From Reuters, Jamming Phones to Keep Worshiping Quiet.

Qatar has imported 1,000 frequency jammers to block mobile phone transmissions that disrupt prayers and sermons in the Gulf state's mosques, the daily newspaper The Peninsula said Thursday.

The Cellular Phone Hunter, a pocket-size device, should silence the modern-day nuisance of cellphones chirruping during prayers, the paper said.

"Imams and muezzins (prayer callers) have been instructed to switch on the devices a few minutes before the call for prayer and keep them on till five minutes after the prayers, five times a day," The Peninsula added.

From csmonitor.com, In ancient monastery, a stunning library.

Nestled at the foot of Mount Sinai, St. Catherine's Monastery has for centuries been almost inaccessible to the outside world. Only the most devout visited, undergoing a 10-day camel trek to reach it. So rare were deliveries of essential goods that the Greek monks there struggled daily to survive.

Built in 527 on the assumed site of the biblical burning bush, the fortress-like complex is the world's oldest continuously inhabited monastery: A Christian presence there can be traced back to the third century. Yet despite its isolated setting and the asceticism of its Orthodox monks, today the monastery is regarded as having one of the world's finest collections of manuscripts and icons.

The ancient library - containing 5,000 early printed books, 3,500 manuscripts, and 2,000 scrolls - is of an age and diversity that only the Vatican can equal. The monastery also owns some 2,000 icons, religious artifacts, and other curios, including a silver and enamel chalice from King Charles VI of France. This item was given to the monastery in 1411 and is so unusual that the Louvre Museum in Paris recently asked to borrow it for an exhibit.

The quality of the collection owes much to the arid mountain climate. The monastery's first printed editions of Plato and Homer, for example, look as if they have just come off the press; biblical fragments from the 4th century on seem untouched by passing centuries.

Today, this unique collection of religious and cultural works is being slowly opened to the public. Under the watchful eye of the monastery's Archbishop Damianos, St. Catherine's is participating in three projects that will make the collection more accessible. [continue]

Tour Egypt's St Catherine's Monastery site has more information about the monastery, and photos, too. Don't miss the icons and diptych, or this illuminated manuscript.

St Catherine Monastery - from geographica.com

Which of these 20 dream holidays would you choose? Feast of the east? Pick up a penguin? Thrills with frills?

From the Sophia Echo: Oldest trade ship discovered.

Robert Ballard, the man who discovered the remains of The Titanic, chose the beginning of January to announce the fact that last summer he had found the remnants of the oldest commercial ship in the world. And he found them in the Bulgarian part of the Black Sea.

This special exploration near the shore of the town of Varna started with the intention of finding something else, something bigger from a scientific point of view, something that would revolutionise the history of mankind. Ballard came to the Black Sea to search for another ship that has another meaning and is referred to as Noah's Ark. [continue]

If you've ever been frustrated by a plethora of stupid Windows error messages, if your Windows computer drives you crazy, or if you've opted for another operating system altogether because Windows makes you grumpy.... well, go play with this bit of frivolity: Windows RG. Priceless. I found this at the Shifted Librarian, and I'll echo her advice: "make sure you click on everything!" Requires Flash.

From classicalmosaics.com:

... most of these beautiful pictures are from cathedrals and churches in Ravenna and Venice, Italy, and the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, Turkey.

And stunning they are, too. Go take a peek at the The ancient mosaics photo album.

Related book:
Ancient Mosaics

From CNN, Bishops seek saint for Internet.

Fed up with hackers, a flood of spam and lousy connections, Italian Roman Catholics have launched a search for a patron saint of the Internet. And they hope their online poll will yield a holy Web protector by Easter.

Will it be Archangel Gabriel, whom the Bible credits with bringing Mary the news that she'd give birth to Jesus? Or Saint Isadore of Seville, who wrote the world's first encyclopedia? Or perhaps Saint Clare of Assisi, a nun believed to have seen visions on a wall?

So far, about 5,000 visitors are casting their votes daily on www.santiebeati.it, something that delights Monsignor James P. Moroney, an expert on prayer and worship for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

"Everyone needs patrons in the Kingdom of Heaven, and perhaps the Internet as a very young child needs the interventions of a saint all the more," he said.

Once the votes are collected, the top six choices, along with all of the names of those nominated, will be delivered to the Vatican's Congregation of Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, the site's creator Francesco Diani said.

So far, however, the Vatican is keeping mum on whether it will indeed take up the idea of assigning a saint to the Internet.

But the site is following hundreds of years of tradition during which Catholics have chosen saintly protectors for their towns, churches and even themselves. Along the way, popes have taken over the process of naming saints and assigning them official patronages. But public opinion has always remained an important influence, which is why the Web poll is so appropriate, said Diani, an Internet expert for Italy's Conference of Bishops. The bishops have joined with several other Catholic groups to run the Internet saint campaign, Diani said.

"This kind of vote allows us the possibility of collecting a very large number of preferences," he said. "It's a plebiscite." [continue]

Related articles:
Search engines seek Net saint - from the Herald Sun newspaper.
Patronising the Internet - from Hindustan Times.com.
Will Isidore Be Patron Saint of the Internet? Pope John Paul Will Decide. - from Christianity Today.
Searchin' for the Surfer's Saint - from Wired.com.
Saints Vying for Net Patron - from Wired.com.

Background info on proposed saints, from the Catholic Encyclopedia:
St. Gabriel the Archangel
St. Isidore of Seville
St Claire of Assisi

From Ananova, 106 year-old offered free bus rides to school.

A 106-year-old Norwegian woman received an offer from local authorities for free bus rides to the school where she is supposed to attend next autumn.

Ingeborg Thuen, born in 1897 when the Klondyke gold rush was going strong, actually started school just before she turned six in 1903.

Computers in the Os township near Bergen read the '97 of her birth year as 1997, meaning she would be starting the first grade the next autumn.

She welcomed the free ride, saying that the last time she started school, she had to walk for an hour every morning.

The letter from the township also encouraged Ingeborg's parents to list the children she would like to have in her class.

"Since I can already read, maybe I should skip a couple grades," she joked.

From a History Today article posted at bethsuryoyo.com, Hasankeyf: A City in Peril.

'Try to imagine a steep cliff rising from the water and crowned by a decaying castle, the whole face of it perforated with cave-dwellings of a very early date in which the present inhabitants live; and at the end of a cliff a ruined mosque with a minaret, from the side of which a grandiose and now broken medieval bridge stretches over the majestically winding river to the opposite shore.'

This is how Dr S Guyer described his first sight of Hasankeyf as he sailed down the River Tigris through south-eastern Turkey, heading for Iraq. The German adventurer made his journey in the early 1920s, although if he went back today, little would have changed. What he would find is a small army of Turkish archaeologists working against the clock to discover the secrets of ancient Hasankeyf before it is flooded by the waters of the proposed Ilisu dam. The Turks say their aim is to have the dam operational by the next decade. [continue]

Related:
In pictures: Hidden treasures of Hasankeyf
Don't build Illsu Dam - photos
Why Hasankeyf? Photos & info
Before the deluge - part one - Guardian article
Before the deluge - part two -Guardian article
Naomi and Naime (account of a visit to Hasankeyf)

From Street in Germany leads to road in Rome at iol.co.za:

A well-preserved segment of a Roman road has been unearthed just one metre below a city street in Cologne, archeologists announced on Tuesday.

So intact is the 700-metre-long stretch of paved roadway that wheel ruts caused by chariots and carts were still clearly visible in the 2 000-year-old roadway.

"It is a prime example of Roman road engineering," a spokesperson for the Cologne municipal archaeological department said. "The paving stones are still in place as are the periphery gutters."

Archaeological evidence indicates the road was still in everyday use in the early 19th Century before finally being covered over by a more modern thoroughfare.

The road linked the Roman colonial outpost at Cologne, known as Colonia Agrippina to the Romans, with the Limes road which in turn led - as did all major roads in those days - directly to Rome

From the Weight of Tradition article at Greece Now:

The standing long jumpers in the ancient Olympics may not have known much about spikes and heels, but no one could accuse them of being light in the purposeful design department.

They made themselves hand-held weights, or halteres, out of heavy stone or lead to add inches to their bare-footed best. And a new study confirms that - minus, perhaps, a bruised heel or two - they had it down to a science.

Professors Alberto Minetti and Luca Ardigo, human movement researchers at Manchester Metropolitan University, say their computer simulations and experiments with volunteers show that a pair of halteres weighing from two to nine kilos will augment an athlete's takeoff speed and the length of a jump. The optimum weight of the two halteres taken together, they add, is five to six kilos.

By swinging their arms forward at takeoff and backward just before landing, athletes with good timing and knee-shoulder coordination can add at least 17 centimetres to a three-metre leap, write the researchers in the 14 November issue of the scientific journal Nature.

Minetti and Ardigo say that the shift in the "centre of mass" and the "greater ground-reaction force" generated by use of weights are the reasons why halteres are anything but excess baggage. [continue]

From a Moscow Times article, 'Walruses' Find a Better Life in the Icy Neva.

While Sergei Ivanov's colleagues in the St. Petersburg metro grab a bite to eat on their lunch breaks, he races off for a quick dip in the frozen Neva River.

"I feel extreme excitement and physical euphoria when getting out of that cold water," said Ivanov, a 43- year-old engineer, pulling on his clothes over skin reddened by the sub-freezing water. The outside temperature that recent afternoon was minus 2 degrees Celsius.

Ivanov is one of at least 100 St. Petersburg ice swimmers -- or morzhi (walruses) -- who regularly make their way to a 12-square-meter pool cut through 30-centimeter-thick ice on the Neva near the Peter and Paul Fortress.

Nina Lyubitskaya, an energetic 66-year-old with sparkling eyes, is another of the pool's aficionados. After undressing and stepping into the pool, she swam gracefully back and forth across the opening, smiling all the while.

"It was a passionate desire to live that made me take this up," Lyubitskaya said after her swim. "You don't need to have a strong will for this."

But her husband, Alexei Kirillov, also 66, undressing for his swim on the snowy edge of the pool, wasn't quite as certain.

"I have to force myself every time to get into that water," Kirillov said. "It was only because of pressure from my wife that I tried it for the first time.

"I had to obey. She is the head of the family, and she knows what's best," he said with a grin. [continue]

From Zenit, Steps Being Taken to Overcome an Ancient Schism.

Representatives of the early Eastern Churches, separated both from Rome as well as from the Byzantine Orthodox Churches during the Council of Chalcedon, in 451, are in the Vatican through Wednesday, to relaunch a second phase of dialogue leading toward full unity.

Wow.

Related news articles:
Pope: Christians Should Unite for Peace - ABC News
In a Shift, Orthodox Join Week for Christian Unity - Zenit

Background information:
Council of Chalcedon - Catholic Encyclopedia
The Council of Chalcedon: Third Ecumenical Council, AD 451 - Proceedings & Texts

From an article at independent.co.uk, Stone age man drank milk, scientists find.

Early Britons drank milk as far back as 4,500 BC, according to a chemical analysis of pottery fragments unearthed at several stone age sites in southern England.

Scientists have identified the chemical signature of dairy products such as milk, cheese or yoghurt inside a variety of cooking pots used for preparing food in neolithic Britain.

Mark Copley, an organic chemistry researcher at Bristol University, said the discovery suggested dairy products formed an important part of the stone age diet almost immediately after the introduction of livestock farming to Britain some 6,000 years ago.

Although it was known that ancient Britons kept livestock for meat, it was not clear whether the milk from the ruminant animals – sheep, goats and cows – was also collected for human consumption.

The question of dairying is important in understanding the nutrition and culture of ancient Britain but until now archaeologists have had little to go on other than the odd discovery of specialist vessels or putative cheese strainers. [continue]

Update:
Dairying Pioneers: Milk ran deep in prehistoric England - from Science News Online, Feb 1st, 2003.

From News in Science.

People of the Bronze Age traded and travelled more widely along a network of ancient highways in the the Middle East than previously thought, newly-released satellite images show.

About 5,000 years ago, wheeled wagons navigated wide dirt roads that extended dozens of kilometres across the fertile prairies of northern Iraq and what is now modern-day Syria and Turkey, and probably reached all the way to the Mediterranean Sea, American researchers said.

"We assumed that these ancient sites were pretty parochial, but in fact they were tied together by well-travelled highways," said Associate Professor Tony Wilkinson, an archaeologist at the University of Chicago, who co-authored a paper on the findings to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Antiquity. [continue]

Related article:
Satellites Uncover Ancient Mideast Road Networks - New York Times. (Requires free registration.)

From Monasticism in Britain:

Benedict's Rule was brought to Britain in 597, by St. Augustine, who had been sent by Pope Gregory the Great (both of whom were Benedictines) to preach to and convert the Saxons, who had taken over control of the island, by this time. The Benedictine observance co-existed with other observances of Celtic origin for some 50 years, but, in the end, prevailed at the Synod of Whitby in AD 664, thanks to St. Wilfred of York, St. Benedict Biscop and others.

Over the next 900 or so years the Benedictines, and all other monastic orders, would go through various vicissitudes which came to an abrupt end, around 1540, with the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII.

Can you name the orders that had monasteries in England? This site does, and they include a bit of information about each, including the more obscure ones. (Tironensians, Premonstratensians, and Gilbertines: oh my!)

From Ananova, Academics invent world's best lie detector.

Scientists in Manchester claim they can tell when people are lying after inventing the world's most sophisticated lie- detector.

A team at Manchester Metropolitan University spent five years developing the "Silent Talker" which uses only a laptop computer and a camera.

It detects and analyses thousands of tiny facial movements, many imperceptible to the naked eye. [continue]

As Robert Park said, "The only thing worse than a lie detector that doesn't work is one that does."

From The Age of Unreason:Cartographic Blunders of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries at mercatorsworld.com.

Twelve-foot giants tower over European explorers in Patagonia, a name itself based on a dog-headed monster from Spanish myth. Cannibals festoon shrubs with severed arms and legs. The outer reaches of North Carolina comprise the entire continent of North America, with the trade-rich Indies just beyond Pamlico Sound. The Seven Golden Cities of Cibola are in South Carolina.

