From Scotsman.com: Nunnery site holds huge wealth of secrets.
Scotland's first Cistercian nunnery, founded in a war zone more than 850 years ago, must have been one of the wealthiest religious establishments in the country, its lands alone carrying a modern-day value of up to £1.5 million.
But for all its power and influence, nothing could stop the destruction of St Leonard’s nunnery, which somehow survived for 150 years as battles between the armies of English and Scottish kings raged around its impressive architecture.
An archaeological excavation at the site of the long-abandoned religious house on the outskirts of Berwick-on-Tweed has revealed the importance of St Leonard’s, and has suggested that an ancient community known as Bondington may have existed long before the town became the busiest and most important of all Scottish ports.
A varied collection of artefacts, including fragments of medieval pottery, writing styli, part of a pilgrim’s badge and oyster shells - an indication of the type of diet enjoyed by the St Leonard’s order - have been recovered from the soil where the nunnery once stood. [continue]
How to make a violin. Wow. If I had a workshop and the proper tools, I'd give this a try.
Spotted here at Metafilter.
Other than the Christmas carol, when do we ever hear of St Wenceslaus? Never, in my neck of the woods. He's important over here, though: St Wenceslaus is the patron saint of brewers, Bohemia, the Czech Republic, and Prague. September 28th is his feast day, and that's a national holiday in the Czech Republic.
Wenceslaus (or Wenceslas, if you prefer) was murdered in the year 929 by his brother. If you're curious about him, read more here, here, and here.
From the BBC: ‘Europe's biggest mushroom’ found.
Swiss scientists have found what they say may be Europe's biggest mushroom - covering an area about the size of 35 football pitches.
The fungus was discovered in a national park near the eastern town of Ofenpass, said the Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Countryside Research (WSL).
Spanning 35 hectares (86 acres), the mostly underground fungus is believed to be 1,000 years old, the WSL added.
The Honey Mushroom (Armillaria ostoyae) is edible, but it can kill trees.
"The majority of the fungus is an underground network that looks a bit like shoelaces," WSL's spokeswoman Muriel Bendel said.
"The surface mushrooms look like the normal type you would pick, and are brown to yellow," the spokeswoman added.
Although harmless to humans, certain species of the vast underground organism can colonise trees, gradually strangling them, scientists say. [continue]
I've always wondered how Saint Vitus came to be associated with St Vitus' dance, which is a nasty thing called rheumatic chorea. Well. This page tells the story of St Vitus, and explains it all.
You're wondering what brought this to mind? We've been to visit St Vitus' Cathedral here in Prague, which is quite splendid. Here are 20 photos we took of the cathedral.
(Note for PDA users: the first photo page consists of thumbnail images, which should display properly on your PDA. The pages to which the thumbnails link contain images that are 375 x 500 pixels, or 500 x 375 pixels.)
From The Australian: Ancient bronze head discovered.
Bulgarian archaeologists have unearthed a 2300-year old bronze head depicting an ancient Thracian ruler in a find they called unique for the era, a newspaper reported today.
"This massive bronze head dates back to the 4th century BC ... and is the first discovery of its kind, as no similar metal objects of Thracian art have been found," the project's lead archaeologist, Georgi Kitov, told the Bulgarian daily 24 Chasa.
Dr. Kitov, who is at the excavation site, could not be immediately reached for comment.
The head weighs 10kg and bears the image of a balding bearded man, most likely a Thracian ruler, Dr. Kitov was quoted as saying. [continue]
From icCoventry: Ancient Priory history revealed.
A long lost pillar from Coventry's Benedictine Priory Cathedral - demolished on the orders of King Henry Vlll - has been uncovered after 460 years.
The precise location of the Norman pillar, or pier, had been guessed at by archaeologists working on excavations ahead of the multi-million pound Phoenix Initiative.
But city conservation chief George Demidowicz was resigned to the fact there was no way of ever seeing more of the remains of the great support structures because they lay beneath the foundations of the eighteenth century buildings in Priory Row. [continue]
The Prague Astronomical Clock (Prague Orloj) is one of the things we saw this afternoon. Here's an article about it from Wikipedia:
The Prague Astronomical Clock or Prague Orloj (Czech: Pražský orloj) is a medieval astronomical clock located in Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic. The Orloj is mounted on the southern wall of Old Town City Hall in the Old Town Square and is a popular tourist attraction.
The Orloj is composed of three main components: the astronomical dial, representing the position of the Sun and Moon in the sky and displaying various astronomical details; "The Walk of the Apostles", a clockwork hourly show of figures of the Apostles and other moving sculptures; and a calendar dial with medallions representing the months. [continue]
From discovery.com: Mummy Hair Reveals Drinking Habits.
Mummy hair has revealed the first direct evidence of alcohol consumption in ancient populations, according to new forensic research.
The study, still in its preliminary stage, examined hair samples from spontaneously mummified remains discovered in one of the most arid regions of the world, the Atacama Desert of northern Chile and southern Peru.
The research was presented at the 5th World Congress on Mummy Studies in Turin, Italy, this month. [continue]
From the BBC: Dogs ‘sniff out’ bladder cancer.
Dogs can be trained to sniff out bladder cancer, the first controlled experiments published claim.
There have been anecdotal reports of dogs spotting cancer in their owners, but now researchers say they have proved this phenomenon scientifically.The scientists at Amersham Hospital, Buckinghamshire, ultimately hope to build a tool that is as good at discerning these smells as dogs' noses.
Their findings appear in the British Medical Journal. [continue]
Well, finally an Internet cafe! We're in Prague, which is full of amazing things. You'd like to see a bit of what it looks like here, wouldn't you? Here are some photos from TrekEarth.
It's time for a holiday, so we're off to Europe tonight. (Several different cities and lots of time to swim in the Mediterranean. Yes!) I expect I'll blog while away, but probably not as frequently as I do when at home.
Maybe I'll post about the archaeological sites I plan to visit. Or, hmmm, maybe I'll even put up some photos for you to peek at.
Anyway. If things are quiet here for a few days, it'll be because I can't find an English keyboard in a convenient Internet café, or because I'm off in the middle of nowhere. Or maybe just too lazy to leave the beach.
If you want to know when there's new content here without checking the site every day, subscribe to the Mirabilis.ca RSS feed.
Everything will return to normal around October 16th, which is when we get home.
From nature.com: Tibetans show ‘evolution in action’.
Tibetan mothers have provided anthropologists with a prime example of ongoing human evolution. Researchers have found that women who are able to store more oxygen in their blood have more offspring that live to maturity.
Cynthia Beall, a physical anthropologist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, and colleagues travelled to the Himalayas to see if they could catch the population there in the act of adapting to the low levels of oxygen found at 4,000 metres.
Beall and her team lived in a series of villages, interviewing thousands of inhabitants, creating detailed family trees and, for women between 20 and 60, recording pregnancy histories.
They also estimated the concentration of oxygen in the villagers' blood, by shining a light through their fingertips. Haemoglobin in the blood absorbs different amounts of the light, depending on how saturated it is with oxygen. [continue]
From csmonitor.com: A Frenchman who can see water beneath the Sahara.
IRIBA, CHAD — Out here in the sandy moonscape of eastern Chad, you don't expect to see a diminutive Frenchman with an Indiana Jones hat marching around, muttering, and staring at his global-positioning device.
But Alain Gachet has come here to outdo generations of witch doctors, water diviners, and PhDs. He aims to pinpoint, with scientific certainty, the right places to dig the costly wells that pull precious water from beneath the sand.
And this isn't some academic exercise. About 200,000 refugees have fled to Chad from Sudan's violent Darfur region. They each need four gallons of water a day, the United Nations says - or a total of about 25 swimming pools in a land that gets no rain for months on end. At a time when nearly 1 out of every 5 people in the world is without adequate drinking water, Mr. Gachet could help save countless lives.
