia. Next to a large sketch of St. Christopher is a clear drawing of the mouse.
Art historian Eduard Mahlknecht believes the similarity to Mickey is pure coincidence.
He told Austrian daily 'Krone: "St Christopher was often depicted surrounded by various animals and sea-life, and in this case something that resembles Mickey Mouse.
"It is most likely to be a drawing of a beaver or a weasel."
That's from Ananova's article, 700-year-old picture of 'Mickey Mouse' found in Austrian church. It's got a photo of that fresco - go have a look!
An article at TheAge.com.au adds this:
According to legend, the weasel was fertilised through its mouth and gave birth through its ears, which is why the ears of the fresco creature may have been sketched large, Mahlknecht said.
This could get interesting when somebody starts producing t-shirts and stuff featuring that big-eared fresco animal. Will the fresco undermine Disney's copyright?
Related link:
Taking the Mickey
Update:
Mouse fresco update - November 21st Mirabilis.ca entry about Austria's attempt to claim the Mickey Mouse copyright.
I've often wished that wireless nodes had a longer range, because that'd make it way easier to provide wireless Internet access on the Gulf Islands and other places I like to visit. Well! Good news from computerworld.com. They've got an article about a 72 mile wireless link.
Most enterprises that deploy wireless LANS estimate their coverage area in terms of hundreds of feet.
Hans Werner-Braun, a researcher at the San Diego Supercomputer Center and principal investigator for the San Diego County High Performance Wireless Research and Education Network (HPWREN), plans and develops wireless circuits that routinely span miles, including HPWREN's current distance-record holder, a 72-mile-hop installed last month from San Diego to San Clemente Island.
This will make a lot of geeks very happy.
I'd never thought of encouraging bats as a way to eliminate mosquitos, but it makes a lot more sense than using pesticide-laden bug sprays. Today's Vancouver Courier has an article about a gardener who's building and selling bat houses.
Building a bat house seems pretty easy, and several websites offer bat house building directions. Maybe making one of these bat boxes would be a good project for a rainy winter night.
Related Links:
Bats eat mosquitos
Wild About Gardening - bathouse buiding directions
How to build a bathouse
The Sixth Century builders of Hagia Sophia, the Byzantine cathedral still standing in Istanbul, discovered cement with earthquake-resistant properties 1 300 years before anyone else, a research team revealed on Wednesday.
Hagia Sophia, built as a church and subsequently turned into a mosque, still stands only because its creators discovered the cement.
Many of the surrounding buildings have long since succumbed to the ravages of time, including earthquakes, according to a report in the New Scientist.
The structure has withstood quakes of up to 7,5 on the Richter scale, according to the team, headed by Antonia Moropoulou from Athens' National Technical University.
Here's the rest of the article, Quake-proof cement mixed '1 300 years ago' from the Independent Online in South Africa.
Meanwhile, Great Buildings Online has a page about Hagia Sophia, which includes photos (this interior shot is particularly nice) and information about the building. The site points out that "The church was built 532 to 537 and the dome replaced in 563 after an earthquake."
I guess Hagia Sophia's builders hadn't figured out how to earthquake-proof a dome.
A few months ago Geoff Hill started making his own biodiesel out of recycled vegetable oil. From a Canada.com article: [update: article no longer available]
An avid mountain hiker and climber, Hill says he "couldn't ethically go out and buy a car that used fossil fuels."
He integrated his biodiesel fascination into his fourth-year studies and simultaneously launched the Biodiesel Project. With support from the UBC Farm, chemical-engineering department and funding from the non- profit, non-governmental Environmental Youth Alliance, Hill plans to produce larger quantities of fuel for campus lawn mowers, emergency generators and even UBC's diesel-powered trucks and tractors.
Better yet, there's talk of making Geoff's biodiesel available commercially.
Ian Thompson, chairman of Bowen Island's sustainable community task force, hopes Hill's fuel may soon be dispensed at a Bowen gas station - - a first in Canada.
"We've been talking to the diesel retailer here and if Geoff can supply him with enough biodiesel at a competitive price, this could be the first retail outlet in Canada," Thompson says.
Related Links:
Finally, grease that's good for you! - SFU.ca
Canadian Renewable Fuels Association - Biodiesel - greenfuels.org
Canada's on the road to marketing friendlier fuel - University of Guelph
University of British Columbia
UBC Farm
Environmental Youth Alliance
Bowen Island - bowen-island.bc.com
Did the Chinese explore Africa a century before the Europeans did? Maybe. Researchers are studying an ancient Chinese map, called the Da Ming Hun Yi Tu. (Amalgamated Map of the Great Ming Empire.) It was created in 1389, and shows the shape of Africa, the Nile River, and the Drakensberg mountains.
