Jan 15th, 2012 by Mirabilis.ca
From the New York Times: Once Hidden by Forest, Carvings in Land Attest to Amazon’s Lost World.
The deforestation that has stripped the Amazon since the 1970s has also exposed a long-hidden secret lurking underneath thick rain forest: flawlessly designed geometric shapes spanning hundreds of yards in diameter.
Alceu Ranzi, a Brazilian scholar who helped discover the squares, octagons, circles, rectangles and ovals that make up the land carvings, said these geoglyphs found on deforested land were as significant as the famous Nazca lines, the enigmatic animal symbols visible from the air in southern Peru.
What impressed me the most about these geoglyphs was their geometric precision, and how they emerged from forest we had all been taught was untouched except by a few nomadic tribes,
said Mr. Ranzi, a paleontologist who first saw the geoglyphs in the 1970s and, years later, surveyed them by plane. [continue]
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Jan 8th, 2012 by Mirabilis.ca
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Dec 8th, 2011 by Mirabilis.ca
What do you do when you take a leave of absence from work? Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed took a break from his job in Buffalo to go and be the prime minister of Somalia.
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Sep 6th, 2011 by Mirabilis.ca
From The Tyee: How Chief Atahm Elementary School Became a Success Story.
Chief Atahm isn’t your typical elementary school. The teachers won’t instruct in English until Grade 4. Curriculum is created by teachers and parents instead of the Ministry of Education. Here, hands-on learning means skinning a deer, collecting medicinal plants, or cleaning and smoking fish. It’s one of the few Aboriginal immersion school programs in B.C. and — celebrating its 20th anniversary this year — the oldest.
Chief Atahm Immersion School is a one-storey building situated on top of the grassy plateau that is the Adams Lake reserve. Connected to the community of Chase by a bridge across Little Shuswap Lake, it’s a 60 kilometre drive north-east of Kamloops. For a Kindergarten-to-Grade 7 school, Chief Atahm is rather small: only five classrooms for eight grades. But the grounds are vast. Like most schoolyards they include a fenced-in play area and a jungle gym. Unlike most, there’s also a smokehouse out front for preserving deer meat and fish. [continue]
Tags: Adams Lake, First Nations, Secwepemctsin
Posted in BC, education | 2 Comments »
Sep 3rd, 2011 by Mirabilis.ca
From the Beeb: Italian town Filettino declares independence.
A small town in central Italy has declared its independence and started to print its own banknotes. [continue]
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Sep 1st, 2011 by Mirabilis.ca
From TechnologyReview.com: Old Blood Impairs Young Brains.
It’s a cliché of vampire tales that young blood is preferable to old, but a new study suggests there’s some truth to it.
A paper published today in Nature finds that when younger mice are exposed to the blood of older mice, their brain cells behave more like those found in aging brains, and vice versa. The researchers who carried out the work also uncovered chemical signals in aged blood that can dampen the growth of new brain cells, suggesting that the decline in brain function with age could be caused in part by blood-borne factors rather than an intrinsic failure of brain cells.[continue]
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Sep 1st, 2011 by Mirabilis.ca
From the LA Times: The typewriter lives on in India.
It’s a stultifying afternoon outside the Delhi District Court as Arun Yadav slides a sheet of paper into his decades-old Remington and revs up his daily 30-word-a-minute tap dance.
Nearby, hundreds of other workers clatter away on manual typewriters amid a sea of broken chairs and wobbly tables as the occasional wildlife thumps on the leaky tin roof above.
Sometimes the monkeys steal the affidavits,
Yadav said. That can be a real nuisance.
[continue]
I love that bit about the monkeys.
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Sep 1st, 2011 by Mirabilis.ca
From the Guardian: Tallest squat in the world becomes emblem of Venezuela housing crisis.
The 45-storey skyscraper that the Venezuelan entrepreneur David Brillembourg began building in the booming financial centre of Caracas of the early 1990s never did become the emblem of abundance its late owner intended it to be. A banking crisis truncated his dream.
But 20 years later, the incomplete Torre Confinanzas, or Torre de David (Tower of David) as it most widely known, with its staircases that lead nowhere and ramps that spiral into infinity is experiencing something of a renaissance – not as a home for a prosperous bank, but 2,500 squatters. [continue]
Tags: housing, squatting
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Aug 24th, 2011 by Mirabilis.ca
From discovery.com: Norway Wants Amundsen’s Ship Back.
Eighty years after it sank in the Canadian Arctic, explorer Roald Amundsen’s three-mast ship Maud may once again sail across the Atlantic to become the centerpiece of a new museum in Norway.