Early maps portray these legends - and many more - as topographic fact. Errors, chimera, and distortions usually are easy to detect, and many are well-known among map aficionados. Not so obvious are how they originated and why they survived for centuries.

Fifteenth- and sixteenth- century explorers, travelers, and mapmakers suffered primitive navigational tools, chaotic spellings, inferior printing techniques, and a simple lack of knowledge, but these handicaps do not account for all cartographic distortions. Wishful thinking and superstition also clouded cartographic perceptions. Mapmakers, who rarely had firsthand information, accepted the exaggerated accounts of travelers, who in turn sometimes based their stories on hearsay. Information blended with myth - that peculiar combination of folklore, religion, instruction, and entertainment. In the words of cartographic historian R.A. Skelton, cartographers worked at "the uncertain boundary between knowledge and ignorance." [continue]

From the BBC: Grow trees to drive cars

The best way to make the UK's road transport green could be a massive tree-growing programme, researchers say.

They say there is considerable potential for producing hydrogen and alcohol fuels from fast-growing trees like willows.

A quarter of all the UK's agricultural land would be enough to fuel the country's entire road transport sector, they believe.

But they say it will be several decades before hydrogen is a sensible choice as a transport fuel. [continue]

Meanwhile, there's always cooking oil.

If I told you that two-metre high urinals pop out of the ground at night time, only to disappear beneath the pavement again in the morning, would you believe me? You should, of course. The Guardian has the details and a flash interactive guide.

From the Guardian, People send the funniest things.

"You shouldn't send anything alive in the post, to be honest with you," says Ray Kennedy, his face quite serious as he sits in the Royal Mail's special office in Belfast's quayside. "I would also prefer that people didn't send anything dead in the post." He has just been telling me about the time staff opened up a Jiffy bag envelope only for a live snake to fall out and start wriggling on the floor. But the dead things are no more fun. "We've had a mummified hand, which wasn't too bad," he says. "But once we had this packet and it was stinking the place out. When they opened it up, it was a putrid salmon. Somebody had caught a salmon fresh, wrapped it up and posted it to his mate. It was sitting for three weeks in the delivery office uncollected."

Ray knows all about what people try to send in the post because he is in charge of the Royal Mail's undeliverable mail service. Letters and parcels - and there are millions of them - that people probably think are lost end up here. In fact, they are usually just undeliverable: address incomplete, handwriting illegible, street name wrongly spelt, and sometimes no address at all. The operation, known as the National Return Letter Centre, also deals with letters and packages where the addressee has moved, or failed to pick up an item from the post office. [. . .]

The National Return Letter Centre was originally known as the Dead Letter Office, a name coined in the days when people used to send game through the post. Game that could not be delivered would end up in a room at the post office. Ray has a photograph of the Dead Letter Office circa 1900 with dead pheasants, rabbits, hares and turkeys hanging from the ceiling.

There are other such offices around the world. But nowhere do they go to quite such lengths as they do here to return undelivered mail. [continue]

From this week's feature in Your Yukon: Cycling through the snow.

Benoit Godin didn't really plan to become a year-round bicycle commuter. It's just that his car battery died.

That was in the spring of 1997. The weather was fine and his Environment Canada office in Whitehorse was only three kilometres away, so Godin decided to ride his bike. And he kept on riding his bike.

"What happened was, I just didn't miss the car."

By fall, Godin had got into the habit of commuting by bicycle. Since his car was still causing problems, he decided to see if he could keep cycling through the winter.

He missed a few days when the temperature dropped too low, but not very many.

"I tried once at minus 40, and I turned back. The gears just wouldn't move," he says. After that, he decided minus 30 was his limit. When the temperature drops below that, he finds another way to get to work or takes a day at home. But it doesn't happen often. Minus 30 days have been scarce for the last few winters, he says.

So this guy lives way up in the Yukon, and he rides to work every day. Meanwhile, the rest of us pathetic slobs. . . .

From the Aethelstan Project Treasure Legend page at vikingtreasure.com.

Organizing a legitimate treasure hunt is a great metaphor for life. It seems that everyone is searching for something but what they will find is uncertain. Our treasure hunt is perhaps more formal than most, consisting of an expedition to unearth the lost chests of silver coins buried by Egil Skallagrimsson in 982 AD in southwestern Iceland. Although a modern day treasure hunt may sound like a child’s fantasy, the existence of the chests of silver is well documented in historical records and many of the ancient Icelandic sagas. The Aethelstan Project has conducted extensive research into the existence and location of the treasure.

As history recounts, the chests of silver coins were given to the Viking poet by King Aethelstan of England for his participation in the battle of Brunaburh. During the battle, Egil’s brother Thorolf Skallagrimsson is killed and in compensation for the death of his brother and in payment for his services in battle, King Aethelstan bestows on Egil two great chests of English silver coins. These coins were eventually taken back to Egil’s farm in Iceland. Much of this historical record was recorded first-hand in poetry written by Egil Skallagrimsson that still survives today detailing the battle, the gifts and the long trip back to Iceland.

The legend behind the burial of the coins is equally fascinating. [continue]

The website includes details about the location, the techniques, the plan, and so forth. I love the summary of the plan:

1. Read the books


2. Find out where Egil buried the treasure


3. Locate the burial place on a map with a big X


4. Go get it!

Related sites:
Egil Skallagrimsson and the Viking Ideal
The story of Egil Skallagrimsson
Vikingar på Unga Fakta! (fun site, but all in Swedish)
How Do We Know about the Vikings?

Related book:
Egil's Saga

Oooh! I love it when I find news about some fascinating archaeological discovery, particularly if Vikings, coins, and jewelry are involved. From the Copenhagen Post, Fascinating glimpse of Viking elite’s lifestyle.

Archaeologists excavating Denmark's most important site - a huge Viking manor house complex on Lake Tissø, west of Copenhagen - are gleaning key information about the life style of the Norse elite over one thousand years ago.

The 2002 dig at the site, located north of the town of Slagelse in west Zealand, Denmark's largest island on which Copenhagen is situated, ended in December with the sensational discovery of the foundations of a manor house building dating back to 500-600 AD - the original building on the site.

"The newly discovered manor house pre-dates the main building on the site by some 500 years," said Lars Jørgensen, leader of the Danish National Museum's Tissø dig. "Post holes indicate that it was 38 metres long and some 8 metres high, and the first such building ever unearthed in Denmark."

"The very size of the building came as a surprise to us, as it is four times bigger than any other manor or farmhouse of that period. Its existence tends to reinforce our theory that the site was used for representational and/or ritual activities by the Viking elite of the time."

Among exciting artefacts from last autumn's dig are a golden hinge and jewellery and other metal items, as well as chunks of white-plastered mud wall.

One theory is that the original manor house probably burned down necessitating its replacement by the already excavated main building nearby.

Archaeologists have had their eyes on Tissø since the discovery there in 1977 of a stunning Viking gold necklace weighing 1.8 kilos - the biggest Viking artefact ever found in Denmark - now on permanent display at the Danish National Museum in Copenhagen. Systematic annual digs began in 1995 at the site on the western shore of Lake Tissø, 60 km from Copenhagen. Here, experts from the Danish National Museum have been unearthing the foundations of what are the largest buildings yet discovered from Denmark's Viking period, dating from 500-1050 AD, along with a substantial treasure trove of high quality artefacts and evidence of workshops, outhouses and adjoining buildings, pit houses and smelting activity. [continue]

Related stuff:
Danish history -the Viking age
Wolfshead Gallery - Viking Coinage
A new Nordic coin with a ship depiction - found on west shore of Tissø lake

A while back I blogged about some monks on Mount Athos who are ignoring an eviction notice. Remember? Their patriarch told them to leave by the end of the month, but the monks of Esfigmenou Monastery say they're not going anywhere.(See the Monks resist eviction blog entry.) Now the Telegraph has an article about this disagreement, entitled Mountain monks prepare for war.

For the monks there is no question of giving into this new ultimatum. For them the monastery's resemblance more to a medieval castle than a place of worship is about to come into its own. A theological conflict is about to become a physical siege.

...

How the Patriarch intends to enforce his will remains unclear. The monks are willing to bolt the reinforced doors and bide their time. They have a well and stores.

"We will not fight with weapons," laughed Abbot Methodius. "We have only our rosaries. But one thing is for sure. The only way we will leave is if we are dead."

From a New York Times article, Because It's There: Putting Everest Online.

This year, just in time for the 50th anniversary of Sir Edmund Hillary's first ascent of Everest, climbers on the mountain will have the chance to connect with the world below by e-mail. That is because Tsering Gyaltsen, the grandson of the only surviving Sherpa to have accompanied Hillary on that famed climb, is planning to build the world's highest Internet cafe at base camp.

It is fitting that the added comfort comes courtesy of a Sherpa, one of the clan of Nepalese who take charge of getting most everything up the mountain for the usually wealthy adventurers seeking the thrill of topping the world's highest peak.

But in contrast to many climber services, this one does not stand to benefit foreign-run outfitters primarily. Although it is an obvious perk for the climbers, the residents of a nearby town may get Internet access because of it, and the mountain may get a bit cleaner.

The technical challenge is significant. Wireless radios will be positioned on moving glaciers, and gear must be insulated against temperatures far colder than they were designed to withstand. And at the helm of the project is Mr. Gyaltsen, who is not wealthy and has no formal technical training.

But tenacious he is. From halfway around the world, Mr. Gyaltsen has attracted an all-star cast of technologists in the United States dedicated to furthering his goal. [continue] (Free registration required for NYT articles.)

Related content:

You may want to read other Mirabilis.ca posts in the Wireless Interent category.

The list of all Mirabilis.ca categories is here.

What do you do with an old SAAB when what you really want is a sauna? You build the sauna inside the car, of course, and that's exactly what Magnus B. did. His sauna car page gives details, and photos. (Via Linkfilter.)

From SFGate.com, Soaring under the Bay

To a chorus of ooohs and aaahs, a San Anselmo engineer ushered in a new era of undersea exploration Thursday when he zipped around the Bay in an innovative homemade submarine. (...)

His one-of-a-kind craft is long and sleek and bright blue. It is made of high-tech stuff like kevlar and carbon fiber. It looks like something NASA might build or the Blue Angels might fly.

If all goes according to plan, Hawkes and his investors said, Deep Flight Aviator will revolutionize exploration by making it easier and cheaper for everyone from scientists to filmmakers to plumb the ocean's depths.

What makes Hawkes' sub unique is how it works. Rather than using ballast to dive and rise like traditional subs -- which Hawkes said are to undersea exploration as dirigibles are to flight -- Deep Flight Aviator slices through the water like a jet through the sky.

"We don't sink, we fly," said Hawkes, a slight, 54-year-old bespectacled man with a slight British accent. "It moves fast and it moves beautifully." [continue]

Related Mirabilis.ca entry:
Homemade submarine - October 28th, 2002.

From the Whistler Question, Bricks, curses to the book thieves.

I thought you would be interested to know that in the Middle Ages, books were protected by curses, not electronic security systems. Long before the printing press, books were all hand-written manuscripts using specially treated sheepskin, called velum. In those days, monks would obviously have to hand-copy books. Often one manuscript would take several weeks, with a monk hand copying the manuscript and working nine hours per day. Having spent so much effort, some monks would write a personal comment to protect their work. For example, Brother Leot of Navara wrote in the 10th century: "Reader, turn the leaves gently, wash your hands, and if you must hold the book, cover it with your tunic." These days, we add a label that says "Keep me clean!"

Since books were very precious, most monastery libraries were loath to loan books for fear that they would never come back — we feel that way about some books and so put them in the Reference section or ask for a deposit on them (particularly travel guides). So began the tradition of a cleverly worded curse inscribed against a potential thief or the forgetful borrower. The goal of the curse was to strike fear into the hearts of potential, but hopefully God-fearing and damnation-fearing, thieves. Unfortunately, these curses didn't work very well, as the books also had to be chained in place. Even chains had limited effect. There are many ancient libraries where there are still chains in place — but alas no books.

Here is a particularly frightening old curse:

"For him that steals, borrows and returns not, a book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain crying aloud for mercy, and let there be not surcease to his agony 'till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw at his entrails in token of the Worm that dieth not. And when at last he goes to his final punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him forever."

Related articles:
Book curses
A curse on book thieves

Related book:
Anathema: Medieval Scribes and the History of Book Curses

From the British Waterways and Canals page at britainexpress.com:

Until the 18th century most heavy goods were transported within Britain by river. And it isn't hard to see why. A healthy horse could pull a cart laden with two tons. That same horse could pull a river barge weighing one hundred tons. But by Tudor times the navigable rivers were gradually silting up. Several acts of Parliament were passed to keep the rivers clean, but by the 18th century the rivers could not keep up with the demands of the burgeoning Industrial Revolution. It was time for a change, and canals provided that change.

The first major canal was built by the Duke of Bridgewater in 1759 to carry coal from his mines at Worsely to Manchester. The Duke's engineer, James Brindley, became the 'pop star' of the canal set, and for the next dozen years he was in constant demand to create canals for other entrepreneurs. [continue]

Now there are over 2000 miles of canals through Britain, with narrow riverboats floating up and down them. It's mostly a recreational thing these days. . . maybe one day we'll rent a narrowboat and float our way through the English countryside.

Here are some photos of the Huddersfield Narrow Canal, and a collection of photos from a Narrowboat holiday in Cheshire. I think I like this photo best.

Related links:
Canals of the United Kingdom - Wikipedia
Canals - Wikpedia
The Transport Revolution: Canals -TheHistoryChannel.co.uk
James Brindley - birminghamuk.com
Canals 1750 to 1900 - HistoryLearningSite.co.uk
The history of the British canal system - A special view of the industrialisation. - web.hist.no
A new golden age of canals in Shropshire - BBC
British Canals -fatbadgers.co.uk
UK Parlaiment - Memorandum submitted by British Waterways -parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk

From the Moscow Times, A Push to Update and Save Latvian.