Gachet says he's up to the task, due, oddly enough, to the space shuttle and the end of the cold war. Working in his 15th-century chateau in France, he fused together an unprecedented set of maps, including newly released topographic ones from the shuttle and previously unavailable radar ones that peer 20 yards underground. Now he's put the data into his GPS device. When he says, "Dig here!" aid workers listen. [continue]
From The Herald: Picts wrongly painted as a race of barbarians.
The Picts, who have been depicted as archetypal barbarians for centuries, were actually a highly sophisticated people with an intimate knowledge of the Bible and Roman classical literature, according to new research.
Since they were first described by the Romans, the ancient inhabitants of Scotland have been depicted as illiterate, uncivilised, scantily-clad, promiscuous heathens.
However, work by world-renowned art historians has revealed the mysterious people, who occupied north-eastern Scotland between the sixth and ninth centuries, were far more culturally developed than was previously thought and are highly likely to have developed the decorative manuscript art of the time.
George Henderson, emeritus professor of medieval art at Cambridge University, and his wife Isabel Henderson, one of the world's leading authorities on the Picts, have discovered the tattooed tribes were not bloodthirsty butchers, but instead members of a cultured society capable of sustaining large-scale art programmes. [continue]
From The Independent: Love, death and Christmas: the meaning behind Britain's birds.
Why do some birds mean so much more to us than just feathers and wings? Why does the raven symbolise death, and the robin, Christmas? Why do eagles mean power and doves mean peace? Why, for that matter, is the red kite now a cherished icon of wildness in Britain, when once it was associated with rubbish and filth?
Answers to most of these questions are intriguing: they are not one-liners and they would not fit into an ornithological version of Trivial Pursuit. When looked into closely, they often turn out to involve the most profound human fears and hopes, sometimes dating back to the Stone Age; they reach into cultural and social history as much as ornithology itself. But a forthcoming book is attempting to answer them all.
When Birds Britannica appears in 2005, it will be building on the most remarkable event in natural history publishing in recent years. Richard Mabey's Flora Britannica was a completely new type of wild flower guide: it went beyond standard descriptions of Britain's wild plants to record comprehensively the folklore surrounding them, their ancient names, their forgotten uses, their medicinal and even magical properties. [continue].
Random House has more on the Birds Britannica project.
From MaltaMedia.com: Study reveals a DNA link between Phoenicians and Maltese.
Y chromosome lineages seen today's Maltese population could have come in with the Phoenicians of 1200 B.C., according to National Geographic emerging explorer Spencer Wells and Pierre Zalloua of the American University of Beirut. "Perhaps the population on Malta wasn't as dense. Perhaps when the Phoenicians settled, they killed off the existing population, and their own descendants became today's Maltese. Maybe the islands never had that many people, and shiploads of Phoenicians literally moved in and swamped the local population," stated Wells.
"We don't know for sure, but the results are consistent with a settlement of people from the Levant within the past 2,000 years, and that points to the Phoenicians," he adds. The data comes through research Wells and Zalloua are conducting on the impact of ancient empires on the modern gene pool. [continue]
From National Geographic: Armenia's Lesson in Street Life.
A small experiment in Gyumri, Armenia has shown how easy it is to turn an urban dead zone into an appealing, living place.
Gyumri boasts two Soviet-era monumental, lifeless city squares. You know the type: asphalt deserts walled by concrete office facades, beloved by urban planners and hated by travelers on foot. In a remote corner of one square, a Gyumri company recently installed just three things: a park bench, a street lamp, and a seesaw.
According to the New York-based Project for Public Spaces, magic resulted. Kids flocked to the seesaw, parents in tow. Parents began to chat with each other. Soon street vendors set up stands next to the bench, drawing more people. Three tiny seeds had bloomed into a garden of street life. Any visitor entering that square would automatically gravitate toward the lively corner. [continue]
From This Is Bath: How Romans' famous road cut through Bath.
Bath's position as a flourishing town in Roman times has been reinforced, thanks to discoveries made during an ambitious excavation project. A two-year dig near the Royal Crescent has unearthed Roman burial sites and buildings, and allowed archaeologists to piece together how the most important road in early Roman Britain cut through the city.
The excavation by the Bath Archaeological Trust also revealed the Georgian and Victorian history behind three former coach houses in Crescent Lane. From This Is Bath: [continue].
From the BBC: Truffles batch ‘a huge discovery’.
A crop of truffles harvested by a farming couple could be one of the most significant finds in the UK for 60 years, according to an expert.
About 10kg of the fungi, prized for their flavour in cooking, were found growing underground, near Little Bedwyn village on the Wilts/Berkshire border.
A sample sent off to Kew Gardens for analysis has revealed the spores match the English black summer truffle.
It is thought the truffles could be worth up to £3,000 on the open market.
And yum, wouldn't truffles be a fun thing to discover on one's property? Live in England and you might uncover truffles or treasures left behind by Romans. Either way, it's all good.
Live in Canada and . . . well, we did find bear poop in our yard a while ago. If that bear comes back, we could have an interesting day indeed.
I'd rather have truffles.
Related:
Hunting the white truffle - Mirabilis.ca
Puppy truffle find stuns chef - BBC
Here's Kathy Evans' article from the Guardian, Me and My Girl. A must-read, if you ask me.
In everyone's life there is a defining event that steers them off the path they were steadily treading. For me it was my daughter Caoimhe's birth. It was not just her diagnosis that knocked me, but the sheer unexpectedness of it. I had limped through a difficult childhood but in my 20s jobs, boyfriends, opportunities had rattled into place like pieces in a child's shape-sorter. While I put it all down to good fortune, a quiet voice inside me believed you made your own luck. If I ate the right food, worked hard, was a nice person, then I would reap the rewards. Then came Caoimhe, a child with a disability, and the tenets of my existence shattered like glass. [continue]
From csmonitor.com: Now you know.
Did your waitress draw a smiley face on your last restaurant check? It may have been simple cheerfulness on her part, but it's also a proven way to get a bigger tip. Michael Lynn, an associate professor of consumer behavior and marketing at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., has done scientific studies on tipping and offers these strategies to servers: [continue].
From National Geographic: Pre-Inca Ruins Emerging From Peru's Cloud Forests.
On the eastern slope of the Andes mountains in northern Peru, forests cloak the ruins of a pre-Inca civilization, the size and scope of which explorers and archaeologists are only now beginning to understand.
Known as the Chachapoya, the civilization covered an estimated 25,000 square miles (65,000 square kilometers). The Chachapoya, distinguished by fair skin and great height, lived primarily on ridges and mountaintops in circular stone houses. [continue]
From the BBC: ‘Extinct’ horses back in the wild.
Three rare horses classified as extinct in the wild have been set free to help protect an Iron Age settlement.
The Przewalski horses will roam around a 12-acre paddock in Clocaenog Forest near Ruthin in Denbighshire.
The horses once roamed Britain 4,000 years ago and visitors to the forest will now be able to see them in the 21st Century.
The animals were introduced by the Forestry Commission after they were bred at Colwyn Bay Mountain Zoo.
"Although they are known as the Mongolian wild horse, the Przewalski's horse roamed Britain 3,000 to 4,000 years ago, so this truly is a scene from the past," said the Forestry Commission's conservation manager Iolo Lloyd.
"Przewalski's horses appear on cave paintings, and now we've brought them back to the forest after all this time as part of a modern approach to the challenge of managing this significant site." [continue]
From The Telegraph: Deaf children invent a new sign language.
Scientists have witnessed the birth of a new language, one invented by deaf children.
A study published today shows that a sign language that emerged over two decades ago now counts as a true language.
It began in a school for the deaf in Managua, Nicaragua, founded in 1977. With instruction only in lip-reading and speaking Spanish, neither very successful, and no exposure to adult signing, the children were left to their own devices.
Their first pantomime-like gestures evolved into a grammar of increasing complexity as new children learned the signs and elaborated. Now it has a formal name: Nicaraguan Sign Language, (NSL), and is so distinct that it would not be understood by American and British signers. [continue]
From the CBC: Nose-controlled device may replace computer mouse.