A replica of the map was unveiled in South Africa's parlaiment yesterday. From iafrica.com's article, Ancient map of Africa poses questions:
The original of the map is housed in Beijing where it has remained wrapped up, sealed and stowed behind a locked door since the fall of China's last emperor in 1924. Fewer than 20 people have had access to it since then.
The digitised reproduction of the map on silk is almost four metres (around 12 feet) high and more than four metres across.
Place names are written mostly in Manchu, a now virtually extinct language, and still in need to be translated.
Related articles:
Africa's oldest map unveiled - BBC
From a Technician Online article, Professor and team of students find evidence of oldest Christian church:
Since 1994, Thomas Parker, has worked in Aqaba, Jordan, to uncover the lost city of Aila. Recently, all that hard work paid off when Parker, a professor in history, and his team of students, specialists and Jordanians discovered an offering table that may confirm what could be the oldest purpose-built church.
The rest of the article has more details about the building's history. And here's part of a news release on the North Carolina State University website, New Artifacts Bolster Case for Oldest Purpose-Built Christian Church:
The sandstone table was found intact near the entrance of the building, Parker recounts. It measures about 3.3 feet long and 2.5 feet wide, and has two slots on one side that would allow it to be attached to a wall. Parker believes the most likely scenario is that, after an earthquake in A.D. 363 that led to the church's collapse and abandonment, looters may have detached the table from a wall and attempted to carry it out of the building.
But the heavy sandstone object, which took four able-bodied students to move, was likely dropped and left by the looters, only to be buried under shifting sand until its discovery this summer. "I'm more convinced than ever that we've found an early church, possibly the oldest purpose-built Christian church in history," Parker says. Due to its obvious historical significance, the table remains in Aqaba.
Other evidence supporting the hypothesis that the building is a church include its orientation toward the east, similar to later churches; the fact that the basic floor plan matches that of later churches; and the preponderance of artifacts inside the structure. For example, the glass oil lamps that would have illuminated the church - and which were used widely in later churches - are concentrated inside the building's walls and rare elsewhere at the Aila site.
Related links:
Roman Aqaba Project, Jordan
Dr. S. Thomas Parker, Professor
In the last while, people have arrived at Mirabilis.ca by searching for:
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Some of these make me giggle.
From the British Museum's Queen of Sheba: Treasures from ancient Yemen website:
This tour provides an introduction to the different myths of the Queen and to how she is portrayed in works of art from the Renaissance onwards. It also examines some of the artefacts in the British Museum's collection which illustrate the importance and splendour of the South Arabian kingdoms.
We visited this exhibit a couple of months ago, and would have taken some snapshots if photography had been allowed. Since it wasn't, I'm happy to have found that this site has at least a few photos. Here are some:
Funerary stela
Tsehai, The Sheba-Solomon narrative, oil on canvas
Painted limestone incense burner
Bronze incense burner with ibex figure
Here's a bit from an Independent article, As the threat of war grows, archaeologists make plea to spare Iraq's treasures.
The names evoke ancient kingdoms past, the empires of Babylon and Assyria from the times of Nebuchadnezzar and Alexander the Great.
Most of the palaces and temples and mosques of those ancient civilisations crumbled many centuries ago. But something between 10,000 and 100,000 archaeological sites hold the enduring remains.
They are, of course, in modern- day Iraq. And, as the United States prepares for war, an international band of curators and historians anxious not to repeat the damage inflicted on Iraqi treasures during the Gulf War 11 years ago are appealing to the American government to take the historic sites into account.
What a splendid idea. Very important.
Now, what international band of experts will appeal to the American government on behalf of the people in Iraq?
In a novel use of clean energy, the world's most northerly town will soon be the first to get electricity from a sub sea power station run on tidal currents tugged by the moon.
Gigantic forces in the oceans - waves, currents and tides - have often proved too costly or awkward to harness, compared to wind or solar power in global efforts to cut reliance on nuclear power or on fossil fuels blamed for global warming.
From late November or early December, however, a tidal current will start turning the blades of a windmill-like turbine standing on the seabed near Kvalsund at the Arctic tip of Norway.
"We will be the first in the world to use tidal currents to generate electricity to be fed into the local grid," Harald Johansen, managing director of Hammerfest Stroem, told Reuters.
Yay Norway!
Here's the rest of the article, Arctic town to get offbeat tidal energy, [update: article no longer available] on the Environmental News Network website.