Latvia's translator-in- chief sits at his desk leafing through dog-eared French and English dictionaries trying to think of a Latvian word for "ombudsman."

As chief terminologist at Latvia's Translation and Terminology Center, Peteris Udris is working to pull the country's language out of its Soviet- era hibernation into the age of free markets, open borders and modern technology.

"For 50 years our language lived behind the Iron Curtain, away from English, and we had no need to translate words we would never use," he said.

Words like entrepreneur, franchise and bank overdraft.

. . .

So far he and the center's 57 other linguists and translators have come up with 51,000 new Latvian words.

Each term has to get approval from a government commission, and it takes an average of three years for people to begin using it regularly, said the center's director, Marta Jaksona.

The center periodically sends out lists of new words to newspapers, hoping journalists will lead the way in incorporating the words into the Latvian lexicon. Jaksona sees the center's role as the front line in the battle to save Latvian, which many here had feared would die out during the Soviet period. "We're not doing this just to enter the EU," she said. "It's very important to us that our language survives, and that will only happen if we help keep it modern, keep it alive." [continue]

Michael McCormick is a professor of medieval history at Harvard. He's got some interesting things to say about the use of DNA in historical analysis; here's an excerpt from the DNA and the fall of Rome in the Harvard Gazzette.

According to McCormick, some specialists have been able to establish kinship among people entombed in the same area of an early medieval cemetery. Others have used DNA evidence to distinguish wild from domesticated geese on Anglo-Saxon farmsteads, and thus illuminate the development of early agriculture and husbandry.

Techniques of biological research may even provide new insights into a field that has long been the province of traditional scholarship - the study of ancient and medieval manuscripts.

"Theoretically, the DNA of the animals whose skins furnished the parchment pages of ancient and medieval books survives in that parchment," McCormick said. "It might be possible not only to determine the species of animal that supplied the skin, it might even be possible to reconstitute the history of the herds from which they came."

The history of disease is undergoing a revolution today as well, precipitated by the revolution in molecular biology. And disease, McCormick points out, is not just about human suffering, important though that is. Networks of contagion are often networks of communication, and major epidemics have differential demographic and economic impacts.

In England, for example, recent research has provided molecular evidence that a particularly devastating form of malaria afflicted Roman Italy in the fourth century A.D. French medical researchers at the University of Marseilles demonstrated the presence of bubonic plague DNA in the excavated remains of victims of the 14th century Black Death. Such evidence is of great interest to McCormick and other scholars investigating the nature, extent, and impact of the great wave of plagues that helped bring down the Roman economy in the age of Justinian. [continue]

From the Telegraph, Roman site points to a Greater Londinium.

The map of Roman London will have to be redrawn after the discovery of a settlement including a palace or military headquarters about a mile outside the city walls.

A site roughly the size of a football pitch was found after the demolition of a theme pub in Shadwell, east of the Tower of London, which was previously thought to be Londinium's boundary.

Although it is still considered unlikely that London spilled outside its walls, the discovery of what archaeologists described yesterday as a "major status building" suggests significant development on the periphery.

"This completely rewrites the story," Alistair Douglas, who works for Preconstruct Archaeology, said yesterday.

"We knew there was archaeology here, but we did not expect something this big. This is very exciting. We started off with a very small trench, but we have had to keep going as we find more evidence." [continue]

Related BBC article:
Roman palace redraws London map

One link led to another and then I wound up reading about Jewish history in Spain: In Spain, Inquisitors Tracked Conversos by Their Foodways. The article outlines some of the horrible things the Inquisition did to the Jews, and mentions that the inquisition looked for Jewish food practices when determining whether a Jewish convert to Christianity had really abandoned the old faith or not. The article is fascinating, but what a sad, sad history.

"One Inquisition list of Jewish food practices, quoted by David Gitlitz and Linda Kay Davidson in "A Drizzle of Honey: The Lives and Recipes of Spain's Secret Jews" (St. Martin's, 1999), reads in part:

cooking on the said Fridays such food as is required for the Saturdays and on the latter eating the meat thus cooked on Fridays as is the manner of the Jews;... cleansing or causing meat to be cleansed, cutting away from it all fat or grease and cutting away the nerve or sinew from the leg;... not eating pork, hare, rabbit, strangled birds, conger-eel, cuttle-fish, nor eels or other scaleless fish, as laid down in the Jewish law; and upon the death of parents... eating... such things as boiled eggs, olives, and other viands...

Inquisition prosecutors also paid special attention to those who fried meat in olive oil rather than lard, as was the common practice in Spain at the time. (Ironically, as Gitlitz and Davidson note, these lists helped to instruct later generations of conversos, who would otherwise have had difficulty finding information about Jewish practice.)

Amazon's description of the book mentioned, A Drizzle of Honey : The Lives and Recipes of Spain's Secret Jews, has more information.

Update, February 7th, 2002:
A Cuisine Returns After Centuries of Exile: Sephardic Cooking Re-emerges in Spain, Altered But Tasty as Ever - third article in this series, from forward.com.

The city of Houston wasn't impressed with Microsoft's expensive licensing strategy, so they've started using a low-cost alternative to Microsoft Office: SimDesk. A USA Today article about the switch, Microsoft loses showdown in Houston, says:

SimDesk delivers software over the Internet at a fraction of the cost of Microsoft's Office, a software suite used on 94% of America's office personal computers. Houston is giving SimDesk to tens of thousands of residents and businesses, free. And it has begun using SimDesk as an Office substitute on at least half the city's 13,000 PCs.

Houston's moves could have a profound impact not only on Microsoft, but on the computing industry. If SimDesk proves to be a cheaper, workable Office alternative here, it could help achieve what Microsoft's rivals and antitrust busters could not: puncture Microsoft's monopoly and give tech buyers more choices.

"It's very cool technology," says retired software analyst Peter Lowber, who led the Gartner research firm's review of SimDesk last fall. "It works." [continue]

Related page:
SimHouston Virtual Desktop Software Applications - Houston Public Library

Free or cheap alternatives to Microsoft Office:
Software 602 - Windows
Easy Office - Windows
SimDesk. (Works on many platforms.)
Star Office (Works on Linux and on Windows.)
Open Office (Works on Windows, Linux, Mac, and Solaris.)

This scribble thing is a pretty good flash toy. Just the thing for when you're bored at work, kids.

Time Traveller's Guide is a the sort of website where you could spend several happy hours. Begin by choosing a time period: Roman Empire, Medieval Britain, Tudor England, Stuart England or Napoleon's Empire. Then check out the links on the right side of each page for details about things like movers and shakers, class and customs, and the arts. Very nicely done, this.

From Ananova, Spies to publish cookbook.

German special agents have published a cookbook of secret recipes.

Top Secret - Schnitzel for Spies, is a new book by the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) - the German equivalent of MI6.

More than two-dozen exotic recipes are included in the book, gathered from German special agents stationed around the world.

Each recipe is spiced up with anecdotes from the agents about how they have made use of their culinary skills.

The stories include advice to a German security chief from a Nigerian counterpart on how to tackle black magic attacks.

Another contributor claims an operation in the desert had to be cancelled when a spy camera designed to withstand extreme heat and dry conditions fell into a pot of Turkish honey. [continue]

In the early nineteenth century, when the Hudson's Bay Company sent men to its furthest posts along the coast of North America's Pacific Northwest, the letters of those who cared for those men followed them in the Company's supply ships. Sometimes, these letters missed their objects: the men had returned to Britain, or deserted their ships, or died. The Company returned the correspondence to its London office and over the years amassed a file of "undelivered letters." Many of these remained sealed for 150 years and until they were opened by archivist Judith Hudson Beattie, when the Company archives were moved to Canada.

These letters tell the fascinating stories of ordinary people whose lives are rarely recounted in traditional histories. Beattie and Helen M. Buss skilfully introduce us to both the lives of the letter writers and their would-be recipients. Their commentaries frame, for contemporary readers, the words of early nineteenth century working and middle class British folk as well as letters to "voyageurs" from Quebec. The stories of their lives - fathers struggling to support a family, widowed mothers yearning to see their sons, bereft sweethearts left behind, and wives raising their children alone - reach out over two centuries to offer rare insight into the varied worlds of men and women in the early nineteenth century, many of whom became settlers in Washington, Oregon, and the new British colony of Vancouver Island.

That's from a the UBC Press page about the book they've published, Undelivered Letters to Hudson's Bay Company Men on the Northwest Coast of America, 1830-57, by Helen M. Buss Judith Hudson Beattie. One more for the reading list!

Related links:
Trading places - excellent article from scotsman.com
Explorers' manuscripts and dead letter office offer deeper peek into Canada's past -from University of Calgary
List of intended recipients - from Gordon Innes

Hudson's Bay Company Museum Collection - Manitoba Museum
Hudson's Bay Company Archives - from the Provincial Archives of Manitoba

Undelivered Letters to Hudson's Bay Company Men on the Northwest Coast of America, 1830-57 - Amazon.com's page for this book

From a Guardian article, Fry and drive.

According to Mike Hebson, the manager of Asda's store in Swansea, south Wales, there was no reason to be suspicious that sales of the company's cheapest bottles of cooking oil were running 20% higher than the previous year, way above any other store in Britain. "We just thought it was one of those things," says Hebson.

Why should he and his staff have been remotely questioning, he suggests, if men in overalls and lived-in denims had started buying Smart Price vegetable oil in batches of six, eight and 12 litres at a time. When one customer came in and filled a trolley to the brim with plastic containers of the thin, urine-coloured liquid, the checkout operator barely gave him a second glance. "Naturally, we assumed they were buying on price," says Hebson, an Asda man to the soles of his own-brand brogues. There was another reason that his staff were unlikely to see anything untoward in bulk-buying cheap vegetable oil. "We just thought they were doing a lot of frying," he says. "You have to remember, healthy eating has not hit Swansea in a big way."

It wasn't until the Department of Transport began a series of trial tests in the city last March that staff realised something odd had been going on. In an attempt to take diesel vehicles belching out illegal emissions off the road, department inspectors introduced experimental spot checks on roads in Bristol, Westminster, Glasgow, Middlesbrough, Canterbury and Swansea. It was in the latter that they found something surprising: a car with a fuel tank half full of cooking oil.

"The funny thing was," says Hebson, "the driver told them he had been getting it from Asda Swansea for four or five months, because it was the cheapest around. When we read the report in the local paper we began to put two and two together." [continue]

Related websites:
Make your own biodiesel - from journeytoforever.org
Biodiesel info - from veggievan.org
Grassroots Biodiesel and Vegetable Oil Fuel Homepage - from dancingrabbit.org

Related news stories:
Police impound cars run on cooking oil - BBC
French fry fuel - ABC News
Frying squad foils cooking oil car scam - Guardian
Cooking-oil fuel goes on sale on the west coast - Scotsman.com

Related Mirabilis.ca postings:
Biodiesel for Brampton buses
Automobile fuel from french fries
Trains run on biodiesel and generate electricity

From Ananova, 'Plague outbreak' city streets reopened.

The entrance to a labyrinth of streets beneath Edinburgh has re-opened, more than 350 years after it was sealed off during an outbreak of plague.

Workmen have knocked through the floor of the city's council headquarters to expose the entrance to the redeveloped Mary King's Close.

Local folklore says the narrow 17th century staircase beneath the City Chambers is where the council closed off 400 plague victims to die in 1645. [continue]

The Mary King's Close website has historical information and a photo tour.

Related news articles:
Taking steps to shine light on city's history
Tourist plan for 'haunted' lane
Bubonic plague site to be given tourist makeover

Related links:
Mary King's Close Ghost Tour
Places to Visit in Scotland- Mary King's Close, Edinburgh
The Plague in Scotland and Ireland

From Douglas Bernon's article, Reveries on A Walk to Machu Picchu.

Machu Picchu, Peru’s famous Lost City Of the Incas, is perched in a high mountain valley ringed by towering peaks. This ancient holy city is about the same distance south of the equator as Barbados is north. Depending on our altitude, we’ve been slipping up and down through a series of microclimates: cloud forest, grassy plains, high sierra, rain forest. Think orchids, jungles, and glaciers, all in the same picture. Once, much of Peru was laced with narrow Inca highways, wide enough only for a walker and his burdens. Many think the trail was a pilgrimage planned as a narrative experience, a complete work of art in which truths are revealed progressively in nature’s changing dramas, culminating with the mountaintop setting and elegantly crafted stone temples of Machu Picchu. Seems right to me. [continue]

Fr. Jim Tucker of Dappled Things has found a good page about memento mori. He notes that the site describes:"...various Baroque memento mori pieces that can be found in the churches of Rome". The site includes photos; go look!

Definition of memento mori from dictionary.com

Ørjan Stokkeland noticed that strange things were happening to his computer. Programs would launch themsleves, text would suddenly appear in the wrong places, and so forth. Turns out that the problem was Ørjan's neighbour's cordless keyboard.

From Aftenposten, Rampant cordless keyboard strikes again:

His neighbor Wormnes works from home, and spends a lot of his time typing at his computer, causing Stokkeland almost constant problems.

"Finally I opened a Word document. There I saw the "virus" writing a letter to Telenor complaining about a bill. When I saw the sender's address I understood the connection. It's crazy. I could have just left the document open and read everything he wrote," Stokkeland said.

Wormnes rang up HP and was told that "this kind of thing could happen". Hewlett-Packard advised him to speak with all neighbors within a radius of 100 meters and switch his keyboard to a channel they weren't using.

"There must be 100 people in that area. It's impossible to talk with all of them," Wormnes said, and that is not even the worst of it.

"If a neighbor wants to listen in, there is no way to stop them. I got a message from HP that another alternative was "not to write any sensitive information". I think that's horrible. In practice the product is useless. They sell it without any mention of the danger," Wormnes said.

If I had a wireless keyboard, it would become a doorstop right about now.

Previous Mirabilis.ca posting on this topic:
Cordless keyboard misadventure - October 31st, 2002.