A Canadian inventor has designed a computer mouse steered by movements of the nose and eyelids.
The invention, dubbed a "Nouse," is meant to help people with a disability use a computer.
Users would move a cursor around a computer screen by moving their nose and blinking instead of clicking a conventional mouse. [continue].
From payvand.com: Jiroft a Key Business Hub 5,000 Years Ago.
New archeological and art studies on insignias unearthed in the Iranian ancient site of Jiroft clearly shows that the southern area used to be the most important business nucleus of Persia and its residents had bustling trade ties with people living in other parts of the country.
"During two excavation seasons, archeologists have found around 25 insignias and seals, dating back from the 3rd millennium BC to 2,300 years BC," announced team leader Dr. Yusef Majidzadeh, an Iranian born archeologist now living in France.
The insignias have had trademarks of ancient northern, southern, eastern and western parts of Persia, indicating Jiroft had been a trade hub for the whole nation, he added. [continue]
From the BBC: Wi-fi device aims to free web radio.
A device which allows people to listen to internet radio without a PC has been developed by a UK company.
The radio, currently a working prototype, makes online radio easier to use, and could change listening habits.
When a wireless network is available, the radio connects to the internet, making thousands of stations available at the touch of a button. [continue]
From The Guardian: Maths holy grail could bring disaster for internet.
Mathematicians could be on the verge of solving two separate million dollar problems. If they are right - still a big if - and somebody really has cracked the so-called Riemann hypothesis, financial disaster might follow. Suddenly all cryptic codes could be breakable. No internet transaction would be safe.
On the other hand, if somebody has already sorted out the so-called Poincaré conjecture, then scientists will understand something profound about the nature of spacetime, experts told the British Association science festival in Exeter yesterday.
Both problems have stood for a century or more. Each is almost dizzyingly arcane: the problems themselves are beyond simple explanation, and the candidate answers published on the internet are so intractable that they could baffle the biggest brains in the business for many months. [continue]
From The Courier: Archaeologists find earlier evidence of life in glen.
Archaeologists have uncovered evidence "potentially of national significance" in a remote Perthshire glen, showing people living there 1200 years ago.
Carbon dating of material from Bunrannoch, in the shadow of Perthshire mountain Schiehallion, has revealed activity there during the Dark Ages in structures previously thought to be medieval.
The breakthrough is the latest stage of a project run by GUARD—Glasgow University Archaeological Research Division—who spent summers from 1999 to 2001 digging a few miles from Kinloch Rannoch.
Their work concentrated on a field containing evidence of several phases of settlement.
They excavated two "criel" houses, a type of long houses, and what appeared to be a larger homestead.
Before their work, the area was thought to have been inhabited from medieval times, and—based on local stories—to have been abandoned in the mid-18th century following a reprisal burning after the Jacobite rebellion. [continue]
From discovery.com: Ramesses II Suffered From Arthritis.
One of ancient Egypt's most illustrious pharaohs, the warrior king Ramesses II the Great, was afflicted by a form of degenerative arthritis, according to a team of Canadian and French radiologists.
The study, to be published next month in the Canadian Association of Radiologists Journal, reaches a diagnoses of diffuse skeletal idiopathic hyperostosis (DISH).
Thought to be the second most common form of arthritis after osteoarthritis, the disease is mainly characterized by excessive bone growth along the sides of the spine's vertebrae. [continue]
From Reuters: Wall-Eye May Have Helped Rembrandt's Vision.
Rembrandt, the 17th-century Dutch master known for his skill in using light to carry perspective, may have been wall-eyed, a U.S. researcher proposed on Wednesday.
An analysis of 36 self-portraits of the great painter suggest he had a strabismus — a misalignment of one eye that caused it to point slightly outward.
This condition, popularly known as wall-eye, may have given Rembrandt van Rijn an advantage in translating three-dimensional scenes into two-dimensional paintings, said Margaret Livingstone, a Harvard Medical School neurobiologist. [continue]
From nature.com: Creature comforts for mummified pets.
When it came to mummification, Ancient Egyptians treated animals every bit as well as humans. A recent chemical analysis of preserved beasts confirms their privileged status in ancient society.
The Ancient Egyptians mummified millions of mammals, birds and reptiles. The sheer number led many to believe that they were prepared with little care compared with human mummies. It was assumed that they were simply wrapped in coarse linen bandages and/or dipped in resin.
But chemical analysis now shows that animal mummies were prepared using embalming agents every bit as complex as those used on humans. Richard Evershed and his colleagues from the University of Bristol analysed samples from four mummies: one cat, two hawks and an ibis that were preserved between 818 and 343 BC. [continue]
From the CBC: Bad dog! Bad driving!.
WHITEHORSE - A pedestrian in a Whitehorse suburb was taken aback Tuesday night when a black dog drove by in a red pickup truck.
Police said a resident was out for a walk when a truck with a Labrador retriever at the wheel passed by.
When RCMP arrived, the truck was in the middle of Thompson Road in Granger, blocking traffic. The dog was still behind the wheel. [continue]
My joy is complete. Found at Slashdot: Beer Found to be as Healthy as Wine.
Matt Clare writes "Researchers at the University of Western Ontario (Canada) recently found that beer has the same positive qualities that wine has previously been found to have. The media release quotes professor John Trevithick, ‘We were very surprised one drink of beer or stout contributed an equal amount of antioxidant benefit as wine, especially since red wine contains about 20 times the amount of polyphenols as beer.’ For more info on how beer helps police harmful free radicals in blood, The London Free Press also has an article."
This and the coffee thing, all in one week!
On Monday I'm going to Europe, and you can bet I'll be drinking a number of salubrious liquids over there.
Related articles:
Beer has same benefits as red wine, study suggests - Toronto Star
Beer Has Same Benefits As Red Wine: Study - HealthTalk.ca
Beer to fight cancer, heart disease and diabetes: a new study shows - NewsFromRussia.com
Weboggle is an addictive little "find the word" game. One game will take only a few minutes, but can you stop there?
(Thanks to Marcus for writing to tell me about this.)
Do you have worms in your kitchen? On purpose? A National Geographic article mentions a worm composting program that we've had in Vancouver for the last decade or so.
For environmentally minded urbanites, no kitchen is complete without an accessory that treats hundreds of wriggling, red guests to dinner — a worm bin. Inside the units, worms munch kitchen scraps into rich, soil-like humus and help reduce the amount of waste reaching landfills.
Worm composting has become so popular in Vancouver, Canada, that the city has established a telephone hot line.
So is your kitchen complete without one? [continue]
Related links:
Composting with red wiggler worms - City Farmer, Vancouver
City Farmer - Vancouver, Canada
Tips to reduce your garbage - City of Vancouver
Worm Composting (Vermiculture) - MasterComposter.com
Worm Composting - Region of Peel, Ontario
Related book:
Worms Eat My Garbage by Mary Appelhof - Amazon.ca
Mary Appelhof's website (She's the author of Worms Eat My Garbage.)
From abc.net.au: Incan capital looked to heavenly puma.
The Incan capital at Cusco was built to look like a dark puma-shaped constellation, according to an Italian scientist.
The research by Professor Giulio Magli from the maths department at Milan's technical university was published recently on the physics website arXiv, which is owned and operated by the Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
The Incan capital of Cusco was founded around the 12th century in what is now Peru and is about 110 kilometres south of the fortress city at Machu Picchu.
Like other ancient cities Cusco was built based on the alignment of buildings with astronomical events such as the winter and summer solstice.
According to tradition the city was conceived as a puma incorporating a nearby hill as its head and the main temple of the capital as its genitals. The tail of the puma is formed where the Tullumayo and Huatanay rivers join.