Related:
Harnessing ocean energy
More than 2,300 years ago, Aristotle wrote about elephants crossing rivers and lakes completely submerged, with only the tips of their trunks above the water, like built-in snorkel tubes. From a physiological point of view, this should be impossible; the differences in pressure exerted by the outside air and the deep water should cause the blood vessels in the lining of the lungs to burst.
This National Geographic article, Snorkeling Elephants and the Secrets of Breathing, explains why elephants are able to snorkle. Another mystery solved!
Buttertarts are right at the top of my favourite delectables list, and I was so pleased to learn (via CBC Radio, a few years ago) that buttertarts seem to be a uniquely Canadian thing. If we're going to have any food represent Canada in a national cuisine kind of way, it might as well be something scrumptious, I think, and buttertarts are certainly that.
So a few days ago I decided to do some baking, but didn't feel like making pastry for tarts. It seemed a good time to try this recipe for buttertart squares. Yum! They're easy, dangerously delicious, and there's no messing about with pastry and tart tins.
The reputation of the Romans for order has led some to believe that the road network demonstrates a grand geometric strategy, with roads imposed on the landscape in a series of regular, rectangular patterns. However, at many towns, such as Silchester, Verulamium, Leicester and Ilchester, roads which arrive at an oblique angle change direction at the town gate or boundary to match the street grid. This indicates that the grids predate the roads, and that roads were built to serve settlements, at least the larger ones, rather than being arbitrarily imposed across the landscape. At Lincoln, by contrast, the principal street does pass straight through, with the town lying almost directly in line with the approach alignment from each side, suggesting that the road and the town were part of the same overall design.
This and other tidbits about Roman road design feature in the Roads from Rome article at the British Archeology Magazine website.
Regular Mirabilis.ca readers will know that I'm tempted to go live in Italy. Almost everything appeals... except the infuriating Italian bureaucracy. Here's an example:
Luciana Buonocore would like to be known as Luciano. In fact, he would like to be known as a man. Because he is one. He was born a male 28 years ago, but the birth certificate mistakenly calls him Luciana and designates him "female."
You might think that correcting such an error would be simple. But a succession of schoolteachers, priests, town officials, central government authorities, cops and judges have unwittingly conspired to keep Buonocore trapped in the bureaucratic body of a female.
So seven years ago, Buonocore went to court to try to become Luciano, "male." Setback followed setback there, and finally things became urgent when he decided to get married. Italy does not recognize same-sex unions, so it was impossible for him, as Luciana, to tie the knot with his fiancee.
So off he went to get the problem sorted out. And oh my, what it took to get that error fixed. Read the rest of The Strange Tale of Unlucky Luciano at the Washington Post website.
From the Rosetta Project website:
The Rosetta Project is a global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers working to develop a contemporary version of the historic Rosetta Stone. In this updated iteration, our goal is a meaningful survey and near permanent archive of 1,000 languages. Our intention is to create a unique platform for comparative linguistic research and education as well as a functional linguistic tool that might help in the recovery or revitalization of lost languages in unknown futures.
Today Wired published an article about the Rosetta Project, Word Up: Keeping Languages Alive. An excerpt:
When Napoleon's troops discovered a granite slab in 1799 containing Greek and Egyptian hieroglyphic translations of ancient text dating back to 100 B.C., they unearthed more than 1,000 years of history.
Now, a group of scientists and engineers are crafting a modern Rosetta stone that will preserve more than 1,400 of the world's 7,000 languages on a 3-inch nickel disk.
Fifty to ninety percent of the world's languages are predicted to disappear in the next century, according to the The Rosetta Project, a collaborative, open-source endeavor by language specialists and native speakers around the world who are creating a "near permanent" archive of the world's languages.
Developers of the modern Rosetta disk hope they will help future generations recover lost languages that are now on the brink of extinction.
An ambitious and fascinating project. I suspect linguists have more fun than the rest of us.
Oh, look. The (US) National Catholic Register has an article on Catholicism in Canada: The World Youth Day Inspires Surge of Orthodoxy North of the Border.
Archbishop Gervais himself said on Sept. 20 that signs of renewal "are numerous enough to give me hope that things are going to get better."
Well, cool.
"It's the scariest thing around," said physicist Robert Park, an outspoken critic of old-fashioned, unreliable polygraph machines. "The only thing worse than a lie detector that doesn't work is one that does."
This from a Philadelphia Inquirer article, Your brain may soon be used against you. It's about using brain scans to figure out what people recognize. "It is easy to imagine such scanners being used in interrogation of criminal suspects or terrorists about their associates," the article points out.
Creepy.
I came upon this little blurb about green roofs in the paper edition of the University of Toronto Magazine.