From the Barley in Islamic Literature page at islam-online.net:

Viewed as the only vegetation on earth that can become a sole source of nutrition from birth to old age, scholars of hadiths (prophetic sayings) have understood barley to be very nutritious, beneficial in coughs and inflammation of the stomach, and to have the ability to expel toxins from the body and act as a good diuretic. At least twenty-one hadiths recommend sattoo (powdered barley). Talbina is a meal made from satoo, formed by adding milk and honey to the dried barley powder. The Prophet Muhammed (peace be upon him) recommended talbina for the sick and grieving (Khan p.1). He is quoted as saying, "At-talbina gives rest to the heart of the patient and makes it active and relieves some of his sorrow and grief" (Bukhari 7:71#593).

According to ibn al-Qayyim, barley water using five times the amount of water as barley, should be boiled until the contents reduce to three-quarters. This milky mixture is a thirst quencher. According to Firdous Al-Hikmat, a suspension prepared from one part barley and 15 parts water until the volume is reduced to two-thirds after boiling is beneficial (Khan p.1-3). The Japanese drank the pure juice from young barley leaves in powdered form for a number of years (Hagiwara p.4). Science has proven the benefits of all of this and more. [continue]

The page has lots more information, a few photos, and a recipe for barley soup from Yemen.

From Science Daily, Ant Agriculture: 50 Million Years Of Success.

Fungus-growing ants practice agriculture and have been doing so for the past 50 million years according to research published in the Jan. 17 issue of Science. These ants not only grow fungus gardens underground for food but also have adapted to handling parasitic "weeds" that infect their crops. [continue]

From the Guardian, First Light.

At 1pm on January 29 1864, a little girl with cherubic features and scraggy, shoulder-length hair was buttoned into her winter coat, waiting patiently for her photograph to be taken. In front of her, a short, stocky, middle- aged woman fitted another glass plate into the back of her huge camera and begged the child to keep still. She was probably counting, too; it could take up to five minutes for the image to be fully exposed. If the girl was bored, she didn't show it. Her face, turned in half-profile to catch the light, was composed but alive, its curves heightened by the contrast between shadow and light. It was a happy result - we know, because the photographer wrote to the girl's father later that day: "My first perfect success in the complete Photograph owing greatly to the docility & sweetness of my best and fairest little sitter. This Photograph was taken by me at 1pm Friday Jan 29th Printed Toned - fixed and framed all by me & given as it now is by 8pm this same day Jan 29th 1864. Julia Margaret Cameron." [continue]

Related link:
Masters of Photography: Julia Margaret Cameron

From (where else?) How to host a Roman orgy:

As soon as your guests seat themselves, ask them to remove their shoes, and have your slaves wash their feet before hors d'oeuvres are served. A full banquet should consist of at least seven courses. For starters, try dormice rolled in honey and poppy seeds, a favorite of Trimalchio, the unfrugal gourmet of Petronius's Satyricon. As an entree, you might offer the "Shield of Minerva the Protectress," invented to tickle the gluttony-dulled palate of Emperor Vitellius: The recipe calls for pike livers, pheasant and peacock brains, flamingo tongues and lamprey milt. (You'd better hope none of your guests asks what "milt" is.) Sow udders were another popular Roman delicacy, especially when the sow had been fattened on figs. Next, dazzle your guests with a "Trojan pig": a roast pig stuffed as full of other creatures--live quail, in the case of Trimalchio's famous dinner--as the mythical horse was of Greeks.

Since the Romans ate mostly with their fingers, dinner will be pretty greasy. Good table manners called for diners to throw bones, shells and cores on the floor. You should, however, send servants around with ewers of perfumed water to wash guests' hands between courses; the very height of elegance was to use pretty slave boys from Asia Minor on whose long hair guests could dry their hands. [continue]

So now you know!

Related:
definition of milt from dictionary.com
Roman recipes at the Roman orgy page

From the Independent, Unearthed: the humble origins of world diplomacy.

Archaeologists have discovered evidence of an invasion of the Middle East by one of the world's first superpowers, which destroyed much of the region 33 centuries ago.

Under the ruins of a 3,800-year-old royal palace in western Syria they have found part of an ancient diplomatic and administrative library, the most important archaeological discovery of its kind for more than 20 years.

Accounts on clay tablets describe the region's conquest by one of the Bronze Age's superpowers, the Hittite Empire, in 1340BC. This helped to reduce Egyptian power in neighbouring Palestine and played a key part in creating biblical-era Israel. The invasion also led, in effect, to the invention of the concept of the international treaty.

The clay tablets – discovered at the site of the ancient city of Qatna, 200km north of Damascus – appear to tell the whole story of the Hittite conquest of the region. What seems to be one of the first letters in the sequence – probably from a diplomatic or intelligence officer in northern Syria – describes how the Hittites invaded with a large army and great numbers of chariots and destroyed many towns, including one 100km north of Qatna. The diplomat implores the King of Qatna – a ruler called Idanda – to reinforce his defences.

Another letter – from a fellow king, also somewhere in northern Syria – described to Idanda how the Hittite general was on the march again, laden with war booty, presumably from the sacked cities. [continue]

David Menzies believes that that the Chinese discovered America in 1421. His website has information about his theory, and the book he's written on this topic. Newspapers all around the world are printing articles about David's book; here's an excerpt from the Chicago Sun-Times' article, Did Chinese get here first?

Take a bite out of this apple: "I suggest that the first settlers of North America came not with Columbus nor any other European pioneer, but in the junks of Admiral Zhou Wen's fleet, landing around Christmas 1421. Perhaps New England should now be renamed New China."

Preposterous? Maybe. Maybe not. Once you've plowed through 1421: The Year China Discovered America, by Gavin Menzies (Morrow, $27.95), you may walk away muttering that maybe the fellow has something there, if only he weren't so credulous.

Menzies is no charlatan like Erich von Daniken, who peddled the now quaint notion that space aliens settled Earth and left behind mysterious artifacts. Rather, Menzies is a retired Royal Navy submarine captain and an amateur historian of the grandly (sometimes grandiosely) imaginative stripe only the British can produce. He believes that not only did the Chinese beat Columbus to America by 72 years, they also circumnavigated the globe a century before Magellan, landed in Australia and sailed past Antarctica and into the Arctic Ocean. They did so, he says, in a fleet of more than 300 ships, some of them huge floating palaces longer than a football field, packed with treasure for trading, ambassadors for diplomacy, astronomers for navigation and concubines for pleasure.

So startling is his evidence that he lectured last March at the venerable British Royal Geographical Society--a venue not ordinarily allowed to crackpots or cranks. Adm. John Woodward, victor of the Falklands War and a former shipmate of Menzies, declared that he "is not some mad eccentric but a rational man, good at analysis." [continue]

UPDATE:

Thanks to Mark Stout for writing to point out the following note on the Royal Geographic Society website: Clarification re: Gavin Menzies.

(posted 24/12/2002)
With the release of Gavin Menzies' book '1421 The Year China Discovered the World' the Society has received a number of enquiries asking about his connection with the Society. Mr Menzies is a Fellow of the Society and he hired the Ondaatje Theatre in March 2002 for a private function at the Society. The talk was not given directly to the Society's members, although some may have been invited by Mr Menzies. The Ondaatje Theatre was simply used as a forum for debate and the Society has not endorsed his theories, although the Society regards the theory as interesting and will be interested to see how the debate unfolds.

Related articles:
Did Columbus discover Chinese food in America? - csmonitor.com
Did the Chinese discover America? - cnn.com
The Chinese discovered America "Or did they? A dubious new book offers an object lesson in amateurish research, slapdash editing and publishing greed." - salon.com
Experts hope to emulate Chinese Columbus - BBC
Explorer from China who 'beat Columbus to America' - telegraph.co.uk
Re-writing the race to America - theage.com.au
The Pinta, Santa Maria, and a Chinese junk? "A new book claims the Chinese discovered America in 1421, but historians refute thesis." - csmonitor.com

The book:
1421: The Year China Discovered America - amazon.com

The city of Brampton, Ontario is already using biodiesel fuel in 200 of their municipal vehicles. Now an otherwise boring article quotes Brampton's mayor, Susan Fennell: "Brampton is recognized as the leading community with the introduction of biodiesel fuel and we are moving it into our transit vehicles"

I've got to go bother Vancouver City Council to see if we can get our diesel buses to run on biodiesel. It sounds like such a sensible idea.

Cooking oil could one day replace fossil fuels - mention's Toronto's 400 biodiesel-powered buses
Biodiesel Canada, Inc
Canadian inventors, governments aim to cut costs of biodiesel
Biodiesel.org

According to Zdnet.co.uk, the UK is poised to legalise faster Wi-Fi hot spots.

The imminent deregulation of 5GHz will give a green light to commercial Wi-Fi hot spots based on the fast 802.11a standard

The UK government is poised to amend the regulations governing wireless spectrum -- a move that would legalise the rollout of faster Wi-Fi hot spots across Britain.

It is understood that legislation will be introduced in the House of Commons next week that will open up the 5GHz band of the radiocommunications spectrum to be used to operate wireless local area networks.

This move is part of the government's drive to make appropriate spectrum available to the telecoms industry, and follows a similar deregulation of 2.4GHz last year. This made it possible for operators to launch commercial WLANs based on 802.11b.

By deregulating 5GHz, the government will make it legal for operators to run hot spots based on 802.11a, which is much faster than 802.11b -- running at a theoretical maximum of 54Mbps compared to 11Mbps (although the actual bandwidth available is about half this maximum in each case). [continue].

From the Iona Abbey website:

One of Scotland's most historic and venerated sites, lona Abbey is a celebrated Christian centre and the burial place of early Scottish kings. The Abbey and Nunnery grounds house one of the most comprehensive collections of Christian carved stones in Scotland, ranging in age from 600AD to the 1600s.

Eight hundred years later the island's significance was reaffirmed when the Abbey buildings were restored and an active community again took up residence. Visitors can tour the Abbey, including Torr an Aba - the site of St Columba's writing cell - which provides a view over the Abbey; St Columba's Shrine; the Abbey church and cloisters. To the north-east of the Abbey is the Michael Chapel and the Infirmary Museum where a magnificent collection of carved stones is on view.

The site includes 360° views of the nunnery, the abbey cloisters, and the inside of the abbey.

Another interesting page is the Iona Abbey section of Undiscovered Scotland: The Ultimate Online Guide. There you'll find some photos, and a history of the island - everything from the Abbey's founding and Viking invasions to the recent restorations.

Related Links
Norsemen raid Abbey of Iona 795
Iona Abbey - 3 photos and short history
Isle of Iona - from Highlandtraveller.com
Andy's Iona photos
Iona photos by Michael Kennedy
Iona photos from the University of Edinburgh Chaplaincy
St Columba - from the Catholic Encyclopedia

From a canada.com article, U of C holds key to lost Mayan city. (Update: link no longer works.)

Calgary archeologist Kathryn Reese-Taylor walked two days behind a mule in the Guatemalan jungle last summer to reach the tantalizing remains of a Mayan city.

The lost city of Naachtun -- mysteriously abandoned at the height of its powers -- beckoned Reese-Taylor, one of only a handful of archeologists in the past 80 years to visit the site.

"It was a huge building -- standing masonry architecture, half-shrouded in jungle vegetation," said Reese-Taylor, associate professor with the University of Calgary's archeology department. "It was one of the most impressive sites I've ever seen. It was incredible to see. I'd hardly ever seen anything like this. It was awe-inspiring."

Searching for more inspiration like the kind she found last July, Reese-Taylor will head back next month to seek approval from the Guatemalan government for a 10-year project that could start in February 2004. [continue]

From canoe.ca, NASA trainees use Canadian winter to simulate gruelling space environment.

Space travel can shrink the human skeleton, cause muscular atrophy and play havoc with a central-nervous system unsuited to microgravity.

NASA needed a training area to simulate that kind of mental and physical anguish - so they chose Canada. More precisely, it saw Canada's harsh winter as an ideal way to push astronauts to the end of their psychological rope, simulating the stress of living isolated and gravity-starved on the international space station. [continue]

From the New York Times, Monks' Brew Showers Blessings on Belgian Town.

With his billowing white beard and black and white hooded habit, Dom Armand Veilleux, a Canadian-born monk in his mid-60's, more resembles a figure from Umberto Eco's novel of monastic mystery, "The Name of the Rose," than your average brewery executive.

Yet just across a snow-dusted garden from the room where he receives visitors, a microbrewery throbs, its six huge stainless steel vats fermenting more than 13,000 gallons of beer a day.

Only five years ago, the Trappist Abbey of Our Lady of Scourmont, where Dom Armand has been abbot for almost five years, turned out 15 percent less. But these days, Belgian Trappist beers — heavy brews, often dark and with as much as 9 percent alcohol — are surging in popularity, spreading blessings on the hilly farmland around Chimay, pop. 10,000, traditionally one of the poorer Belgian lands that snuggle against the French border.

You can read the rest of the article at the New York Times website, which requires free registration. Or you can skip the registration thing and read a reprint of the article instead: Brewery grows as Trappist beers grace more tables at the International Herald Tribune site.

The NYT version has photos, the IHT version doesn't.

More news about Trappist beer:
Brewer monks battle to protect a rare and potent ale

From the Mummering in Newfoundland page:

Sometime during the twelve days of Christmas, usually on the night of the "Old Twelfth", People would disguise themselves with old articles of clothing and visit the homes of their friends and neighbours. They would even cover their faces with a hood, scarf, mask or pillowcase to keep their identity hidden. Men would sometimes dress as women and women as men. They would go from house to house. They usually carried their own musical instruments to play, sing and dance in every house they visited. The host and hostess of these 'mummers parties' would serve a small lunch of Christmas cake with a glass of syrup or blueberry or dogberry wine. All mummers usually drink a Christmas "grog" before they leave each house. (A grog is a drink of an alcoholic beverage such as rum or whiskey.)

When mummers visit everyone in the house starts playing a guessing game. They try to guess the identity of each mummer. As each one is identified they uncover their faces, but if their true identity is not guessed they do not have to unmask.