Magli said Cusco's layout was meant to replicate a puma constellation, which the Inca said was formed not of stars but the dark spaces between the stars. [continue]
You could always build a virtual window, which is what Ryan Hoagland did with a bunch of 15 inch LED panels. His step-by-step photos are fascinating, if you like this kind of thing.
Hey, there's a new pre-release version of the Firefox web browser available today. It's free, 100 gazillion times better than Internet Explorer, and full of good features like popup blocking, tabbed browsing, and more.
You might like the feature called live bookmarks, which is a handy way to read RSS feeds. Here are more of the new Firefox features.
Related:
Urgent: Dump Internet Explorer
Browse Happy
From The Beeb: Flower power turns up the volume.
Green-fingered gardeners have long espoused the positive benefits of talking to plants.
Now a gadget developed in Japan is allowing flowers to answer back — with music.
Called Ka-on, which means "flower sound" in Japanese, the gadget consists of a doughnut-shaped magnet and coil at the base of a vase.
It hooks up to a CD player, TV or stereo and relays sounds up through a plant's stem and out via the petals.
[continue]
Related:
"Canon" Turns Plants, Flowers Into Speakers - Gizmodo.com
The flowers....are speakers? - TechJapan.com
From abc.net.au: Speak to my right ear, sing to my left.
Our left and right ears process sound differently, according to new research.
When scientists studied babies' hearing they found the left ear was more attuned to music and the right better at picking up speech-like sounds.
Lead researcher Dr Yvonne Sininger of the University of California at Los Angeles and team published their study in the latest issue of the journal Science.
It has long been known that the right and left halves of the brain process sound differently, but those differences were thought to stem from cellular properties unique to each brain hemisphere.
The new research suggested the differences start at the ear. [continue]
Oh! Oh! Remember the thing about capsule hotels? Well, somebody is finally setting some up in England. From the Guardian: Britain's first taste of the Japanese short-stay capsule hotel will pack a lot of luxury into a little space.
It's not exactly a room with a view, but one of the UK's leading entrepreneurs believes Britain is ready for the capsule hotel - a stack of cramped, windowless pods which can be booked for the night, or for a matter of hours.
Simon Woodroffe, the man responsible for the Yo! Sushi chain of restaurants, has brought the concept from Japan and is planning to build the "Yotels" throughout Britain.
A full-scale model of a Yotel room will be shown at a design fair at Earls Court later this month, and sites are currently being looked at.
For £10 an hour, or £75 a night, guests will be able to sleep in rooms measuring 10 square metres and without any proper windows. [continue]
Just the thing for a nap between flights, yes? Please, Simon, put a capsule hotel in Heathrow airport.
The end of the Guardian article is worth a read, too, for those interested in novelty hotels. Tidbits like this are hard to resist:
In Matmata, in the Tunisian Sahara, Berbers have lived as troglodytes since the 4th century. Many of the 50 underground houses of the village are still in use today and have been converted into hotels. The village was used as a location for Luke Skywalker's house in Star Wars. [continue]
Related:
Tycoon to Launch ‘Capsule’ Hotels - Scotsman.com
Simon Woodroffe - Guardian
Capsule hotel - Wikipedia
From The Herald: Sunken forest found after 6500 years.
It has all the ingredients of an Indiana Jones adventure: an academic, an old map, and a search for hidden treasure older than the pyramids of Egypt.
This treasure, however, is a forest in Orkney, which was buried beneath rising sea levels 6500 years ago. Alistair Rennie discovered it while doing a PhD looking at the effect of rising sea levels in the area, which he hopes will inform methods of dealing with climate change. His studies, funded jointly by Scottish Natural Heritage and Glasgow University's geography department, took Mr Rennie and his colleagues to Sanday, Orkney, which he described as a "sinking island".
The 27-year-old said: "We looked at a series of beaches there and we came across poems and letters and legends suggesting there was this submerged forest on the other side of the island at Otterswick Bay. [continue]
From BBC Scotland: Ancient graves uncovered at pit.
Quarry workers have unearthed a 1,500 year-old Christian burial ground.
The 20 stone-lined graves were found in a sand and gravel pit at Auchterforfar, near Forfar in Angus.
Archaeologists working for Historic Scotland excavated the scene and have now removed a number of bone remains for examination.
A total of 17 skeletal remains, including two children, were taken from the site. The graves were "cists", which are small, coffin-like boxes.
Experts are analysing the discovery in an effort to find out more about the dawn of Christianity in Scotland and its impact on the native Picts. [continue]
From Ananova: Priests demand compensation.
Catholic priests in Croatia want more than half a million pounds a year in compensation after a new zero tolerance law for drink driving was introduced in the country.
The new law means they can no longer drive between churches after drinking wine during holy Mass.
The priests used to drive between churches after each service, but after the legal alcohol limit was reduced to zero, they have been forced to find chauffeurs. [continue]
There's more at the BBC.
Oh, this is splendid! It probably won't last long, but still.
You can get at the Oxford English Dictionary for free. Yay. Unfortunately you have to use this backdoor thing. Don't tell anyone.
Ssssh!
Found here at Metafilter.
Related Mirabilis.ca content:
From OED to poetry
Matrimony cake
New OED Edition
Elsewhere:
Oxford English Dictionary - oed.com
From The Guardian: Short, tough, well fed: Cromwell's seaman.
He was short, like his life. He was enormously muscular in the chest and arms, but his legs were bowed with rickets. He dined well on fresh fish, Scottish beef and lamb and then he went down with his ship, the Swan, in September 1653, off the Isle of Mull.
Nobody knows the real name of Seaman Swan. His remains were found in the hull of the ship, a three-masted pinnace in the service of Oliver Cromwell, part of a task force from England during the Commonwealth to suppress Scottish royalists.
Forensic researchers, divers and archaeologists have been reconstructing the life and times of Seaman Swan and his ship, Colin Martin of the University of St Andrews told the British Association science festival. [continue]
The BBC has more, including a few photos.
Related news articles:
It Was A Superman's Life in Cromwell's Navy - Scotsman.com
Seaman Swan, killed in a storm, tells story of life in Cromwell's navy - The Independent
Cromwell's sailor had torso of Superman but bow legs - The Telegraph
Old bones reveal Cromwell sailor clues - Reuters
(If any of these sites ask for a password, try BugMeNot.)
Background:
Oliver Cromwell - Wikipedia
OliverCromwell.org
Cromwell's ship - BBC History
From the BBC: In the time of cholera.
Exactly 150 years ago London was in the grip of a cholera epidemic but within the space of a week in early September a doctor changed medical thinking forever.
Today cholera is indelibly linked with water. However, 150 years ago it was much different.
At the end of August 1854 London's third big cholera outbreak was beginning.
The accepted thinking was that it was an airborne disease.
Within a week London physician John Snow had changed the perceived wisdom - but only after hundreds of people had died. [continue]
Take 100 photos of 100 faces in a metropolitan area, morph them together to create a composite male and female face, and you can see the face of tomorrow.
From this posting at Metafilter.
Yesterday's Vancouver Sun featured an article about coffee, in which the author suggests that it's not bad for us after all. I love my espresso, and I love this kind of news. Here's the start of the coffee article:
When coffee first came to Europe from Constantinople in 1615, Viennese priests warned it was "the drink of infidels." The warnings in recent times have come from scientists, pseudo-scientists, and governments.
For most of the last half century, coffee was a health pariah, suspected of causing everything from breast, colon and pancreatic cancer to heart disease, infertility and birth defects. To get to the bottom of often wild speculation based on the flimsiest of evidence, the medical world swung into action in the 1980s and 1990s, with many of the world's leading scientists and research bodies investigating coffee's effects on health.
Today, some 19,000 studies later, it is clear that most past concerns didn't amount to a hill of beans. The great preponderance of evidence has lain to rest virtually all coffee-related health concerns.
Want to read the rest? Here is a copy of the article.
The Vancouver Sun didn't put the article on its website, and the National Post (who published it last week) only allows paying subscribers see this kind of thing. Isn't that absurd? These days everything seems to be reprinted somewhere or other.