Canada, however, must still agree to the repatriation plan hatched by Norwegian investors, amid strong opposition from locals in the Canadian territory of Nunavut who want the ship to stay for tourists to admire from shore. [continue]
Posted in Canada, history & archaeology, Norway | No Comments »
Aug 24th, 2011 by Mirabilis.ca
Oh my, beer drinkers. Did you see this? Scientists find lager beer’s missing link — in Patagonia.
How did lager beer come to be? After pondering the question for decades, scientists have found that an elusive species of yeast isolated in the forests of Argentina was key to the invention of the crisp-tasting German beer 600 years ago.
It took a five-year search around the world before a scientific team discovered, identified and named the organism, a species of wild yeast called Saccharomyces eubayanus that lives on beech trees. [continue]
Posted in food, history & archaeology | 1 Comment »
Aug 18th, 2011 by Mirabilis.ca
From the Guardian: Black Death study lets rats off the hook.
Rats weren’t the carriers of the plague after all. A study by an archaeologist looking at the ravages of the Black Death in London, in late 1348 and 1349, has exonerated the most famous animal villains in history.
“The evidence just isn’t there to support it,” said Barney Sloane, author of The Black Death in London. “We ought to be finding great heaps of dead rats in all the waterfront sites but they just aren’t there. And all the evidence I’ve looked at suggests the plague spread too fast for the traditional explanation of transmission by rats and fleas. It has to be person to person – there just isn’t time for the rats to be spreading it.” [continue]
Posted in health, history & archaeology | 2 Comments »
Jun 28th, 2011 by Mirabilis.ca
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Jun 21st, 2011 by Mirabilis.ca
From the Guardian: Badge dug up in field is medieval treasure.
A scrap of twisted silver found a few weeks ago by a metal detector in Lancashire will take its place among masterpieces of medieval art at the British Museum, in an exhibition opening this week of the bejewelled shrines made to hold the relics of saints and martyrs.
The badge made of silver found by Paul King, a retired logistics expert, is a humble object to earn a place in an exhibition called Treasures of Heaven, but it is unique. It will sit among gold and silver reliquaries studded with gems the size of thumbnails – or the sockets from which they were wrenched by thieves – once owned by emperors, popes and princes.
The badge, the only one of its kind ever found in Britain, provides a link 500 years ago between this corner of rural Lancashire and the great pilgrimage sites of mainland Europe. It shows one of the companions of St Ursula, one of the most popular mystical legends of medieval Europe. She was said to be a British princess who sailed with 11,000 virgin companions to marry a pagan prince in Brittany, but diverted to go on a pilgrimage to Rome – and in some versions of the story, Jerusalem. [continue]
Posted in history & archaeology | 1 Comment »
Jun 14th, 2011 by Mirabilis.ca
From the Guardian: Mob rule: Iceland crowdsources its next constitution.
It is not the way the scribes of yore would have done it but Iceland is tearing up the rulebook by drawing up its new constitution through crowdsourcing.
As the country recovers from the financial crisis that saw the collapse of its banks and government, it is using social media to get its citizens to share their ideas as to what the new document should contain.
I believe this is the first time a constitution is being drafted basically on the internet,
said Thorvaldur Gylfason, member of Iceland’s constitutional council.
The public sees the constitution come into being before their eyes … This is very different from old times where constitution makers sometimes found it better to find themselves a remote spot out of sight, out of touch.
[continue]
Tags: constitution, Iceland
Posted in internet | 1 Comment »
Jun 7th, 2011 by Mirabilis.ca
From the Globe and Mail: Radar-like ‘inner vision’ helps blind learn to navigate beyond preconceived limits.
Daniel Kish has no eyes, but can ride his bike down the street and walk through an unfamiliar airport on his own. He travels the world teaching other blind people the bat-like navigational technique that gives him so much freedom and allows him to perceive trees, bushes, cars or the furniture in a hotel room.
He makes short, sharp clicking sounds with his tongue and mouth, and is able to translate the slight echoes that are returned into a spatial representation of a curb, a fence or a sofa – a technique called echolocation that he taught to himself. [continue]
Related links:
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Jun 2nd, 2011 by Mirabilis.ca
From Wired: The Mystery of the Canadian Whiskey Fungus. Canada, whiskey, fungus — how much better can a story get?
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Apr 8th, 2011 by Mirabilis.ca
From stanford.edu: Tuberculosis strain spread by the fur trade reveals stealthy approach of epidemics, say Stanford researchers.