For a time the old tradition of "Mummering", or "Jannying" as it is sometimes called, seemed to fade, especially in the larger centers of Newfoundland. But in recent years, thanks to the popular musical duo, Simini, who wrote and recorded "The Mummer's Song" in 1982, mummering has been revived. It is just as prevalent and popular as it was years ago and young and old look forward to dressing up this Christmas, knocking on a friend's door and calling out "ANY MUMMERS ALLOWED IN?" [continue]

Lyrics to Any Mummers 'Lowed In song, by Simani.
Simani has a .wav sound clip of Any Mummers 'Lowed In
Mummering in François, south coast of Newfoundland

I keep coming across references to the Old Twelfth celebrations, which take place in mid-January. It turns out that the Old Twelfth is the twelfth day of Christmas according to the old Julian calendar.

The Gregorian calendar page from Weisstein's World of Astronomy has details about why we adopted the Gregorian calendar, and when various countries changed from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian one. An excerpt:

The Julian calendar was switched over to the Gregorian starting in 1582, at which point the 10 day difference between the actual time of year and traditional time of year on which calendrical events occurred became intolerable. The switchover was bitterly opposed by much of the populace, who feared it was attempt by landlords to cheat then out of a week and a half's rent. However, when Pope Gregory XIII decreed that the day after October 4, 1582 would be October 15, 1582, the Catholic countries of France, Spain, Portugal, and Italy complied. Various Catholic German countries (Germany was not yet unified), Belgium, the Netherlands, and Switzerland followed suit within a year or two, and Hungary followed in 1587. Because of the Pope's decree, the reform of the Julian calendar came to be known as the Gregorian calendar. The rest of Europe did not follow suit for more than a century. The Protestant German countries adopted the Gregorian reform in 1700. By this time, the calendar trailed the seasons by twelve days. England finally followed suit in 1752, declaring that Wednesday, September 2, 1752 was immediately followed by Thursday, September 14, 1752 . . . .

In England, some Twelfth Day traditions (like wassailing the apple trees) continue to be celebrated on Old Twelfth (twelfth day after Christmas in the Julian calendar) instead of on the New Twelfth (twelfth day after Christmas in the Gregorian calendar).

From the Sydney Morning Herald: Prisoners bless nun who gave it all up. It's about a 76 year old nun who lives in a Mexican prison.

In between visits of succour and support to a seemingly endless number of prisoners and guards, the tiny 76-year-old erupts in peals of laughter from dawn till dark.

With a mischievous chuckle, she confirms that prisoners have tossed their guns away when she has marched into the middle of their deadly riots. They do not want the woman they call "Mama" to see them fighting.

Another chuckle accompanies her explanation of the way she trained for life in a cell surrounded by 4500 murderers, thieves and drug dealers: "I'm the mother of seven children," she said. "I'm prepared for everything." [continue]

From Times Online: Explosive evidence found in a 13th-century shipwreck off the coast of Japan.

Japanese underwater archaeologists have found evidence of the great invasion fleet sent by Kublai Khan in the 13th century, which tradition says was destroyed by a kamikaze or "divine wind" sent by the Emperor’s deified ancestors to save Japan from its enemies. Only a small proportion of the force was Mongol, the evidence shows: the majority was drawn from conquered China, and used advanced weaponry including shrapnel-filled projectile bombs.

The discovery, by Kenzo Hayashida of the Kyushu Okinawa Society for Underwater Archaeology, follows years of patient searching of the sea bottom off the north coast of Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s four main islands. The site, in Imari Bay, was initially found by fishermen, whose nets brought up artefacts including the personal seal of a Mongol commander, inscribed in both Chinese and the Phagspa script used to write the Mongolian language after the descendants of Genghis Khan conquered China and needed to administer their empire. [continue]

From the Guardian, Monks Resist Greek Monastery Eviction.

Power and water have been cut, authorities have halted supplies of food and medicine, and a deadline for forcible eviction looms.

For now, though, more than 100 Greek Orthodox monks are resisting efforts to force them from their 1,000- year-old monastery on a remote peninsula in the Aegean Sea as punishment for their bitter opposition to reconciliation between orthodox Christians and the Roman Catholic church.

Holding up a knotted rope rosary, the monastery's abbot, who goes by the name Methodius, said the monks of the Esphigmenou Monastery would challenge the eviction order in Greece's highest administrative court. [continue]

Related article:
Remote Greek monks resist eviction

From 'Cleaned' hard drives reveal secrets at newscientist.com.

Discarded and recycled computer drives can reveal financial and personal information even when apparently wiped clean, MIT researchers have found.

Simson Garfinkel and Abhi Shelat, graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, analysed 158 second hand hard drives bought over the internet between November 2000 and August 2002. They were able to recover over 6000 credit card numbers, as well as email messages and pornographic images.

The pair wrote a program to scour the disk drives for any trace of credit card information. They found card numbers on 42 drives of the drives they bought.

One drive had previously been used in an ATM cash machine and contained 2868 different numbers, as well as account and transaction information. Another drive contained a credit card number within a cached web page. [continue]

Until now, my favourite Microsoft Windows error message was "keyboard not found. Press F1 to continue." But this treasure from the Microsoft Knowledge Base is even better:

Error Message: Your Password Must Be at Least 18770 Characters and Cannot Repeat Any of Your Previous 30689 Passwords.

Found at Linkfilter.

From the Charlotte Observer, Glacial melt turns up treasure:

Biologist Gerry Kuzyk was hiking with his wife in the remote reaches of the Yukon when he caught the putrid scent of caribou dung wafting through the chill air.

Then he saw it -- the biggest pile of animal droppings he had ever seen, 8 feet high and stretching over a half-mile of mountainside.

Kuzyk, a researcher with the Yukon Department of Renewable Resources, knew there weren't enough caribou in the entire territory to create such an epic mound. Odder yet, there hadn't been caribou in the area for nearly a century.

"It was like being in the `Twilight Zone,' " said Rick Farnell, a colleague who helped investigate the find. "You could see them from a distance -- big, black bands of feces. I'm talking tons of it."

The mystery was solved by lab analysis: The dung, the product of innumerable migrating caribou herds, had been frozen for thousands of years and only recently exposed by melting ice.

Along with the dung, the scientists soon discovered an arsenal of Stone Age darts, arrows and spears.

For most scientists, from ecologists to climate experts, the warming of the planet is a disturbing trend that could radically alter the environment. But for archaeologists, it has prompted a breathtaking treasure hunt.

Without doing any digging, the scientists are scooping up artifacts, mummies and fossils long hidden in the depths of monstrous glaciers.

"We walk right up and pull arrows and animals out of the ice," Farnell said. [continue]

Other pages about this story:
History Emerging from the Ice - from npr.org. Iincludes photo gallery.
Droppings are a storehouse of knowledge
Ancient secrets on ice
Scientific Gold Is Where You Find It
Treasures from Icy Tombs

Background info:
Yukon Mammal Series: Caribou
Historic caribou herd returns to Yukon
Yukon Beringia Interpretive Centre: Ancient Caribou
Tour Yukon, Canada's True North

From the Can these bones live? article in Ha'aretz:

"This is an example of `burial art' - typically English - actually the work of a German friar who lived here." These are the words of a tourist who visited Rome in 1775, describing what he saw at the Cimitero dei Capuccini, the Capuchin catacombs near Piazza Barberini. The tourist was the Marquis de Sade, and the person who took him to visit this subterranean crypt under the Church of Santa Maria della Concezione apparently knew just what his guest would like.

The art hanging on the walls of the catacomb no doubt supplied the marquis with lots of inspiration. It is still on show today, in five rooms jam- packed with delicate sculptures crafted from thousands of monks' bones.

The Marquis de Sade wrote about his experiences in a travel diary called "Voyage d'Italie." It is not easy to find this book, but the brochure put out by the church for visitors to the catacombs contains quotes from it.

"Burial art" revolving around the display of skulls or bones is not unusual in the Christian world. Here and there, it can be found in the crypts of churches - a reminder of death lurking around the corner, but at the same time, offering hope for the dead, based on the belief that those who have died will be resurrected after the Second Coming. [continue]

Related links:
Capuccini Monastery, Palermo
Dressed for eternity

I could spend quite a while looking at Ayesha's amazing animated Arabic alphabet. Rest your mouse on a letter to see what that shape is called, or click on a letter to watch as it's drawn for you. (Requires Flash.) Isn't that cool?

For related information, see the calligraphy section of Islamicart.com, particularly the pages about the six major styles of Arabic calligraphy.

Fresh Mozzarella made from the milk of water buffalo is one of the greatest delicacies in all of Italian cuisine. Origins of this exquisite cheese are somewhat obscure, but it is known that water buffalo were introduced into Italy from Asia in the seventh century and that most of the production occurs in the region of Campania, particularly around Benevento and Casserta. [continue]

The Mozzarella di Bufala page describes a visit to a water buffalo farm near Benevento, and then to a cheese plant to see the buffalo milk transformed into that most wonderful of cheeses. Read all about it! (They've got photos, too.)

Related links
Buffalo Mozzarella

From Newsday, Ancient Ship Provides Evidence of Trade.

While classical Greece brings to mind great poets, architects and sculptors, the people had to eat, too. Now undersea explorers have found evidence of trade in one of the Greeks' most common foods, salted fish.

Ancient historians tell of the dried fish similar to salt cod, known as tarichos, being imported in great quantities.

In apparent confirmation of those tales, the oldest shipwreck yet found in the Black Sea is providing evidence of dried fish being shipped from as far away as the Crimea in what is now Ukraine.

The discovery, off the coast of Bulgaria, was announced this week by undersea explorer Robert Ballard of the Institute for Exploration in Mystic, Conn. Ballard is best known for finding the remains of the Titanic and other famed shipwrecks. [continue]

National Geographic has more about the shipwreck.

Thanks to the Guardian for this hilarious article, Mischievous saint gets to the bottom of parishioners' woes.

If another church had not grabbed the name, it might be called the Church of Moonies. For a small chapel at Murtosa, northern Portugal, is the only Roman Catholic church where it is acceptable to drop your trousers and show your bum.

The reason? The local saint, an allegedly mischievous chap called Goncalo, has a reputation for curing haemorrhoids. All you have to do is show him the affected region, say a prayer and, according to locals, bottom pain becomes a thing of the past.

The saint, a colourful 13th century priest, is also said to perform the miracle of casting out that most devilish of problems - teenage acne.

Villagers say people have been showing Saint Goncalo their bottoms for decades, often as a sign of thanks for having their prayers answered and their haemorrhoids eliminated. [continue]

Related link:
Saint has piles of followers

From the Norway Post: Bicycling to work tax deductable?

Norwegians may in future be able to earn tax relief by bicycling to work. Bicycles may also be excempt from value added tax.

These are proposals presently being considered by the Highway Directorate, Aftenposten reports.

What a brilliant idea.

The latest interesting news about the Opera web browser is that it's now available in the Sami language. (And 41 other languages too, of course.) From an Aftenposten article:

A Norwegian software company has released a version of its Internet browser in Sami, the language used by the indigenous population of northern Scandinavia and Russia, many of them traditional reindeer herders.

...

The Sami, once called the Lapps, are believed to have followed their herds of reindeer to Europe's northern fringe thousands of years ago and, like the Inuit of North America, are an indigenous people of the Arctic.

Related links:
Northern Sami Completed, Opera Released in 42 Languages
The Sami and Lapland

ABC News Online reports that archaeologists have unearthed Roman ruins in Jordan.

Archaelogists in Jordan have discovered a large Roman amphitheatre which they say is one of their most important finds for years.

The BBC reports the area where the amphitheatre was discovered was known to be the site of the ancient Roman city of Capitolias, but until now only a few remains had even been found.

The clue to the discovery was a small piece of wall that sparked the interest of archaelogists just over a year ago.

Months of digging beneath up to 20 metres of mud have now unearthed about 20 per cent of what antiquities officials say is an amphitheatre that could have seated around 6,000 people.

Archaeologists believe much more of the ancient city is still lying underground, beneath a carpet of olive trees.

From Steppe by step in the Guardian.

It's a small world, as the saying goes, when you find out that the Swede sitting next to you on the plane is friends with the only person that you know in Stockholm. Nearly everyone I know has had a "small world" experience. There's even a theory, called six degrees of separation, that says there are just six steps between any two people on earth. In other words, you can get to anyone in the world through a chain of acquaintances. So someone knows someone who knows someone else, and so on - and in six of these steps, you can get to anyone.

. . .

So 35 years on from the original experiment, I decided to test out the urban myth on a world stage: how many steps would it really take to get to someone on the other side of the planet? When I suggested this to Channel 4 commissioning editor Jess Search, it struck us as interesting to see if I could get to someone and somewhere completely random. And what better a place for my mission than Outer Mongolia? After all, it is the proverbial middle of nowhere. What is more, I had never met anyone who had ever been there, let alone anyone from there.

So I placed an ad in national Mongolian newspapers, asking for volunteers to be filmed for a documentary. It seemed like the best way to reach a large cross-section of the population - Mongolia has a very high literacy rate of 94%, and newspapers are distributed widely, even in rural areas. [continue]

A CNET news.com article asks Could we be constantly tracked through our clothes, shoes or even our cash in the future?

. . .in the future, we could be tracked because we'll be wearing, eating and carrying objects that are carefully designed to do so.

The generic name for this technology is RFID, which stands for radio frequency identification. RFID tags are miniscule microchips, which already have shrunk to half the size of a grain of sand. They listen for a radio query and respond by transmitting their unique ID code. Most RFID tags have no batteries: They use the power from the initial radio signal to transmit their response.

[. . . ]

That raises the disquieting possibility of being tracked though our personal possessions. Imagine: The Gap links your sweater's RFID tag with the credit card you used to buy it and recognizes you by name when you return. Grocery stores flash ads on wall-sized screens based on your spending patterns, just like in "Minority Report." Police gain a trendy method of constant, cradle-to-grave surveillance. [continue]

James Evans (1801-1846) was a very determined fellow. Often called the Apostle of the North, he was the missionary who invented a new orthography for native languages. When he wanted to do his own printing, James melted down scraps of lead to make his own metal type, then mixed fish oil and soot to make ink. Goodness! Syllabic writing systems are now used by Ojibwa, and Cree, and Inuktitut.