Related Mirabilis.ca content:
Coffee can make you forgetful
Elsewhere on the web:
Coffee and your health - GreenBeanery.ca
CoffeeGeek.com
From the Berkeley College of Engineering Lab Notes: Wireless Ways to Go Green.
Sitting down on a Sunday morning with a hot cup of coffee and the New York Times may save a tremendous amount of wear-and-tear on the environment — as long as you're reading all the news that's fit to print on your personal digital assistant. In a new study, UC Berkeley researchers report that receiving your news wirelessly on a PDA instead of delivered to your door requires up to 140 times less carbon dioxide, several orders of magnitude less greenhouse gases, and the consumption of 26 to 67 times less water. [continue].
Well, there's some happy news! I read a bunch of newspapers and websites on my Palm Pilot every day.
If you're a PDA user you can read Mirabilis.ca on your handheld computer. The methods I've outlined for doing that will work with any other handheld-friendly website, too. (Should I give you a list of PDA-friendly websites?)
(Link to the article above found at Taint.org.)
Here's a fascinating article from the New York Times: The Beating Heart of Medieval Cairo.
Scores of human teeth are jumbled together in a small glass box that is on display within the imposing, honey-colored limestone towers of Zuweila Gate, one of four spectacular portals remaining from Cairo's medieval walls. A few hundred years ago, supplicants seeking relief from sickness or other evils slipped a (usually rotten) tooth behind the metal cladding of the hulking wooden doors as offerings to a local faith healer believed to haunt the place. The doors revealed their interior secrets during renovations completed last year. I, too, often seek a certain relief by trekking to Zuweila Gate -- or Bab Zuweila, as it is known in Arabic. I do not petition the ghost; I find the more tangible spirit of the place captivating, an antidote to the endless tensions of the region.
The gate marks the southern entrance to what was the most renowned thoroughfare in medieval Cairo, now called al-Mu'izz li-Din Allah Street. It constituted the very spine of the city for the hundreds of years that Cairo served as Islam's imperial capital, unmatched in wealth, power and glamour. The street now bears the name of the commander who captured Egypt in 969 and immediately set about building the city called al-Qahira, or Cairo, although it had existed in several previous incarnations. An enchanting string of mosques, tombs, schools, mansions, warehouses and fountains line Mu'izz Street as it twists for roughly a mile from Bab Zuweila to Bab al-Futuh, or Gate of Conquests, in the northern wall. [continue]
You'll need a password if you want to read the rest of the article.
From news.com: Much ado about Bard's texts online.
William Shakespeare, the Warwickshire wordsmith, was paid a posthumous compliment this week, when the British Library made available 21 of his works on the Internet.
High-resolution images of 21 original texts, in 93 different versions, are available on the British Library Web site.
Leafing through virtual page after virtual page, people will be able to read the plays in the same format that Shakespeare himself and the actors who performed his plays for the Globe audiences did. [continue]
From Scotsman.com: Ancient Gold Penny ‘Could Sell for £150,000’.
A pure gold English penny, hailed as the most important find of its type for a century, could fetch up to £150,000 at auction, it emerged today.
The coin, which dates back around 1,200 years, was stumbled upon by a man walking along the banks of the River Ivel in Bedfordshire.
It was struck in London and bears the image of King Coenwulf, who ruled ancient 7th century kingdom Mercia, in central England. [continue]
Related:
Coenwulf of Mercia - Wikipedia
From the Saffron Walden Reporter: White horse crops up in aerial photo.
An archaeological riddle is unfolding in the undulating landscape of Whittlesford.
Is the white horse that is apparent from the air a genuine historic figure or not?
Answers could be some time away, for the "white horse" is in a sugar beet crop which is not expected to be harvested for some months.
The discovery has ignited a lively debate. Many villagers who have seen the aerial photographs are convinced it is an historic monument, but expert opinion is more guarded.
"We simply don't know what it is," said Ashley Arbon, manager of the Whittlesford Society Archive Project, who "discovered" the horse's outline when he was taking aerial photographs on Wednesday last week. It is not obvious at ground level.
"There were one or two sites in the village that I wanted to photograph. I was trying to see if there were any crop marks where the old brick factory, as mentioned in the book Anatomy of a Victorian Village, used to be.
"I downloaded the images and took them to show a friend who asked 'what's that pale patch in that field'. She said ‘my god that looks like...‘ and we both said ‘white chalk horse’ together." [continue]
Related:
Wiltshire White Horses: The Uffington White Horse
The Wiltshire Web: The White Horses
From Scotsman.com: DNA shows Scots and Irish should look to Spain for their ancestry.
The Irish and Scots may be as closely related to the people of Spain and Portugal as the Celts of central Europe.
Historians have long believed the British Isles were invaded by Iron Age Celts from central Europe in about 500 BC. But geneticists at Dublin’s Trinity College now claim the Scots and Irish have as much, if not more, in common with the people of north-western Spain.
Dr Daniel Bradley, genetics lecturer at Trinity College Dublin, said a study published in the American Journal of Human Genetics into Celtic origins revealed close affinities with the people of Galicia. [continue]
From Ananova: Nurses get lessons in Geordie.
Nurses from overseas who work in Newcastle are going back to college to learn Geordie.
The nurses — from Singapore, the Philippines and India — passed English language tests before being recruited.
But The Sun says they can barely understand the North East accent.
One nurse had to check with local staff when a patient asked for the "netty" — meaning they needed the toilet.
And phrases such as "howay man" and "that's canny" left them so puzzled that NHS bosses decided to launch ten-week courses at Newcastle College to help them understand. [continue]
Related:
Newcastle English ("Geordie")
Geordie - English dictionary
English to Geordie Tranaslator
From newscientist.com: Dinosaurs may have been doting parents.
A fossil of one adult Psittacosaurus dinosaur surrounded by 34 juveniles has provided the most compelling evidence to date that dinosaurs raised their young after hatching.
Previously discovered fossils of teeth found at the same site in China from Allosaurus dinosaurs of differing ages, and fossils of groups of young Maiasaura have hinted that dinosaurs may have indulged in parental care.
But what makes this 125-million-year old fossil find from Liaoning province more convincing is that the skeletons are complete, and crowded together in life-like positions with their legs tucked under and heads raised, indicating that they were buried alive rather than swept together after death.
Psittacosaurus are herbivorous dinosaurs, about one metre long, with parrot-like beaks and cheek horns. The newly unearthed juveniles are about a quarter of the length of the adult, and far bigger than hatchlings. This suggests that the adult had tended them for some time, says David Varricchio of Montana State University in Bozeman, US, who examined the ancient remains with Jinyuan Liu of the Dalian Natural History Museum, China, and colleagues. [continue]
From the BBC: Architects urged to copy India.
Renowned Indian architect Charles Correa has said housing designs from his home country offer the key to eco-friendly buildings of the future.
Correa, who is famed for design principles based on low-density, low cost architecture at a reduced environmental cost, wants architects to examine low-rise, high-density urban areas such as Rajasthan as a way of best using natural and local resources.
"The basic principle of housing in a country like India is that you have very limited resources," Correa told BBC World Service's Masterpiece programme.
"Therefore you have to use great ingenuity. That's when you really learn to respect what traditionally is done.
"If you look at a village in Kerala, everything is re-used and recycled. Leaves which fall from palm trees are used again for the roofs.
"There's nothing like poverty to be the mother of invention. As an architect, looking at those solutions, I was absolutely stunned by it." [continue]
From The Guardian: In a secret Paris cavern, the real underground cinema.
Police in Paris have discovered a fully equipped cinema-cum-restaurant in a large and previously uncharted cavern underneath the capital's chic 16th arrondissement.
Officers admit they are at a loss to know who built or used one of Paris's most intriguing recent discoveries.
"We have no idea whatsoever," a police spokesman said.
