An eclectic assortment of stuff: food, archaeology, fun, books, history, geekery, etc.
Posted in books & lit, health on Feb 21st, 2010
From the University of Toronto Magazine: At a Loss for Words.
Agatha Christie, English literature’s Queen of Crime, may have succumbed to Alzheimer’s disease in her later years. It was never diagnosed by doctors, but now two U of T professors say that a trail of evidence left in her published work leads suspiciously in that [...]
Posted in books & lit on Dec 17th, 2009
From New Scientist article by Melanie Bayley: Alice’s adventures in algebra: Wonderland solved.
What would Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland be without the Cheshire Cat, the trial, the Duchess’s baby or the Mad Hatter’s tea party? Look at the original story that the author told Alice Liddell and her two sisters one day during a [...]
Posted in books & lit on Oct 2nd, 2009
This is the most touching story I’ve come across in a while: Boy Lifts Book; Librarian Changes Boy’s Life. Go on now, read it.
Posted in books & lit on Jul 23rd, 2009
Frank McCourt died a few days ago. Have you read his books? (Angela’s Ashes, ‘Tis, Teacher Man.) What I liked about Teacher Man is that it shows Frank’s journey from incompetent teacher to masterful teacher. To my delight, Reader’s Digest has just published one of my favourite chapters from the book. Here you go:
I [...]
Posted in books & lit, history & archaeology, religion on Jul 6th, 2009
From The Independent: World’s oldest bible published in full online.
The oldest bible in the world was displayed in its entirety for the first time in 150 years today after researchers digitised its four sections kept in cities thousands of miles apart and placed the reunited text in cyberspace.
The Codex Sinaiticus, which was written some 1,600 [...]
Posted in books & lit, technology on Apr 27th, 2009
From the Guardian: Revolutionary Espresso Book Machine launches in London.
It’s not elegant and it’s not sexy — it looks like a large photocopier — but the Espresso Book Machine is being billed as the biggest change for the literary world since Gutenberg invented the printing press more than 500 years ago and made the mass [...]
Posted in books & lit on Mar 27th, 2009
This made me laugh until my tummy hurt. Put down your wine, kids, before you start on this Guardian article.
He has written more than 200,000 – yes, 200,000 – books to date, but today marked a first for Professor Philip M Parker, who picked up the Diagram prize for the Oddest Book Title of the [...]
Posted in books & lit, internet, technology on Mar 2nd, 2009
Captchas are those words or non-words you see in squiggly letters when you try to comment on some websites. You’re commanded to type the letters you see into a little box to prove that you’re a human, not some automated spam machine. From the Walrus Magazine we have this article on the new and improved [...]
Posted in books & lit, history & archaeology, religion on Feb 8th, 2009
From Reuters: Ancient Syriac bible found in Cyprus.
Authorities in northern Cyprus believe they have found an ancient version of the Bible written in Syriac, a dialect of the native language of Jesus.
The manuscript was found in a police raid on suspected antiquity smugglers. Turkish Cypriot police testified in a court hearing they believe the manuscript [...]
Posted in books & lit on Jan 18th, 2009
From the Guardian: How do you get a girl? Ask this boy of nine.
A book of pithy dating advice written by a nine-year-old American boy is to hit British bookstores in time for Saint Valentine’s Day.
A publishing sensation, Alec Greven’s How to Talk to Girls started as a pamphlet sold at his school fair in [...]
Posted in DNA, books & lit, history & archaeology on Jan 18th, 2009
From Science Daily: DNA Testing May Unlock Secrets Of Medieval Manuscripts.
Thousands of painstakingly handwritten books produced in medieval Europe still exist today, but scholars have long struggled with questions about when and where the majority of these works originated. Now a researcher from North Carolina State University is using modern advances in genetics to develop [...]
Posted in books & lit, history & archaeology on Oct 30th, 2008
From Wikipedia: Danse Macabre.
Dance of Death, also variously called Danse Macabre (French), Danza Macabra (Italian) or Totentanz (German), is a late-medieval allegory on the universality of death: no matter one’s station in life, the dance of death unites all. La Danse Macabre consists of the personified death leading a row of dancing figures from all [...]
Posted in books & lit, food on Sep 23rd, 2008
Now this is the kind of thing that makes the Internet worthwhile. From the Guardian: Library to share 14th-century royal cookbook online.