"Green" roofs made of an infrastructure that support soil and plants are better than conventional roofs at keeping homes cool in summer, according to preliminary results from a U of T study. Professor Brad Bass of the Institute for Environmental Studies at U of T and Environment Canada's Adaptation and Impacts Research Group, along with colleagues at the National Research Council's Institute for Research in Construction, created an experimental roof - half of it a traditional flat roof, the other half a six-inch layer of soil and wildflowers above a special drainage layer and a root-repellent, waterproof memrane. The green roof maintained a cooler surfact and interior temperature in summer and reduced storm water run-off. "The green roof acts as insulation," says Bass. "The vegetation on the roof also provides shade and returns moisture back to the atmosphere, preventing a dsignificant amount of solar energy from being absorbed by the roof."
This sounds like a far nicer solution than air conditioning, and green roofs have other benefits, too, like improving air quality, providing habitat for birds, and adding beauty.
University of Toronto green roof links:
University plans another green roof
Green roofs cool for summer, environmentalist says
Other green roof links:
Exploring the ecology of organic greenroof architecture - greenroofs.com
GreenRoofs.org
Maintenance of Green Roofs - lid-stormwater.net
Green Roofs - greenroof.co.uk
A National Research Council Canada study evaluates green roof systems' thermal performances - professionalroofing.net
Making green roofs simple - edcmag.com
Extensive green roofs - wbdg.org
Still more links (added during page update)
Northwest EcoBuilding Guild's Green Roof Project - hadj.net
Green roof workshop held in Vancouver - nrc-cnrc.gc.ca
City Farmer's green roof - cityfarmer.org
Green roof research at BCIT - bcit.ca
Green Roof Benefits - roofmeadow.com
Penn State Center for Green Roof Research - psu.edu
A green roof for our cob shed - City Farmer page at mac.com
Sky Gardens - Vancouver Courier artcicle
Rooftops and Urban Agriculture (lots of links!) - cityfarmer.org
From the Inukshuk entry in the Canadian Encyclopedia:
Inukshuk (singular), meaning "likeness of a person" in Inuktitut (the Inuit language) is a stone figure made by the Inuit. The plural is inuksuit. The Inuit make inuksuit in different forms and for different purposes: to show directions to travellers, to warn of impending danger, to mark a place of respect, or to act as helpers in the hunting of caribou. Similar stone figures were made all over the world in ancient times, but the Arctic is one of the few places where they still stand. An inukshuk can be small or large, a single rock, several rocks balanced on each other, round boulders or flat. Inuit tradition forbids the destruction of inuksuit.
The Inukshuk Creator will let you build your own inukshuk. (Flash required.) Whee!
I'm a sucker for stories about one person making a tremendous difference in the world. Here's one such story: Lighting up the World, from the current issue of Maclean's. It's about Dave Irvine-Halliday, who used his life savings to bring electric light to remote parts of the world.
His mission began in 1997, when he was travelling through Nepal's Thorung La Pass region. He was distressed to see children as young as six working in the rice fields, with little time for schooling. And since few homes had light, studying after dark was impossible. Irvine-Halliday discovered that by deploying modern technology, virtually anyone could have light, and in 2000 he created the foundation Light Up The World. "It is about giving kids a chance," says Irvine-Halliday, 60, the father of two grown children. "Reading and writing is such a vital part of any successful society. I just felt something needed to be done."
And so he's doing it.
From the Light Up the World Foundation website:
Light Up the World provides, to the world's poorest, solid state lighting systems powered by renewable resources. Our goal is to light up, in an environmentally conscious and long lasting way, the homes of two billion people world wide who do not have the opportunity to read after dark.
Related Links:
Dave Irvine-Halliday's home page at the University of Calgary Engineering Department
Prestigious award will help shine more light on developing world - article from University of Calgary website
LEDs Come to the Developing World - article from the Living on Earth network
article about Dave's pedal-powered lighting system from FFWD Weekly
The Register has an article about why SchoolNet Namibia has decided to turn down a donation from Microsoft and continue running the Linux operating system instead.
The African nation of Namibia is large in area and small in population with considerable distances between communities. Imagine the challenges of getting its schools wired to the Net. SchoolNet Namibia, a chiefly volunteer organization, struggles to do precisely that with a free ISP and numerous other initiatives to get the nation's schools, many of which lack any library resources at all, on-line.
Imagine the pleasure with which SchoolNet would initially have confronted a charitable overture from Microsoft involving free software. Now imagine the disappointment of learning that accepting the 'gift' would entail outlays of money in the range of fifteen times the value of the M$ Trojan horse.
Well, some donation.