"There were two swastikas painted on the ceiling, but also celtic crosses and several stars of David, so we don't think it's extremists. Some sect or secret society, maybe. There are any number of possibilities."
Members of the force's sports squad, responsible - among other tasks - for policing the 170 miles of tunnels, caves, galleries and catacombs that underlie large parts of Paris, stumbled on the complex while on a training exercise beneath the Palais de Chaillot, across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower.
After entering the network through a drain next to the Trocadero, the officers came across a tarpaulin marked: Building site, No access. [continue]
From newscientist.com: Babies prefer to gaze upon beautiful faces.
Newborn babies prefer to look at attractive faces, says a UK researcher, suggesting that face recognition is hardwired at birth, rather than learned.
Alan Slater and his colleagues at the University of Exeter showed paired images of faces to babies as young a one day old and found that they spent more time fixated on the more attractive face.
"Attractiveness is not in the eye of the beholder, it’s innate to a newborn infant," says Slater.
Developmental psychologists have known for years that babies have preferences for certain objects, such as high contrast images, and curvy, biological shapes. But where these preferences come from remained unknown.
Slater’s research, using extraordinarily young infants, supports the idea that babies are not mere blank slates, but instead come into the world with a fairly well developed perception system. [continue]
From discovery.com: Italian Mummy Source of ‘The Scream’?.
An Inca mummy kept in a Florentine museum might have been a source of inspiration for Edvard Munch's painting "The Scream," an Italian anthropologist claims.
Bearing a striking resemblance to Munch's now stolen painting, the mummy was rediscovered as Florence's Museum of Natural History began to carry out scientific investigations such as CT scans on its collection of Peruvian mummies.
"It"s the strong resemblance that struck us. Basically, the images of the 'The Scream' and the mummy can be overlapped," Piero Mannucci of Florence University told Discovery News.
The idea that Edvard Munch got his inspiration for "The Scream" from a Peruvian mummy is not new.
Already in 1978, in the exhibition catalogue "Symbols and Images of Edvard Munch," National Gallery of Art, Washington, the renowned Munch scholar Robert Rosenblum, professor of modern European art at New York University, suggested a possible link with an Inca mummy now kept at the Musée de l'Homme in Paris.
According to Rosenblum, Munch and Paul Gauguin had seen that mummy at the 1889 Trocadero exposition in Paris. [continue]
Reuters tells of two nuns who hunted down their stolen property.
Two German nuns took the law into their own hands and recovered a picture of the Virgin Mary stolen from their Franciscan hospital, police said Tuesday.
The engraving vanished Saturday and Sisters Georgia and Isabella decided not to leave the case just to the police. [continue]
Don't mess with the sisters.
From scotsman.com: Experts Hail Viking Burial Site Find.
Archaeologists have excavated an "extremely important" Viking burial ground in Cumbria, it was announced today.
The burial site of six Viking men and women, complete with swords, spears, jewellery, fire-making materials and riding equipment, was discovered near Cumwhitton.
It is believed to date back to the early 10th Century and was discovered at the end of March when amateur archaeologist Peter Adams found two copper brooches with a metal detector.
The grave of a Viking woman was found underneath and further excavation led to the discovery of the graves of another woman and four men.
Among the items found in the graves were weapons, spurs, a bridle and a drinking horn, as well as a jet bracelet and a belt fitting. [continue]
Here's more from the BBC: ‘Amazing’ Viking cemetery found.
From the CBC: Parrots use tongues to change sounds: study.
In a study that breaks new ground on how animals communicate, scientists in Indiana have shown that parrots, like humans, use their tongues to modify sound.
Researchers had known that a parrot uses its syrinx, a voice box organ located between the trachea and lungs, to produce sound.
But the new study, by Indiana University's Gabriel Beckers, Brian Nelson, and Roderick Suthers, shows that the tongue does play a role in what sound is produced. [continue]
From haaretz.com: Pennies from heaven, or elsewhere
How did hundreds of thousands of bronze coins from the reign of Alexander Jannaeus (Yannai) end up on the bottom of the Dead Sea?
For some years now rumors have been circulating among antiquities afficionados in Israel about a huge coin hoard discovered along the Dead Sea shore. According to Donald Zvi Ariel, head of the coin division at the Israel Antiquities Authority, an acquaintance from Haifa University approached him 15 years ago with an envelope containing 190 ancient coins. The contact recounted visiting the Dead Sea, at a spot somewhere south of Ein Feshkha, sticking his hand down into shallow water and bringing up a handful of coins from the bottom. Since the area where the coins were found is in the West Bank, Ariel refrained from examining them carefully and sent the envelope to the office of archaeological affairs at military government headquarters. [continue]
From discovery.com: Seeking the Santa Maria.
When Christopher Columbus "discovered" America in 1492, he piloted one of history's most storied ships, the Santa Maria.
Yet when the great mariner returned in glory to Spain in 1493, he had left behind his flagship and more than a third of his men.
On Christmas Eve, 1492, the Santa Maria had wrecked on a Caribbean sandbar. The loss of his largest vessel forced Columbus to leave 39 sailors behind with friendly Taino Indians governed by chief Guacanagari in what is now northern Haiti.
Columbus instructed his men to build a fort, explore the area, look for gold and treat the indigenous people with respect. And Columbus kept his promise to return in less than a year. But what he found was the burned remains of a fort, a scorched Taino village and not one of his men alive.
Five centuries later, archaeologists and explorers are seeking the remains of the Santa Maria and the site of Europe's first accidental colony in the Americas, named La Navidad. [continue]
From The Scotsman: Traces of prehistoric homes open door on early man.
They were the first people to live in Scotland, nomads who left little trace of their day-to-day lives. But the first evidence that early man built homes as far north as Orkney up to 10,000 years ago appears to have been uncovered by archaeologists.
Tiny slivers of stone — combined with previously puzzling results from a geophysics survey — point to the presence of a settlement created by Mesolithic hunter gatherers. [continue]
From abc.net.au: Romany Gypsies came out of India.
Legend has it that European Gypsies came from Egypt but a new genetic study has shown they came from a small population that emerged from ancestors in India around 1000 years ago.
The research, by Professor Luba Kalaydjieva of the University of Western Australia and team, looked at the origins of eight to 10 million people in Europe commonly known as Gypsies.
Roma, Romani or Romany are other names for this community, which has featured in movies such as Latcho Drom.
"[The research] is the best evidence yet of the Indian origins of the Gypsies," the researchers write in an article published online ahead of print in the American Journal of Human Genetics.
The researchers were first alerted to the idea that the Romany may be descended from a small founder population when they discovered that certain genetic mutations in the population were shared in people who were not directly related.
This occurs in other groups that have developed from small founder populations such as the Finns, Ashkenazi Jews, the population of Quebec in Canada and possibly the Australian island state of Tasmania, Kalaydjieva, told ABC Science Online.
Kalaydjieva and team have been studying the genetics of Romany people for over 10 years. [continue]
From boston.com: Shrinking population threatens an ancient faith.
BOMBAY -- For centuries, this city has been the citadel where Zoroastrianism, one of the world's oldest religions, has persevered in the face of overwhelming odds.
Now demographers say Zoroastrians, who live mainly in India, where they are called Parsis, and Iran, where the religion originated, could face eventual extinction because of a falling birth rate and a tradition of barring those from other faiths from converting.
The perceived threat to its existence has locked the tiny community into an emotional debate over how to maintain the faith and identity while also adapting with the times. [continue]
Related:
Zoroastrianism - Wikipedia
You know I'm fond of bats, yes? If you are, too, go take a look at this BBC article about flying foxes. Who knew that bats came in that kind of size?
A huge tropical bat which could soon be extinct in the wild appears to be doing well in captivity in a British zoo.
A colony of Livingstone's fruit bats, whose wingspan can reach 5ft (1.5m), has been kept at Jersey zoo in the Channel Islands for the last 12 years.
A number of the bats have now started to fly through a purpose-built tunnel in their enclosure in search of food.