A rare medieval cookbook is to be digitally photographed page by page and the results uploaded to the internet for gourmands around the globe to study.
Forme of Cury, a recipe book compiled by King [...]
Posted in books & lit, history & archaeology on Sep 2nd, 2008
From 24 Hour Museum: British Library acquires Dering Roll – A who’s who of Medieval arms.
The British Library has acquired the UK’s oldest known heraldic medieval manuscript following a successful fundraising campaign.
The Dering Roll, a painted register bearing medieval coats of arms from the last quarter of the 13th Century, represents a fascinating ‘Who’s Who’ [...]
Posted in books & lit, language, privacy on Aug 29th, 2008
From the BBC: The secret code of diaries.
The 300,000-word journal of Charles Wesley, the co-founder of the Methodist movement, which was written in an obscure shorthand, has been solved and the diary transcribed. It has taken nine years.
It appears that the shorthand was used not for speed, but for security. What was so important that [...]
Posted in books & lit, history & archaeology on Aug 27th, 2008
From The Guardian: From papyrus to cyberspace: Israel to make Dead Sea Scrolls available online.
Scientists and scholars in Jerusalem have begun a programme to take the first high-resolution, digital photographs of the Dead Sea Scrolls so they can be made available to the public on the internet.
The Israel Antiquities Authority this week ends a pilot [...]
Posted in books & lit, technology on Aug 14th, 2008
From Ars Technica: CAPTCHAs work—for digitizing old, damaged texts, manuscripts.
Over the course of history, humanity has suffered some horrifying damage to our collective cultural legacy in the form of books and other text lost to accident or neglect. The digitalization of text holds out the promise of permanently preserving the written word in an archive [...]
Posted in books & lit, history & archaeology on Aug 12th, 2008
From The Australian: In search of Western civilisation’s lost classics.
Stored in a sky-lit reading room on the top floor of the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples are the charred remains of the only library to survive from classical antiquity. The ancient world’s other great book collections — at Athens, Alexandria and Rome — all perished in [...]
Posted in books & lit, history & archaeology, religion on May 24th, 2008
Last December you read about the controversy regarding the translation of the gospel of Judas. Were there serious errors in the translation? Here’s more on that story from The Chronicle: The Betrayal of Judas: Did a ‘dream team’ of biblical scholars mislead millions?
When the Gospel of Judas was unveiled at a news conference in April [...]
Posted in Canada, books & lit, history & archaeology on May 20th, 2008
From thestar.com: With a little bit of vinegar, rare Bible returns to N.S..
Richard Luckett knew he had a problem when a water pipe burst in his college room where 10,000 books – some dating back 400 years – lined the walls from one end to the other.
"Water is the worst possible thing for books," he [...]
Posted in books & lit, history & archaeology, religion on Feb 19th, 2008
From The Independent: Found at last: the world’s oldest missing page.
A year after the Romans packed up their shields in AD410 and left Britain to the mercy of the Anglo-Saxons, a scribe in Edessa, in what is modern day Turkey, was preparing a list of martyrs who had perished in defence of the relatively new [...]
Posted in books & lit, history & archaeology on Feb 7th, 2008
From csmonitor.com: In Timbuktu, a new move to save ancient manuscripts.
Abdel Kader Haidara carefully picks up one of a dozen small leather-bound books lying on his desk and leafs through the age-weathered pages covered in Arabic calligraphy.
This tiny book is centuries old and one of more than 100,000 manuscripts that can be found on shelves [...]
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 Christmas, books & lit, history & archaeology on Dec 23rd, 2007
From The Telegraph: Real Scrooge ‘was Dutch gravedigger’.
He is synonymous with the traditional image of the Victorian English Christmas but Ebenezer Scrooge may have his roots much further afield.
According to Sjef de Jong, a Dutch academic, the Charles Dickens character may have been inspired by the real life of Gabriel de Graaf, a 19th century [...]
Posted in books & lit on Oct 11th, 2007
I knew LibraryThing existed, but had never checked into it until last week. (Have you seen it? Do you use it?) It’s a catalog your books online site, and it’s heaven for book-lovers. The site explains:
Enter what you’re reading or your whole library — it’s an easy, library-quality catalog. LibraryThing also connects you with [...]