French Canadian voyageurs spread tuberculosis throughout the indigenous peoples of western Canada for over 150 years, yet, strangely enough, it wasn’t until the fur traders ceased their forays that epidemics of tuberculosis broke out. Now Stanford researchers have puzzled out why. It took a shift in the environment of the infected peoples – in this case, confinement to reservations – to create conditions conducive to outbreaks. [continue]
Posted in Canada, history & archaeology | 2 Comments »
Mar 29th, 2011 by Mirabilis.ca
From Scientific American: The dawn of beer remains elusive in archaeological record.
One place they certainly were making beer is Mesopotamia, where cuneiform tablets record the trade of beer around 4000 BC. The Sumerians were so enthralled with beer that around 1800 BC, someone inscribed an ode to Ninkasi, the goddess of beer, on a tablet that survives today. The Hymn to Ninkasi features verses such as Ninkasi, you are the one who pours out the filtered beer of the collector vat / It is [like] the onrush of Tigris and Euphrates,
according to Ian S. Hornsey’s 2003 A History of Beer and Brewing.
Who has a goddess of beer who doesn’t care about beer?
Hastorf asked rhetorically. “I think it’s fair to say that beer was important in Mesopotamian life.” Perhaps because Ninkasi was a female deity, Sumerian brewing was the realm of women. [continue]
Tags: beer
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Mar 29th, 2011 by Mirabilis.ca
From the BBC: Jordan battles to regain ‘priceless’ Christian relics.
They could be the earliest Christian writing in existence, surviving almost 2,000 years in a Jordanian cave. They could, just possibly, change our understanding of how Jesus was crucified and resurrected, and how Christianity was born.
A group of 70 or so books
, each with between five and 15 lead leaves bound by lead rings, was apparently discovered in a remote arid valley in northern Jordan somewhere between 2005 and 2007. [continue]
Posted in books & lit, history & archaeology | 3 Comments »
Mar 23rd, 2011 by Mirabilis.ca
Elizabeth Taylor (who died today) did just that. From VillageVoice.com: RIP New York Times Elizabeth Taylor Obit Writer, 1933-2005.
The news of Elizabeth Taylor’s passing has put an added sadness to this already gloomy day, but not everyone was shocked. The New York Times’ principal writer for the Taylor obituary died almost six full years ago. Mel Gussow, a Times theater critic, died after a battle with cancer in 2005. He was 71. Gussow had written over 4,000 pieces for the New York Times, one of them, apparently, was the Elizabeth Taylor obit they had ready to run for over half a decade. [continue]
There is something highly amusing about an obituary writer being outlived by the subject of his obituary.
(I must add that I intend no disrespect for Elizabeth Taylor, nor for Mel Gussow. May they rest in peace, and may light perpetual shine upon them.)
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Mar 23rd, 2011 by Mirabilis.ca
From A List Apart: The Miseducation of the Doodle.
Doodling may be better described as ‘markings to help a person think.’ Most people believe that doodling requires the intellectual mind to shutdown, but this is one misrepresentation that needs correcting. There is no such thing as a mindless doodle. The act of doodling is the mind’s attempt to engage before succumbing to mindlessness. Doodling serves a myriad of functions that result in thinking, albeit in disguise. This universal act is known to: [continue]
Tags: doodling, learning
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Mar 23rd, 2011 by Mirabilis.ca
From the Boston Globe: Titas wuz here: Ancient graffiti begins giving up its secrets.
Cast your mind back to the history books you read in school, the ones that covered classical Greece and Rome, and you’ll probably find yourself thinking about people like Pliny and Plato, Seneca and Socrates, men who seemed to spend the bulk of their days orchestrating epic battles and formulating complicated theories about shadows in caves.
It seems less likely that you’ll recall the anonymous Athenian who, some 1,500 years ago, snuck out in the middle of the night to inform the world that a certain Sydromachos had a backside as big as a cistern.
Likewise, the fact that someone named Titas was a lewd fellow
will almost certainly have passed you by. [continue]
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Mar 22nd, 2011 by Mirabilis.ca
From nature.com Epidemiology: Study of a lifetime.
In 1946, scientists started tracking thousands of British children born during one cold March week. On their 65th birthday, the study members find themselves more scientifically valuable than ever before. [continue]
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Mar 19th, 2011 by Mirabilis.ca
From The Independent: Mass graves to shed light on Britain’s bloodiest battle.
It was one of the biggest and probably the bloodiest battle ever fought on British soil. Such was its ferocity almost 1 per cent of the English population was wiped out in a single day. Yet mention the Battle of Towton to most people and you would probably get a blank stare.
Next week marks the 550th anniversary of the engagement that changed the course of the Wars of the Roses. It is estimated that between 50,000 and 80,000 soldiers took part in the battle in 1461 between the Houses of York and Lancaster for control of the English throne. An estimated 28,000 men are said to have lost their lives. [continue]
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