The zoo, HQ of the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, is one of only two global sites where the bats are kept.
Livingstone's fruit bat (Pteropus livingstonii), also known as the Comoro black flying fox from its home in the Comores Islands near Madagascar, is thought to be at risk of imminent extinction because of the loss of its forest habitat.
The trust is working with a local group, Action Comores, to save the species. It now has 30 bats on Jersey; another colony is at Bristol Zoo Gardens. [continue, see photos]
From eubusiness.com: Medieval castle for sale in Slovakia for less than a euro.
If you've always wanted to own an authentic medieval castle, the country for you is Slovakia, in the heart of central Europe, where less than one euro may be enough to pay for the property of your dreams.
Keen to see its proud heritage preserved and renovated, the Slovak Heritage Office is using modern methods to sell off some of its history while preserving it at the same time. [continue]
From The Telegraph: Cloistered chic of the minimalist monastery.
At the invitation of a French Cistercian abbot, more than 2,000 people travelled to a rural corner of the Czech Republic to celebrate the formal dedication of a new monastery.
But the star guest was undoubtedly John Pawson, the British architect who can now put "design of a Cistercian monastery" on his CV - along with the design of Calvin Klein's flagship store in Manhattan as well as numerous houses for clients, such as Doris Lockhart Saatchi, in London.
Initially, a more unlikely pairing of client and designer would be hard to imagine, but the project seized Pawson's imagination and has produced a serenely beautiful range of buildings, sited around a quadrangle, that perch on a remote Bohemian hillside.
The Cistercians are a Roman Catholic monastic order, based on the fourth century rule of St Benedict, who embrace simplicity and poverty. [continue]
From The Scotsman: Of spice and men.
The fall of Rome, according to one view, had little to do with barbarians. It was all about exotic Asian spices. Indian pepper, cinnamon from Ceylon and nutmeg and cloves from the Moluccas reduced the empire to flabby decadence, at which point it was a knockover. As Roman moralists liked to point out, eastern spices were expensive, effeminate and, worse, had zero nutritional value. Boudicca appeared to agree, reminding her troops before they went out to slaughter the colonists that Romans were nothing but spice-eating sodomites. They were barely men at all.
If spices were indeed behind the degeneration of Rome, in the tumultuous aftermath they may have been the only thing still connecting Europe to the outside world when commerce virtually dried up and access to the old spice routes came under Islamic control. When trade picked up again in the later Middle Ages, it is renewed spice traffic that provides the best candidate for the transmission of bubonic plague from the east; the Black Death of 1348 which wiped out at least half the continent. And at a later, similarly epochal, moment, spices are, once again, the usual suspects: Columbus, and especially Da Gama and Magellan, were driven to redraw the world by the mystical allure of spices and their promise of vast profits.
Fortunately, one is not required to buy completely into Jack Turner’s highly spiced, ever so slightly tongue-in-cheek version of pre-modern Europe’s big moments in order to appreciate this sprawling cornucopia of a book. His stated goal is [continue]
Ha! You'll have to continue now that I've left you mid-sentence, won't you? I must remember to do this more often.
From The Scotsman: Revealed: 2,500-year-old tomb under shadow of Egyptian pyramid.
Egypt's antiquities chief yesterday revealed a 2,500-year-old hidden tomb under the shadow of one of Giza’s three giant pyramids, containing 400 finger-size statues and six coffin-sized niches carved into granite rock.
Zahi Hawass, the director of Egypt’s supreme council of antiquities, said archaeologists had been working for three months to clear sand from a granite shaft found between the pyramid of Khafre - also known by its Greek name of Chephren - Giza’s second-largest tomb of a pharaoh, and the Sphinx.
Mr Hawass said Giza’s latest ancient discovery came to light after archaeologists detected what appeared to be a four-sided shaft. [continue]
From csmonitor.com: Preservationists raid the pantry.
From atop 30-foot-high scaffolding, Dayton Spence works his way across the vaulted ceiling of the 113-year-old City Opera House in Traverse City, Mich., painstakingly cleaning the Victorian mural with ... a loaf of Wonder Bread.
Yes, you read that right. Mr. Spence, an architectural preservationist and president of New Millennium Inc. in Suttons Bay, Mich., uses all sorts of everyday household products to restore vintage buildings. And so do most of his fellow preservationists.
To make a Wonder Bread poultice, "take any white bread, cut the crust off, then mush it up into a ball and dab it on the painting," explains the 35-year veteran of the preservation business. "It gently draws out any impurities, but won't hurt the pigments or varnish."
Sure, there are plenty of commercial products available to clean and restore architectural treasures, but quite often, preservationists turn to items such as Ivory soap, candles, sponges, spatulas, tea, and eggs. It's simply a matter of using common sense to determine which products work best, says Spence, who has overseen such restoration projects as the Helmsley Palace in New York and Chicago's City Hall.
Often, his workers come up with ingenious solutions to problems they encounter. Once a female employee suggested using Pam cooking spray when Spence's team ran out of their usual relief agent - wax - while making angel-shaped plaster moldings during a church restoration. [continue]
From the CBC: Scans unmask face of Egyptian mummy.
The face of an Egyptian man who lived nearly 3,000 years ago has been revealed using special X-rays and CT scan technology.
The mummified corpse of Harwa, an Egyptian artisan, had been on display at the Egyptian Museum in Torino, Italy.
Scientists were unable to see his face without unwrapping the mummy, which would have destroyed the bandages, said Dr. Federico Cesarani of the Struttura Operativa Complessa di Radiodiagnostica in Asti, Italy.
Cesarani and his colleagues used computer-enhanced X-rays to produce three-dimensional images of the mummy's face.
This was the first use of the technology, called multidetector computed tomography, to produce a detailed 3-D model of a mummy, the team said in the September issue of the American Journal of Roentgenology. [continue]
Thanks to Cynthia for pointing out this article. (And this similar one, back in January.)
From The Independent: Let there be light: Restoration reveals glory of Christ Church.
You could say it is one of the things we don't have a lot of in Britain, like revolutions, vineyards or sunshine: the Baroque. That period in architecture when Renaissance classicism went elaborate and ornate saw a great sprouting of fancy churches everywhere in southern Europe, from Bavaria to Sicily, but somehow it was all just a bit too extravagant, too excitable, for the restrained British soul.
Yet for a few decades, with Christopher Wren and his successors, the Baroque did briefly flourish in England, and yesterday saw the unveiling of the restored masterpiece of the greatest of Wren's followers, his own apprentice, Nicholas Hawksmoor.
Christ Church, Spitalfields, on the boundary between the City of London and the East End, has been the subject of perhaps the most ambitious and costly programme of restoration of a parish church ever carried out in Britain: they have been putting it right for more than 30 years, at a total cost of more than £10m.
It has been inspired by architectural enthusiasts who felt passionately that one of the finest of Britain's relatively few Baroque monuments could not be allowed to fall into ruin, as was once threatened. In 1956 it was officially declared unsafe and closed; it stayed closed for much of the 1960s and 1970s.
Some of Britain's most influential voices were raised in protest: John Betjeman, much-loved poet and church architecture buff, declared that it was a building on whose behalf he would go to the stake. But even more effective were local people. [continue]
My list of churches to visit while in London is a long one, but I'll be certain to stop in at Christ Church, Spitalfields when next in London. (Which will be this fall - yay!)
Related:
Christ Church, Spitalfields - GreatBuildingsOnline.com
The Friends of Christ Church Spitalfields (Includes photos and resotration info)
Nicholas Hawksmoor - Wikipedia
Christopher Wren - Wikipedia
Spitalfields - Wikipedia
Spitalfields.org.uk (the area today)
John Betjeman - Wikipedia
From canoe.ca: Danes prepare to invade England again.
The Vikings are preparing to cross the North Sea again.