Here are some excerpts from a biography of James Evans at tiro.com:

In 1827, James Evans received the responsibility of the mission post at Rice Lake. After a year there were some 40 native students, half of whom could read English. Evans himself was becoming familiar with the local languages, and wrote in Ojibwa, and in 1830 was preaching sermons in the local Ojibwa language. By 1831, Evans had produced an original orthography and the beginnings of a writing system for the native languages to replace the only current representation for the language which was in the Latin script. As the Ojibwa were being taught both in English and in their own tongue, it was confusing for them to use the same script, especially as English.

Through his study of the language, Evans realized that the Ojibwa language could best be represented through just nine sounds, which are: a, ch, k, m, n, p, t, s, and y all of which can be combined with the basic vowels in four variations: ai, chi, ki, mi, ni, pi, ti, si, yi and so on for the vowels e, i, o, u. It was probably also around this time that Evans first considered a new syllabic writing system as being the ideal way to render the Algonkian languages.

and later:

Evan's educated himself in the customs and language of the Cree. Evans determined that the language had 36 principal sounds and a few affixes for which he adapted a syllabic writing system he originally devised for Ojibway, of nine basic shapes which when rotated on their axis could be used to represent each syllable.

The biography of James Evans page has lots more information, including some good photos.

Writing Inuktitut: Syllabics or Roman Orthography - from the Office of the Languages Commissioner of Nunavut
Learning Inuktitut - excellent resources from the Office of the Languages Commissioner of Nunavut
the Pigiarniq and Uqammaq syllabic fonts, available for download
James Evans -from Canadian Heritage at the Victoria University Library
The Apostle of the North, Rev. James Evans - from anglican.org

From sify.com we have news of the text messages the Vatican is sending out: Pope reaches out with daily SMS.

Pope John Paul II is to reach out to mobile phone users with SMS messages detailing his spiritual "thought for the day", Italy's biggest mobile phone operator and the Vatican said Tuesday.

Telecom Italia subsidiary TIM is cashing in on the craze in Italy for SMSs, or Short Messaging Service, on the ubiquitous "telefonino", as well as the Vatican's need to bring its spiritual message to young people.

"This shows once again that the mobile phone is part of our daily lives," said TIM's chief Marco De Benedetti. "In this case, it becomes a means of bringing to a wider public the messages of the sovereign pontiff."

Clients are asked to dial a service number to sign up for the daily 160 character message, costing 15 cents, or 4.50 euros(dollars) a month.

Suitable thoughts for the day will be selected by the Vatican's press section, distilled from John Paul II's prodigious output of encyclicals and homilies.

Catholics worldwide will have to wait for the service, which for the moment will be offered only in Italian.

Related links:
Pope spreads the word by SMS - ananova.com
SMS a day can keep the devil away - cnn.com
Pope spreads the Word by SMS - cathnews.com

Update - more still!
Honey, it's the Pope -smh.com.au

World's Longest Wi-Fi Connection Made by The Swedish Space Corporation

The Swedish Space Corporation (SSC) announced today that they have transmitted information via a broadband wireless link over a distance of 310km. They believe that this is the longest distance achieved using wireless connectivity.

The link was made between a stratospheric balloon that was launched from Esrange near the town of Kiruna in northern Sweden and a base station located near Esrange.

I dream of having a high speed wireless Internet connection on several remote islands, so this kind of news is most encouraging.

(link to this story found on Slashdot)

From Ananova, Huge Bronze Age haul found in Austria.

Europe's biggest-ever discovery of Bronze Age weapons and jewellery has been made in Austria. Archaeologists believe the hoard could prove Bronze Age Europe rivaled Greece in terms of early society and technology.

The scientists from the University of Innsbruck and the Austrian National Memorial Office have so far found 360 pieces buried at the side of a crevice in Moosbruckschrofen am Piller in Tyrol.

It is thought they were laid there as part of a ritual offering sometime between 1550 and 1250 BC. [continue]

related link:
Major find of Bronze Age artifacts - canoe.ca

Every once in a while I check to see what web searches led to Mirabilis.ca, because there's usually something weird or funny in that list. Here's the most recent collection of oddities. (I've linked each search string to the Mirabilis.ca page the search engine suggested.)

teapots apple
nuns milan archive ritual
cleaning italian silk priest vestment
a corer in the army as a driver in the UK
philadelphia inquirer article on air soot compared to human hair
requirements to be an orthodox monk
photos france medieval prisoners
nun profession hair
depend on christ the rubber ducky

That last one really does me in.

Now this I wouldn't have expected:

Using old saris to filter drinking water collected from rivers and ponds has halved the number of cholera cases in remote Bangladeshi villages.

"Many, many lives could be saved" by this cheap and simple way of reducing the cholera risk, says Rita Colwell, of the National Science Foundation (NSF) in Virginia, USA. Colwell led a three-year study, the results of which were published on Monday. [continue].

From a Newscientist.com article, Old clothes filter out cholera.

Tonight's bedtime story is The Good Catch. It's from Adam Biro's book, Two Jews on a Train: Stories from the Old Country and the New.

Kohn was the matchmaker in a small village in Poland. He was a shadchen. Well, to say "matchmaker in a village" is a misnomer. A matchmaker can never stay in one place; his profession forces him to travel from village to village, he has to be constantly on the road to gather news as a thistle gathers dust, to glean all the marvels, the horrors, the murders, the adulteries, the lottery winnings, the shameful births, the happy death, the examples to follow, and the examples to avoid. He has to draw the inventory of eligible parties, of the couples to assemble, of the young and not so young people he'll join for life.

Kohn practiced an important profession, the most important after that of God. He was arranging life. [continue]

From the Bio-cars article [update: article no longer available] at e4engineering.com:

Car body materials are to be grown from plants in a UK project to reduce the environmental impact of vehicles while increasing their safety and fuel efficiency.

The Qinetiq-led Biomat project, which also includes Ford, will develop technologies to enhance the performance of plant fibres for use in injection moulded thermoplastic composites.

Funded by the Department for the Environment, the project aims to reduce the car industry's reliance on unsustainable materials, by using fibres from plants such as flax and hemp to build composite parts.

Under EU legislation, cars must be made from 95 per cent recyclable material by 2015. Plant fibres are relatively easy to recycle, and require low amounts of energy to manufacture. [continue]

From an AP article on the Guardian website, Israeli Experts Examine Ancient Tablet.

Israeli geologists said Monday they have examined a stone tablet detailing repair plans for the Jewish Temple of King Solomon that, if authenticated, would be a rare piece of physical evidence confirming biblical narrative.

The find - whose origin is murky - is about the size of a legal pad, with a 15-line inscription in ancient Hebrew that strongly resembles descriptions in the Bible's Book of Kings. It could also strengthen Jewish claims to a disputed holy site in Jerusalem's Old City that is now home to two major mosques. [continue]

Related link:
There is nothing else like it - article from Ha'aretz Daily.

From the Polar Bear Tracker website:

Two polar bears. One million nine hundred thousand square kilometers of frozen arctic wilderness. Where are they? It should be like looking for needles in a haystack, but it isn't. The bears are tagged with radio collars, which beam their positions via a satellite to this web site. Go and find Lena and Yana now!

The site has a few gorgeous photos, and lots of information about polar bears: their diet, habitat, characteristics, family, and the problems they face due to climate change and oil exploration. Well worth a visit.

From a techextreme.com article:

The miniature storage device measures roughly an inch-wide and functions exactly like traditional hard drives found in any computer. But by using advanced technology developed from IBM research, the Microdrive can store over four gigabytes of data on disks roughly the size of U.S. quarters.

Just imagine how useful this will be, particularly in handheld computing.

Wowza. Queen's University has 60 rare and unusual copies of the Bible on display at their Bibles Through the Ages exhibit. (Link slow to load due to Bible photos.) The exhibit includes a page from the Book of Kells, a Tyndale New Testament from 1534, a Walton Polyglot Bible from 1657, and a whole bunch of other stuff besides.

There are more details in the Kingston Whig Standard article, Bible studies: Rare Scriptures on view for first time in decades.

Related page:
1536 Tyndale New Testament Facsimile

Related .pdf file (you'll need the Acrobat Reader to see it):
Queens University On-line Gazette from December 16th, 2002. The article about the Bible exhibit is on page nine of that publication.

From Zoomata, Italian Priest Beats Pinups for Most Popular Calendar.

Italians are ringing in the new year with the last calendar penned by undisputed publishing phenomenon Father Mariangelo da Cerqueto -- despite the lack of pulchritude his calendar "Frate Indovino" (Brother Fortuneteller) has been a sell out since 1946. The priest died at the age of 87 in November 2002.

The homespun wisdom of Brother Fortuneteller is rooted in daily weather forecasts--the calendar first gained popularity with farmers in Father Mariangelo's native Perugia in Umbria for the accuracy of predictions made. The secret? The capuchin priest used a manuscript from the 1600s found in monastery archives. [continue]

I've read about how various schools are switching to the Linux operating system, but usually those announcements just give an overview of what's going on. This, though, is far more detailed: Linux from Kindergarten to High School at LinuxJournal.com. The school sysadmin and article author outlines the reasons for the switch, and talks about how well it's worked out.

As a teacher of computer science, I am finding this year a fascinating test for Linux. Very few of our students, parents or teachers knew what Linux was before this year. I have actually found this to be a great advantage in teaching computers. In the past, I have found students to be disinterested in learning about the personal computer running Windows, because it is something most of them grew up with at home. This lack of interest made it more difficult to teach the more-advanced aspects of the operating system. However, Linux is something completely new, different and unexplored. Instead of being intimidated by the change, as many adults might be, young people are excited to explore the "uncharted territory". This opens a door for me as a teacher, allowing me to educate eager minds in the more-advanced aspects of computer operating systems and software. In fact, it only took two weeks until students began to ask me, "Where can I get Linux?" [continue]

Mexican Schools Embrace Linux
Wired: Penguin Enrolls in U.S. Schools
Linux in the Classroom
Linux for Schools project
Why should open source software be used in schools? (scroll down for many links)
France to install Linux in schools
Open Schools to Open Source
Skolelinux - Linux for Norwegian schools

Travels with a Tangerine is next on my reading list. Here's a bit about the book from a review at iraquipapers.com:

Ibn Battutah, the greatest traveller of the pre-mechanical age, set out in 1325 from his native Tangier on the pilgrimage to Mecca. By the time he returned twenty-nine years later, he had visited most of the known world, travelling three times the distance Marco Polo allegedly covered. Spiritual backpacker, tireless social climber, temporary hermit and failed ambassador, he braved brigands and his own prejudices. The outcome was a monumental book on The Wonders of Wandering and the Marvels of Metropolises - in short, The Travels.

Captivated by this inquisitive, indefatigable man, Tim Mackintosh Smith, in the tradition of earlier Arab authors, set out to write a dhyal to his book - a 'tail', or continuation of the original train of writing. Travels with a Tangerine follows the first stage of the Moroccan's eccentric journey, from Tangier to Constantinople. Destinations include an Assasin castle in Syria, the Kuria Muria Islands in the Arabian Sea and some of the greatest cities of medieval Islam. Mackintosh-Smith travels both in Ibn Battutah's footsteps and in the footnotes of his text, rooting out memorabilia of the man and his age - buffalo-milk puddings, a crimean minaert, dancing dervishes and the scions of defunct dynasties.

The New York Times has just published an article about the book, Following the Path of a Medieval Arab Wanderer. (NYT requires free registration.) Fascinating.

About buying the book online:
Here's the link to Travels with a Tangerine at Amazon.com, but they say the book isn't available right now. You'll have better luck at Amazon.co.uk or at Chapters.ca.

Today I was reminded about that Ancient Chinese map of Africa, and I wanted to see what written Manchu looks like. It's beautiful. Here's the Manchu alphabet and here's the Lord's prayer in Manchu.

Pope returns to his long-lost love - poetry.

Pope John Paul II is to release a new volume of poetry, including a meditation on the choice of his successor, after spending months working on the top secret project at his summer residence.

The 14-page verse work has been given the working title Roman Triptych - Meditations by John Paul II and the writings mark a return to one of the Pope’s great loves.

In his early years in Poland as a young priest, and later bishop and cardinal, he wrote many poems and essays and his love of the arts also led him to several acting roles in the theatre.

But since he became leader of the Roman Catholic Church in 1978, he has had to put his love of writing poetry on hold because of his enormous workload and constant Papal visits across the world.

The work had been kept secret but details of it began to leak out from Poland over Christmas and the New Year and the Vatican reluctantly had to confirm the news. [continue]

From White Russia: Warmth, mysticism await visitors to a country shaped by cold.

People will flat out tell you that you are crazy to go to Russia in the wintertime. But, to me, that is the only time to experience the gray, brooding skies of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Dr. Zhivago.

In the long days of summer, you can't wade knee-deep into the protective snows that stopped every invader from Charles XII of Sweden to Hitler. Only in the bitter cold does vodka perform its intended warming task along with the fur hats and thick wool coats. In winter, Russia is the Russia of literature, legend and history. [continue]

From the Nunatsiaq News, an article about Taming Nunavut’s addiction to fossil fuels.

Most Canadians who live north of 60 depend on imported diesel power. Generating stations are as much a part of life today as seal-oil lamps and dog sleds were a half-century ago.

They burn undying in communities across the Arctic like a vast terrestrial constellation: ungainly, utterly vital shrines to Canada’s fossil-fuel addiction.

In Nunavut, the addiction is total. Nunavut’s 27,000 inhabitants burned a staggering 36 million litres of imported fuel last year to brighten homes, chill food, cook meals, wash dishes, launder clothes, surf the Net and watch television. Even more was burned — 58 million litres — keeping warm. And that’s not counting the three million litres of gasoline used to power the growing numbers of boats, snowmobiles and cars.

