An eclectic assortment of stuff: food, archaeology, fun, books, history, geekery, etc.
Posted in history & archaeology on Jan 30th, 2008
From National Geograpic: Ancient Mass Sacrifice, Riches Discovered in China Tomb.
A 2,500-year-old tomb containing nearly four dozen victims of human sacrifice has been excavated in eastern China, yielding a treasure trove of precious artifacts and new insights into ritual customs during the era of Confucius, archaeologists say. [continue]
Posted in history & archaeology on Jan 30th, 2008
From the Associated Press: 1,400-Year-Old Mosaic Restored in Israel.
Experts have restored a 1,400-year-old glass mosaic glowing in gold, recovered from a site next to the Sea of Galilee, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced Monday.
The mosaic panel is believed to be the only one in the world, the antiquities authority said, citing the quality of its [...]
Posted in history & archaeology on Jan 30th, 2008
From discovery.com: Earliest Shoe-Wearers Revealed by Toe Bones.
People started wearing shoes around 40,000 years ago, according to a study on recently excavated small toe bones that belonged to an individual from China who apparently loved shoes.
Most footwear erodes over time. The earliest known shoes, rope sandals that attached to the feet with string, date to [...]
Posted in history & archaeology on Jan 30th, 2008
From the BBC: Grim secrets of Pharaoh’s city.
Evidence of the brutal lives endured by some ancient Egyptians to build the monuments of the Pharaohs has been uncovered by archaeologists.
Skeletal remains from a lost city in the middle of Egypt suggest many ordinary people died in their teenage years and lived a punishing lifestyle.
Many suffered from [...]
Posted in history & archaeology on Jan 30th, 2008
From Reuters: Black Death did not kill indiscriminately.
The Black Death that decimated populations in Europe and elsewhere during the middle of the 14th century may not have been a blindly indiscriminate killer, as some experts have believed.
An analysis of 490 skeletons from a London cemetery for Black Death victims demonstrated that the infection did not [...]
Posted in history & archaeology, technology on Jan 24th, 2008
From TheStar.com: Reassembling a puzzle with 600 million pieces.
Nineteen years ago, as the Berlin Wall crumbled and democracy swept through communist East Germany, STASI agents – members of the secret police – worked feverishly to destroy millions of top-secret documents in an effort to keep them from Western eyes. (…)
Then, in May 2007, the German [...]
Posted in coffee on Jan 23rd, 2008
From the New York Times: At Last, a $20,000 Cup of Coffee.
With its brass-trimmed halogen heating elements, glass globes and bamboo paddles, the new contraption that is to begin making coffee this week at the Blue Bottle Café here looks like a machine from a Jules Verne novel, a 19th-century vision of the future. [continue]
Posted in art, history & archaeology on Jan 17th, 2008
From discovery.com: Mona Lisa’s Identity Confirmed by Document.
The mystery over the identity of the woman behind Leonardo da Vinci’s "Mona Lisa" painting has been solved once and for all, German academics at Heidelberg University announced on Tuesday.
Mona Lisa is "undoubtedly" Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo, according to Veit Probst, director of the Heidelberg University Library.
Conclusive evidence [...]
Posted in history & archaeology, religion on Jan 16th, 2008
From the Jerusalem Post: First Temple seal found in Jerusalem.
A stone seal bearing the name of one of the families who acted as servants in the First Temple and then returned to Jerusalem after being exiled to Babylonia has been uncovered in an archeological excavation in Jerusalem’s City of David, a prominent Israeli archeologist said [...]
Posted in books & lit, history & archaeology, religion on Jan 15th, 2008
From the Wall Street Journal: The Lost Archive.
On the night of April 24, 1944, British air force bombers hammered a former Jesuit college here housing the Bavarian Academy of Science. The 16th-century building crumpled in the inferno. Among the treasures lost, later lamented Anton Spitaler, an Arabic scholar at the academy, was a unique photo [...]
Posted in history & archaeology on Jan 3rd, 2008
From discovery.com: Neanderthals Stitched Too Little Too Late.
Neanderthals probably froze to death in the last ice age because rapid climate change caught them by surprise without the tools needed to make warm clothes, finds new research.
Ian Gilligan, a postgraduate researcher from the Australian National University argues his case in the current issue of the journal [...]
Posted in history & archaeology on Jan 1st, 2008
From the Yorkshire Post: Grisly discovery of headless bodies gives insight into justice Saxon style.
Once they were spectacular resting places to honour the dead.
But with pagan Britain’s conversion to Christianity, the Bronze Age burial mounds came to be regarded with suspicion as places where devils and dragons lurked.
It was at one such site in East [...]
Posted in health on Jan 1st, 2008
From The Boston Globe: His parasite theory stirs a revolution.
"What if I told you," Joel Weinstock said, "there were countries where the doctors had never seen hay fever?"
It is another piece of evidence, another "aha" moment in the global medical mystery that Weinstock — the chief of gastroenterology and hepatology at Tufts-New England Medical Center [...]
Posted in history & archaeology on Jan 1st, 2008
From New York Carver: Feast of Fools.
Perhaps a medieval Christmas was more serious than the commercial celebration many of us have come to know.
However, a medieval New Year’s Day was the one time of year EVERYBODY jumped at the chance to let loose at the medieval Feast of Fools celebration.
The celebrations usually began on the [...]
Posted in computer stuff, education on Jan 1st, 2008
Michael Tiemann gave his 8-year-old daughter an XO laptop for Christmas, and blogs about how that’s working out: Risks–and rewards–of XO laptop.
…the real fun began after we started to explore the XO’s games. I told her to open Pippy and we played the "guess the number" game. In Pippy, the source code appears on the [...]