Queen Margrethe of Denmark, whose ancestors once raided continental Europe and the British Isles, is expected to christen a replica of a 1,000-year-old Viking ship Saturday that was built with a more peaceful purpose.
Plans are for a crew of 60 men to sail the vessel, which builders said is the world's longest Viking ship reconstruction, to Britain and Ireland in 2007 along the routes once used by marauding Norsemen.
Crew members will study how Viking ships, among the most advanced vessels of their era, behave at sea. They're also planning to exchange knowledge with their British and Irish colleagues about the Viking warriors who once ruled over large parts of northern Europe and traded with merchants as far away as Central Asia.
The ship is a replica of a vessel believed to have been built in 1042 by a Norse chieftain in Dublin, which was founded by Vikings. The original is housed along with four similar vessels in the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, 40 kilometres west of Copenhagen. [continue]
Related Mirabilis.ca content:
Viking vessel on its way for Dublin raid
Found: Viking boat burial?
Oseberg Viking queen
Vancouver's Viking ship
From The Globe and Mail: On a hunch, archeology student finds ancient smokehouse.
VANCOUVER -- An archeology student's hunch has paid off in the discovery of one of the oldest smokehouses in British Columbia.
Beneath an Agassiz farmer's seemingly pristine field, a team led by Simon Fraser University archeologist Dana Lepofsky has discovered a small, wood-and-stone structure that radiocarbon dating has shown to be 5,700 years old. [continue]
From the BBC: Jet-powered wheelchair surprise.
Giuseppe Cannella had a big surprise for his mother-in-law when he put a jet engine on the back of her wheelchair.
Mr Cannella says the chair can now do top speeds of more than 60mph and has proved the star of a model plane championship during the Bank Holiday.
A model plane enthusiast himself, Mr Cannella has been putting on shows at Barkston Heath near Grantham, Lincs.
"It is just the wheelchair with the engine bolted on the back and steering on the front," he said. [continue]
I meant to mention something I saw in the print version of a local newspaper yesterday: an article about Vancouver architect Peter Busby and the sustainable condo he has designed. Unfortunately the article isn't on the web, but look - busby.ca has details about The Sustainable Condo Project:
The Sustainable Condo illustrates and promotes practical solutions and addresses the challenges of urban sustainability. A dynamic and interactive "green" condo, it features leading edge green building concepts that reduce environmental impacts and resource consumption.
There's also a project website at SustainableCondo.com. Both sites include photos, details on design and material, and so forth.
From nature.com: Chinese dyslexics have problems of their own.
There is no one cause for dyslexia: rather, the causes vary between languages. So conclude researchers who have found that Chinese children with reading difficulties have different brain anomalies to their Western counterparts.
The finding explains why one can be dyslexic in one language but not another. The team also hopes the work will aid the design of culturally specific strategies for learning to read and write that could benefit everyone. [continue]
From the BBC: Cashing in on Tibet's religious traditions.
On an early afternoon at Sera monastery, just outside Lhasa, Tibetan monks debate theology in time-honoured tradition across a leafy sunlit courtyard.
The monks debate in pairs - one seated on the ground barking out questions, the other lunging forward, slapping his hands together in his rivals' face as he parries back answers.
It could be a scene from centuries past, were it not for the presence of a grinning tourist standing alongside a monk, mimicking his movements for a holiday snap.
Mainland Chinese tourists are beating a track to Tibet in ever-increasing numbers.
The monks in Sera monastery are now outnumbered by tourists, capturing their every move on camera, and turning serious theological practice into a circus.
Religious institutions in Tibet are increasingly finding their timetables driven by tourist schedules and visitor demands. Even senior monks act as glorified tour guides. [continue]
From the (Malasia) Star Online: Haven for man and beast.
The Buddhist temple in Kanchanaburi province, 322km north of Bangkok, is the perfect setting for the monks who live there, the serenity of the surrounding forests conducive for deep meditation. The peacefulness of the land there is almost palpable, the silence as thick as the trees. But once in a while, you will hear the crowing of a cockerel, the call of a gibbon — and even the piercing wail of newborn tiger cubs.
The Luangta Bua Yansampanno Forest Monastery in the Sai Yok district has over the years become a wildlife sanctuary, where the monks not only practise their daily rituals and routines, but also care for animals that have wandered into the monastery grounds or were brought by concerned villagers. Under the leadership of abbot Phra Achan Bhusit Chan Khantitharo, the monastery has adopted the objective of not only propagating Buddhism but also conserving wildlife.
And it all started with tigers. [continue]
From nature.com: Owls use dung as bait for beetles.
It is unlikely to win an award for tasteful home decor, but the burrowing owl has a good reason for filling its lair with other animals' muck. The birds scatter scraps of faeces in and around their burrows to attract dung beetles, one of their favourite foods.
The birds' ‘bait and wait’ strategy represents a form of tool use, say Douglas Levey of the University of Florida in Gainesville and his colleagues, who made the discovery. Although dung might not be everyone's idea of a useful tool, the fact that the birds gather and arrange it means that it can be defined as such. [continue]
A friend wrote and mentioned this Economist article about Julia Child, pointing out his favourite bit:
Mistakes were summarily dealt with. An offending loaf was tossed over her shoulder among the potted plants; a misflipped potato pancake was scraped off the range and back into the pan; her false teeth were firmly readjusted in front of the camera. She began her demonstration of coq au vin by dropping a whole chicken on the floor, dusting it off and remarking: "It's OK. No one's looking."
Thanks, Lawrence!
From Wired: Scientific Method Man.
Two years ago, an Englishman named Gordon Rugg slipped back in time. Night after night he spread his papers on the kitchen table once his children had gone to bed. Working on faux parchment with a steel-nibbed calligraphic pen, he scribbled a strange, unidentifiable, vaguely medieval script. Transliterated into the Roman alphabet, some of the words read: "qopchedy qokedydy qokoloky qokeedy qokedy shedy." As he wrote, he struggled to get inside the mind of the person who had first scrawled this incomprehensible text some 400 years ago.
By day, Rugg, a 48-year-old psychologist, teaches in the computer science department of Keele University, near Manchester, England. By night, as an intellectual exercise, he has been researching one of the world's great oddities: the Voynich manuscript, a hand-lettered book written in an unknown code that has frustrated cryptographers since its discovery in an Italian villa in 1912. How impregnable is the Voynich? During World War II, US Army code breakers - the guys who blew away Nazi ciphers - grappled with the manuscript in their spare time and came up empty. Since then, decoding the book's contents has become an obsession for geeks and puzzle nuts everywhere.
Then came Rugg. In three months, he cooked up the most persuasive explanation yet for the 234-page text: Sorry, folks, there is no code - it's a hoax! Lifelong Voynichologists were impressed with his reasoning and proofs, even if they were a little chagrined. "The Voynich is such a challenge," says Rugg, "such a social activity. But then along comes someone who says 'Oh, it's just a lot of meaningless gibberish.' It's as if we're all surfers, and the sea has dried up."
When the news of Rugg's breakthrough was published last winter, everyone missed the bigger story. Rugg cracked the Voynich not because he was smarter, but because he focused on what everyone else had missed. Then again, this came naturally to Rugg: He has made a career out of studying how experts acquire knowledge yet screw up nevertheless. In 1996, he and his colleagues developed a rigorous method for peering over the shoulders of experts - doctors, software engineers, pilots, physicists - watching how they work and think, testing their logic, and uncovering ways to help them solve problems. [continue]
Related Mirabilis.ca content:
Voynich manuscript update
Voynich manuscript
Elsewhere:
Voynich manuscript - Wikipedia
Drolleries are decorative thumbnail illustrations which adorn the margins of certain manuscripts, often depicting fanciful or grotesque hybrid creatures. One manuscript in particular features such an abundance of this type of illumination that it has become known as ‘the Book of Drolleries’ (Le Livre des Drôleries).
That's from this entry at Giornale Nuovo. You must go see the rest - the page includes 19 lovely drolleries, and more information.