In a land of harsh extremes — long, dark winters and brief, brilliant summers — petroleum is like sunshine in a bottle, the great energy equalizer in a nation of uneven strengths. But at what price?

. . .

Some analysts believe that wind energy, a centuries-old source of mechanical power now converted to electricity in many parts of the world, holds much promise in Nunavut, though it has been slow to fire the imagination of public-utility managers. [continue]

From an Archeological Odyssey article, Ancient Ships: An Iconographical Tale.

Nautical archaeology has taught us much about ancient seafaring, but some details do not survive in the archaeological record. To fill in the picture, we can turn to iconography, that is, ancient depictions of seagoing vessels though we must remember that depictions of ships are not the ships themselves. Here are some examples of what we can learn from iconography. [continue]

From Ananova: Rare cannon recovered from Cromwellian wreck.

Archaeologists have discovered what is believed to be one of the most significant underwater finds ever made.

They have found a 17th century iron cannon, thought to be the only one of its kind still in existence.

It was recovered from the wreck of the Swan, a small Cromwellian warship lost off Mull while attacking the royalist stronghold of Duart Castle in 1653. [continue]

We're going to Victoria for a couple of days to visit friends, explore bookshops, and wander through Beacon Hill Park. Expect regular blogging to resume sometime on Friday.

I've had a weakness for antique toasters since I was six, when I saw the one my friend's grandma had. It was way cooler than any modern toaster, and certainly superior to the one my mom and dad had. An article at csmonitor.com, A burning passion for toasters, introduces a tempting idea.

As the owner of 800 antique toasters, Mr. Sheafe has one for practically every mood.

Feel like conserving electricity? Try the manual Bromwell pyramid-shaped toaster, so you can hold your bread over a flame just as your ancestors did at the turn of the 20th century.

Maybe one of these old toasters would like to live in my kitchen.

Related Mirabilis.ca entry:
Toaster history

An amazing thing (complete with photos!) from the Iowa City Press-Citizen: Moving a barn, by hand.

Around 150 Amish men from the Kalona area help to carry one of four pieces of a large barn Friday morning along Highway 22 east of Kalona. The men moved the barn by foot to the homestead of Paul T. Miller, who purchased the structure at an auction from Randy Billups of Kalona. It took the group about four hours to finish the task, and they drew the attention of numerous passersby. [continue]

Found on jwz's LiveJournal.

Lobsters Navigate by Magnetism, Study Says.

The animal world has its share of celebrated navigators, from flocking geese to spawning salmon. A rather unlikely character, however, may soon take its place among the best of them.

New research suggests that Caribbean spiny lobsters, despite their limited intelligence, may be among the animal kingdom's top navigators. Their homing abilities could also provide scientists with new clues to the long-debated role of the Earth's magnetic fields in animal movements and migrations.

Larry C. Boles and Kenneth J. Lohmann, researchers at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, reported their findings in the January 2003 issue of Nature. Their research suggests that spiny lobsters are able to determine their location on Earth even when transported to an unfamiliar area. The lobsters are the first invertebrates to display this ability known as true navigation. [continue]

From the Guardian, Soccer row over sign of the cross.

It is used the world over by anxious and celebrating football players and fans alike, but members of the Scottish parliament want to banish the sign of the cross from football grounds across the country.

Under controversial proposals designed to tackle sectarianism north of the border, MSPs are advising police to crack down on the religious gesture when it is used "provocatively" by players or fans to rile opponents. [continue]

Discovery.com reports the opening of an ancient elephant graveyard near Rome.

A Pompeii for elephants, an Italian site packed with the remains of Middle Pleistocene stuck-in-the-mud pachyderms, has just opened to the public after a 17-year excavation.

Situated 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) northeast of Rome, La Polledrara di Cecanibbio is a sort of a fossilized prehistoric zoo. The bones — more than 10,000 of them — emerged from the hardened earth of a 900-square- meter area (ca. 9,700 square feet) belonging to an ancient riverbed.

The Cranky Professor is in Rome right now. (And posting the odd cranky blog entry, too.) I wonder if he'll have time to go see this and tell us what it's like.

Related link:
Excavating Ancient Elephants in Italy

From a National Post article, Martha and the monks:

When people used to phone the monks at St. Benedict Monastery in Oxford, Mich., to ask if they had a mass that was open to the public, the monks were trained to reply, "Well, yes we do, but our mass is very early in the morning, and we're very hard to find. Have a blessed day." The monk who'd answered the call would then quickly put the phone down.

. . .

When the monks finally did overcome their introverted natures and started opening their doors to outsiders, the neighbouring public in Michigan was invited to partake in the kind of hospitality Benedictine monks have been practising for the last 15 centuries. It was a hospitality Lonni Collins Pratt says "just blew her away." It impressed her so much, the journalist and now good friend of Father Dan has spent the last year writing a book with him titled Radical Hospitality.

"The hospitality explored in this book is not the same kind you will learn about from Martha Stewart," Lonni and Father Dan write in Radical Hospitality. "Benedictine hospitality is not about sipping tea and making bland talk with people who live next door or work with you." It does not refer to hotels or cruise ships. It is not connected to entertaining friends and family in the warmth of candlelight with gleaming silver and ivory lace. Nor did it begin with Howard Johnson's and Good Housekeeping.

"Hospitality, as it has been practised from ancient days, protected people from the dangers of travelling alone. In St. Benedict's day there were no safe and cheap shelters for travellers. Along the way people could be brutalized, robbed, wounded, or lost. In those days monasteries saved lives when they opened their doors to strangers." And when the monks of ancient days opened up their monastery and made room for someone who was not one of them, they, too, took a risk. [continue]

Oh, and here's the book mentioned in the article: Radical Hospitality: Benedict's Way of Love.

From NewsOK.com: Translators unravel old scroll's secrets.

On a dry day 2,000 years ago, a worker charged with mummifying a body among the tombs of Egypt preserved what would become one of the largest ancient literary finds in history.

Experts, including Cincinnati professor Kathryn Gutzwiller, said the worker cut and molded a piece of papyrus -- what to him was a scrap of paper -- into a chest cover that resembled papier-mache. The cover formed a hard layer on the mummy before intricate decorations were added.

The mummy was entombed, along with the papyrus, until 1992, when the body was stolen from Egypt. Gutzwiller said the papyrus, an ancient paper made from a tall grassy sedge in the Nile Valley, made its way to the antiquities market, where it lingered until being discovered by two scholars at the University of Milan. [continue]

Good news for anybody who's wished for more Linux fonts: Linux, Formerly Font-Challenged, Now Boasts Deluxe Font Collection:

Linux technology on the desktop continues to make great strides for the mass market as evidenced by Lindows.com now boasting a deluxe font collection in their operating system, LindowsOS. Bitstream Inc. (Nasdaq: BITS) announced today that Lindows.com, Inc. has licensed a core set of delta-hinted fonts for LindowsOS. The license agreement also includes a set of more than 50 high-quality display and text fonts from Bitstream. To see Lindows.com's Click-N-Run Warehouse ( http://www.lindows.com/clicknrun) page describing the exact functionality of the Bitstream fonts in LindowsOS, visit www.lindows.com/deluxefonts.

I'm hoping we'll soon see similar announcements from other Linux distributions, too.

Related Links:
Linux Distributions from LinuxLinks.com
Linux Distributions - info for Linux beginners from Mirabilis.ca

From the New York Times: More Cities Set Up Wireless Networks.

The city of Long Beach, Calif., plans to announce on Friday that it will make free wireless Internet access available in its downtown area as part of an effort to attract visitors and companies to the business district. The city will use the increasingly popular standard known as Wi-Fi, which lets personal computers and other hand-held devices connect to the Internet without wires at high speed.

The new service is one of the first examples of a city's setting up a free wireless Internet system. It is being supported in part by equipment donations from a group of companies, with the city underwriting the $2,500 annual cost of an Internet connection.

The project will initially provide wireless service to a four-block area around the city's convention district along Pine Street, but there are plans to extend the network to other Long Beach neighborhoods including the marina and the airport, said Bruce Mayes, the acting technology officer for the Long Beach Economic Development Bureau.

He said the city wanted to expand its high technology base and viewed the network as a good way to advertise its commitment.

Long Beach is one of a growing number of cities and community groups that are considering free wireless Internet access. A number of cities are exploring the idea of installing such networks in downtown areas or throughout entire communities; they include San Francisco; Seattle; Jacksonville, Fla.; and Lodi, Calif. [continue] (NYT requires free registration.)

Now if I could just convince the City of Vancouver to set up a free wireless network for downtown and the West End, that would be most excellent.

From Reuters, Demanding Payment from 8th Century Saint:

Germany's television license fee agency apologized Monday for sending an angry letter demanding payment from an eighth century saint.

"This was quite embarrassing," said Eckhard Ohliger, an official at the Cologne-based GEZ fee collection headquarters, which collects 6.5 billion euros ($6.8 billion) per year from viewers. "But unfortunately mistakes happen."

Father Karl Terhorst said the agency had sent letters demanding payment of the monthly 16.15 euro fee to a woman named "Frau Walburga St." at the address of the Roman Catholic Church in Ramsdorf, 80 miles east of Cologne.

"At first I just ignored the letters," Terhorst said. "But after the last letter demanding payment threatened the saint with 'legal action' and a 1,000-euro fine, I figured it was time to write back."

Terhorst informed the GEZ that St. Walburga, born in 710 in England, was an abbess and missionary who played an important role in St. Boniface's organization of the Frankish church. She headed a monastery, and was later made a saint in 880.

Update:
TV licence demands try patience of a saint - from the Guardian, Jan 7-03.

Ananova will make you shiver today, with an article about an icy swim for Epiphany in Istanbul. (Great photo, by the way.)

Nearly a dozen people have competed in the freezing waters of Istanbul's Golden Horn to retrieve a wooden cross in a ceremony commemorating the baptism of Jesus.

Some 100 Greek Orthodox gathered on the shores of the Horn, to celebrate Epiphany with the ceremony of Blessing the Waters.

Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I, leader of the world's Orthodox Christians, led a two-hour liturgy at the Patriarchal Cathedral of St. George.

Bartholomew, who is based in Istanbul, threw a gold-painted wooden cross into the water.

Giorgos Aristotelis Sakellariou, out-swam 10 competitors and was first to reach the cross. [continue]

When you get good and annoyed with your bank, what do you do? Xdude made a flash thing about his annoying experience with the Royal Bank. It's brilliant. If you've got flash installed, turn up your speakers and go look.

In Tudor winters the Thames froze solid, and fairs were held on the ice. This is local London has an article about London’s days of icy fairs.

The fairs all took place upstream from the Old London Bridge. Its 19 arches drastically calmed and slowed the flow of the river, making it more likely to freeze solid, although the Thames did freeze over at Greenwich on at least one occasion.

Nicholas Reed says: "There is not much recorded about it but the third wife of Henry VIII, Jane Seymour, the mother of Edward, apparently crossed the river on the ice to Greenwich Palace on horseback with the King.

"The court attended them, so the river must have frozen solid from the Isle of Dogs to Greenwich for them to be able to do that.

"We don't hear about the river freezing at that point later on, which may have been because the river was shallower then, before regular dredging took place." [continue]

Related book:
Frost Fairs on Frozen Thames

From Time, What Lies Beneath

Just yesterday I read about how the Knights Templar plan to use ultrasound and thermal imaging technology to see what's underground at Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland. Now Time Asia reports that an Indian court is planning to use the same sort of techniques, this time to figure out if a disputed holy site should belong to Hindus or Muslims.

Hindus and Muslims continue to fight and die for a 1.1-hectare piece of real estate in the northern Indian city of Ayodhya. This struggle has gone on for centuries, with both sides claiming the site as sacred ground. But now an Indian court is trying to combine archaeology with technology to settle the dispute. Following a court order, government archaeologists last week began probing the dusty parcel with a ground- penetrating-radar magnometer capable of detecting a buried foundation and other subsurface ruins. Hindus hope the machine will bolster their claim that an ancient temple marking the birthplace of the god Ram once stood there—superseding the Muslim claim that dates back to the 16th century, when Mughal invaders erected a mosque on the site. [continue]

Christians from several traditions start celebrating Christmas today, because they're using the old Julian calendar instead of the Gregorian one. If you're interested in the traditions associated with these celebrations, see the Guelph Mercury's Orthodox Christmas: Same idea at different time, Canada.com's Rich symbolism plays large role in Ukrainian Christmas, and the Guardian's Russians Mark Orthodox Christmas. Fascinating.

From the Independent: Knights Templar use technology to search for Grail.

For centuries the intricately carved stones of Rosslyn Chapel near Edinburgh have tantalised historians, archaeologists and devoted Christians.

A labyrinth of vaults beneath the 15th-century home of the Knights Templar is reputed to contain dozens of holy relics, including early gospels, the Ark of the Covenant, the fabled Holy Grail – and even the mummified head of Christ.

More than 550 years after the first foundation stones were laid, modern technology is about to put the legend to the test.

A group of Knights Templar, successors to the warrior monks who sought asylum from the Pope by fleeing to Scotland in the early 14th century and fought for Robert the Bruce at Bannockburn, are to make a "non-invasive" survey of the land around the chapel. They will use the latest ultrasound and thermal imaging technology in the hope of finding evidence of the existence of the vaults.

"The plan is to investigate the land around the chapel to a depth of at least 20ft," said John Ritchie, Grand Herald and spokesman for the Knights Templar. [continue]

Related links:
The Knights Templars - from the Catholic Encyclopedia

Here's an interesting article in today's Seattle Times, Ethiopian Christmas celebrations begin.

The congregation of St. Gebriel Church of the Ethiopians spills from the pews into the aisle. The men sit to one side. On the other, women sit wrapped in white shawls, the edges embroidered in yellow and green. Beneath a string of chandeliers, the crowd flows from the aisle into the foyer and trickles down the stairs.

Even those without a view of the altar stand and sing in Amharic, the language of Ethiopia. Among the swaying choir one man raps on a drum, letting out a deep boom. Female voices respond in a piercing chorus of ululations.

St. Gebriel's is in the middle of Seattle's Central Area, but, from the inside on a Sunday morning, it could easily pass for Ethiopia. Tomorrow night, Ethiopian Orthodox Christians will begin their Christmas celebrations, almost two weeks after many children left shredded wrapping paper piled around their Christmas trees. [continue]

From Scotland on Sunday, Which of these is Scotland's top treasure?

They were discovered by Victorian drain diggers, measure less than 30cms and don’t have a gem or scrap of precious metal between them.

But the cache of Neolithic stone axes has been named Scotland's greatest archaeological treasure.

Last week, archaeologists revealed the top 10 treasures held at the British Museum in London. Only one - the Lewis Chessmen - was discovered in Scotland.

But two TV archaeologists have now compiled Scotland's very own ancient top 10 and have put the axes - found at Smerrick, Banffshire, in 1881 - at the head of the list.

Other leading contenders were the oldest bow ever found in Britain, a Viking boat discovered in an Orkney sand dune, a carved stone Roman lioness which emerged from the muddy banks of a river after 1,700 years, an Iron Age wind instrument cast into a bog and a hoard of silver Roman coins. [continue]

From the Pluscarden Abbey website:

One of Northern Scotland's most unusual attractions and one which is unique in Britain, is Pluscarden Abbey, near Elgin. It is the only medieval monastery in Britain still inhabited by monks and being used for its original purpose. Founded in 1230 by Alexander II, its site in a sheltered, south-facing glen against a background of forested hillside, adds to its beauty.

The road to Pluscarden winds south-west across the wooded countryside around Elgin, Scotland. Six miles are all that separate the busy High Street of the county town from this peaceful valley, but those six miles take us back over six centuries of time. The atmosphere of quiet reflection and of work dedicated to the glory of God is the same today as it was in the thirteenth century when an organised community of monks first came to this part of Morayshire. Under the skilful hands of the present-day brethren, Pluscarden Abbey is a living entity that is returning again to something approaching its former splendour after so long a period of pillage and decay. If you are privileged to visit the Abbey today, you will enjoy not only the beauty of its architecture and its setting, but also something of the restful atmosphere of devotion that has so deeply permeated this little corner of Scotland.

The abbey's website includes a history page and information about Benedictine monasticism.

The Guardian's travel page suggests a few options for retreat holidays. They write about a spa, then this:

It's not yet light but I'm sitting in a chilly chapel for one hour 45 minutes of Gregorian Chant and prayer. Over the course of a day not designed for sufferers of chronic lumbago, I'll attend six more services, spending more than four hours on a hard pew listening to Latin worship.

It's not an endurance test. It's one of the most restful breaks of my life. The monks' mesmerising chant, washing over me like a tranquilliser, is as noisy as it gets at Pluscarden Abbey near Elgin in north-east Scotland. I'm on a four-day silent retreat that Father Giles, the Prior, refers to as 'solitude, soliloquy and straightening of the soul'.

Here's the rest of the article, although you'll have to scroll down a bit to get to the part about Pluscarden Abbey.

From the Halifax Daily News, an article about the first settlement in Nova Scotia.

The snow is undisturbed on a frozen clearing in Debert, Colchester Co. It’s not marked on maps and there are no signs drawing cars off the main road. It’s a little known site. But historically, it has massive significance.

About 12,600 years ago this was a village, the first known settlement in Nova Scotia. And starting next spring, the Confederacy of Mainland Mi’kmaq will be encouraging people to see one of the oldest archaeological sites in North America. [continue]

An interesting historical tidbit appears in The Sentinal (Staffordshire, England) today: Plaque commemorates ancient plague stone. [Update: article no longer available.]

A plaque is to be erected to commemorate an ancient plague stone which saved families from the Black Death.

The listed stone at Birchall, on the outskirts of Leek, marks the spot where provisions were left for the residents of the town during the 14th Century plague, which killed more than 50 million people.

This got me wondering about other plague stones. Were they common? I'm guessing they were; I found quite a few mentions of them on the web. A page from Cotgrave.com gives the story of Cotgrave's plague stone:

The Plague came to Cotgrave in 1637. This was not the notorious "Black Death" outbreak but it devastated Cotgrave; 93 people died, 46 of them children - an unimaginable tragedy in a community then of less than 500. During the outbreak, two men exiled themselves from their families, locked themselves into the church and used the building as the village food store. Food was placed on the church wall for people to collect, placing their money in a hollow Plague Stone filled with vinegar as disinfectant. The Plague Stone remains in the church today and still fulfils a useful purpose as a holy-water stoup.

Related Links:
definition of plague stone from EnglishHeritage.org.uk
Headless Cross Plague Stone
Vinegar kills bacteria, mold, and germs

Although it has been gone for almost 2,000 years, the temple at Jerusalem still stands at the center of Jewish belief and imagination.

Much of the Bible and accompanying oral tradition allude to it. The tabernacle, a portable sanctuary in the wilderness, was its prototype. The priestly garb, the sacrificial system and the purity laws all grew out of temple worship.

Yet the ancient temple remains only as a collective memory and intellectual tradition rather than a tangible, visible reality.

First built by King Solomon, then rebuilt by Herod only to be destroyed by the Romans, the temple took on an idealized form whose rites and services are largely unfamiliar to most Jews, says Catriel Sugarman, a professional craftsman in Israel who has spent more than 20 years studying the texts about the ancient structure.

With his research, Sugarman hopes to fill in the visual gaps.

He has built a maple wood model, about 6 feet by 5 feet, which he believes to be the most accurate reconstruction in existence. It was funded by an anonymous philanthropist and is kept in a private residence in Israel.

That's from Craftsman to Show Detailed Model of Ancient Jewish Temple of Jerusalem in the Salt Lake Tribune.

There are several photos of the model at the home page for Catriel's Model of the Beit HaMikdash. (It's hosted on Geocities, so access may be slow.)

Midkash in Miniature: Catriel's Models

In the mountains of Peru, entire cities have been lost since they were abandoned by the last Incas five centuries ago. Hugh Thomson - young, British, and with no idea what he wanted to do with his life - found the idea of discovering one irresistible.

Thomson takes us with him on his "Exploration of the Inca Heartland," where he succeeds in putting several lost sites in their rightful places on the map. But the quest soon becomes far more ambitious than an effort to locate ruined cities by traversing roadless mountains in landslide country, or pushing through tropical forests so lush that a hiker can pass within a few feet of a large stone building without seeing it.

From A palace at the top of the world at csmonitor.com. It's a review of The White Rock.

The Guardian has an article about a South African plant that could "cure obesity and save an ancient way of life." It's also said to be an aphrodisiac.

Hunting with bows and poisoned arrows over the bleached sands of the Kalahari, it was sometimes days before the San bushmen had food or water. So precarious was survival that some believed their god was a "trickster" who played jokes with the land and their fate.

The San learned that in this arid wilderness of southern Africa they could trust one thing. Sprouting 6ft high amid the prehistoric vegetation, green, prickly and sour, it was a plant they called Xhoba.

Hunters would cut a slice, munch it, and within minutes hunger and thirst would evaporate, leaving a feeling of strength and alertness. They could travel for days eating nothing else.

The trickster god has played another joke, except this time it is to the benefit of the San. Xhoba, a member of the Asclepiadaceae family of plants, is known in English as hoodia, but is more likely to become better known as P57.

Dotting the Kalahari desert of South Africa, Botswana, Namibia and Angola, it is being hailed as a wonder plant whose qualities as an appetite-suppressant could revolutionise treatment of obesity for 100 million westerners.

So of course Pfizer's going to make a drug from the Xhoba plant, and then a good number of portly people will line up for prescriptions instead of bothering with excercise. (Am I too cynical?) The good part is that the San will get a good chunk of money and benefits.

Under the accord it is expected that San youths will be given scholarships to study abroad and those left at home will be employed tending plantations and teaching scientists what they know about hoodia. [continue]

Native healers want drug company cooperation
In Africa the Hoodia cactus keeps men alive. Now its secret is 'stolen' to make us thin.

Update:
Africa's Bushmen May Get Rich From Diet-Drug Secret - National Geographic, April 2003.

From the Herald newspaper in Glasgow: Lost castle found on the internet.

An archive of sixteenth-century maps published on the internet has led a historian to the forgotten site of a medieval castle on the Black Isle.

The marriage of modern technology with rudimentary mapmaking could help an army of amateur historians to fill in the gaps left by professional historians and archaeologists, according to David Alston, a museum curator, who made the discovery.

When the mapmakers of the Ordnance Survey surveyed the Black Isle in the early 1870s they recorded "Castledownie" as the name for vestiges of a fortification on the coastal cliffs, high above the spot where the Eathie Burn flows into the Moray Firth, opposite the site of the Ardersier fabrication yard.

However, the suggestion that it was the site of a medieval castle found little favour with archaeologists when they visited the site in the 19th century and again in the middle of the 20th. But within the last year, the late 16th-century maps of Timothy Pont have become available on the world-wide web through the National Library of Scotland. One of his maps shows a prominent tower house inside an enclosure at the Black Isle site. [continue]

Should you happen to be interested in fencing, take a look at the Double-edged history article at csmonitor.com. It's a review of Richard Cohen's book, By The Sword: A History of Gladiators, Musketeers, Samurai, Swashbucklers, and Olympic Champions.

My "to do" list for tomorrow now includes:
- See if the library has a copy of this book, and
- Phone fencing master to see about taking lessons again.

Today's amusement comes from Not incensed over new fragrance at totalcatholic.com. [Sorry, article no longer available.]

Messe de Minuit, or Midnight Mass, is a new aroma that the makers claim is ‘deeply reminiscent of the cool, calm interior of any house of prayer’ which will conjure images of ‘childhood, holidays and celebration’ for the wearer.

The exclusive fragrance is a combination of incense, honey, cinnamon and musk combined with fresher notes. At £52 per bottle, it is on sale at Harvey Nichols and Harrods.

But Catholic Times testers who kindly offered their sharp sense of smell after a Sunday Mass in North Wales did not connect it with too many images of celebration.

Mother-of-one Mrs Angela Edwards said: ‘It's a bit overpowering, I feel like I'm not going to be able to get rid of this smell for days, I wouldn't want to wear it.’

Karen Breen, 22, from Mold, North Wales, added: ‘It smells a bit like church incense, but more like when you walk into a house full of students and they are burning joss-sticks.’

Nicki Catherall, 30, also from Mold, said: ‘I would feel a bit hard done by if I had paid that much for it. The smell is quite accurate, as it does smell of incense but it's just not an aroma I'd want to have on my skin all day, every day.’

Mrs Mathilde Sciarrillo, 70, a Catholic grandmother, was not convinced that it was a nice smell to wear: ‘It does smell like the inside of church, which can be nice but sometimes even that smell can be too much if the priest overdoes it with the thurible.’

Phil Gyford, the guy who's turning Samuel Pepys' diary into a weblog, has an article about the project on the BBC website today. Here's an excerpt:

It all seemed too perfect: this could be a fascinating site and would be simple and cheap to create. I couldn't believe I was alone in thinking this, so I didn't tell even my closest friends about it.

After a few months thinking about how best to tackle it, I spent a few weekends and evenings creating the site, which was ready a week before Pepys' first entry on 1 January.

Although the diary text came with footnotes, these assume a level of knowledge about British history, geography and language that few have in the 21st Century.

This is where the ability to post comments on the site has proved crucial. Entries and footnotes are already being annotated by readers who provide explanations and additional information, creating a more communal experience than conventional publishing allows. So rather than simply publishing a dead - albeit fascinating - text, I now find myself in charge of a far more exciting living read. [continue]

Related Mirabilis.ca entry:
Samuel Pepys' blog

From the People's Daily, Ancient Tablet on Ecological Protection Discovered in Shaanxi.

A stone tablet inscribed with a decree on ecological protection issued by Emperor Jiajing in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) has been discovered near the imposing Great Wall in north China's Shaanxi province.

Found at the cross of Bachakou near Shuozhou city, the tablet, measuring 1.6 meters high and one meter wide, was erected in 1549 on a hillside several dozen kilometers from the Yanmen Pass on the ancient Great Wall, according to inscriptions on it.

The decree of about 700-character banned tree-felling and called for efforts to restore pastures or return farmland to woodlands. It also warned those in violation of the decree would be dealt with harshly and exiled to remote regions. [continue]

From a National Geographic article on a "Koala-Friendly" Subdivision.

On the north coast of New South Wales, Australia, koala researchers, a property developer, and local citizens have joined forces to create the first housing development planned around the needs of koalas.

Koalas and people thrive in the same places, along the fertile east coast of Australia. The native forests are rapidly being cleared and converted to urban landscapes. Because most koalas live on private land, their survival depends on community support.

The six-year-old housing development, known as Koala Beach Estate, is proving to be an example of how human development can be more friendly to resident wildlife. [continue]

Here. See if these polar bear photos don't make you want to be a bear for a day, or at least play in the snow like one. The same site, travelmaniac.com, has other bear photos, too.

What once was a temple is now a puzzle of ancient stones:

Forty years ago, a team of French archaeologists decided that the best way to save the Baphuon temple was to destroy it.

They began to take apart the fragile temple block by block, keeping meticulous records of their work, planning to put it back together again as a more stable structure.

Then came war. As the Communist Khmer Rouge approached, the restorers fled the Angkor temple complex in 1972. In the chaos that followed, all their written records were destroyed.

When they returned in 1995, all they found was 300,000 heavy stone blocks strewn among the trees -- the biggest jigsaw puzzle in the world.

It is a puzzle without a key, but it does have a solution. Block by block, layer by layer, the Baphuon temple is rising again as one of the towering monuments of Angkor.

This article is from the New York Times. Read the rest there, if you like, and see the photos as well, although you'll need to register first. The Seattle PI has reprinted the article, without photos. No registration nonsense if you go for that version.

BBC's Cambodia:Temples page has a bit of information about Baphuon Temple, and a photo.