Laputan Logic

Back again

2003-10-24T11:21:00.000+10:00

Yes there's movement at the station once again finally.

I'm moving Laputan Logic over to a new completely dog-food-compliant website which is located at www.laputanlogic.com. All updates will occur there for now on, so please update your bookmarks and if you have one of those websites that is kind enough to link to me, please update your blogroll as well.

I must say I'm pretty happy with the new format which I hope will enable me to update more frequently but at the same time keep the stuff I have spent more time working on from being pushed too far down the page. I must confess I have been struggling to find the right mix with the blog format. I think this should be a major improvement and I hope you will like it as well.

Here's a sample of why you should be heading there RIGHT NOW:

A Roman in the Indies

In 550 AD, during the reign of Emperor Justinian, a monk who was cloistered at a remote monastery in the Sinai desert wrote a curious book about the topology of the earth and the universe. In the book the monk, who is know to posterity as Cosmas Indicopleustes, propounded a surprising theory that the world was not spherical as believed by the ancients but, on the contrary, was flat and surrounded by four walls which stretched up to the heavens and formed a curved lid.

Scholarship has not been terribly kind to the work of Cosmas Indicopleustes. Even in his own time he had to staunchly defend his theory against strong criticism. By his own admission he was not well educated in the "learning of schools" and his unfortunate practice of distorting passages of scripture in order to support his argument led to his work being largely dismissed by his contemporaries and then disregarded by later generations. While we too can easily dismiss his eccentric notions which seem to be more the product of pious daydreaming than any kind of scientific investigation or empirical observation, on closer inspection there is another rather more interesting side to Cosmas.

Thirty years before writing his book, Cosmas had led a life very different from the serene austerity of a desert cloister. Cosmas Indicopleustes actually means "Cosmas the India Voyager" and back then the monk was a merchant who had traveled extensively around the coasts of the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. Buried deep under ten volumes of questionable scholarship which comprises the bulk of his Topology we find a surprising and particularly lucid account of his travels to these countries. This eleventh volume bears little relationship to the earlier parts of the book and it is thought to have been excerpted from another larger work of his on geography which has, sadly, been lost.

While its known that the Roman world engaged in trade with the Indian subcontinent, Cosmas offers us one of the only authentic eyewitness accounts. A close reading indicates that he had considerable local knowledge of the regions he describes and there is little doubt that he actually visited these places rather than merely relating second-hand information.

He begins his geographical treatise by describing the unusual flora and fauna of Africa and Asia. Here are some excerpts:

Rhinoceros
This animal is called the rhinoceros from having horns upon his snout. When he is walking his horns are mobile, but when he sees anything to move his rage, he erects them and they become so rigid that they are strong enough to tear up even trees by the root, those especially which come right before him. His eyes are placed low down near his jaws. He is altogether a fearful animal, and he is somehow hostile to the elephant. His feet and his skin, however, closely resemble those of the elephant. His skin, when dried, is four fingers thick, and this some people put, instead of iron, in the plough, and with it plough the land.

The Ethiopians in their own dialect call the rhinoceros Arou, or Harisi, aspirating the alpha of the latter word, and adding risi. By the arou they designate the beast as such, and by arisi, ploughing, giving him this name from his shape about the nostrils, and also from the use to which his hide is turned. In Ethiopia I once saw a live rhinoceros while I was standing at a far distance, and I saw also the skin of a dead one stuffed with chaff, standing in the royal palace, and so I have been able to draw him accurately.

The accuracy of Cosmas' drawing of the rhinoceros leaves a fair bit to be desired but apparently the word arou that he gives as the name of the two-horned rhinoceros is still used in Ethiopia to this day.

Dog chow for brekky

2003-10-08T10:15:00.000+10:00

As I implied in an earlier post I have been working on software that will enable me to manage my own website. This software is part of a suite of products that we're developing at Lagado which covers things like content management and site maintenance and goes all the way through to publishing to web or print.

So it's tad ironic that Laputan Logic has up to now been maintained using someone else's code. I'm not complaining about Blogger which I think has improved dramatically of late¹ but I've been thinking it's high time that I start to practice what I preach or, to borrow some industry parlance, its time to start eating my own dog food.

New developments to follow shortly...

¹ - okay, okay, I'll admit it was pretty rugged before that.

Update on the Third Buddha

2003-10-02T01:52:00.000+10:00

It now appears that Japanese archaeologists are also on the case to find the missing third Bamiyan Buddha. This looks like it's heating up to be a race to see who finds it first.

My bet is that the only thing left to find will be its stone foundations.

Japanese team to probe Bamiyan

A team of Japanese experts departed Saturday afternoon for Afghanistan on a mission to search for an image of a supine Buddha in Bamiyan.

The team will attempt to confirm the existence of the supine Buddha that is rumored to be located somewhere in the region by using high-tech devices such as radar capable of locating buried artifacts.

Xuanzang (602-664), a Chinese Buddhist monk, described the artifact in his book "The Records of the Western Regions of the Great Tang Dynasty": "Inside a Buddhist temple located about 10 kilometers from the palace, there is a statue of Buddha in a state of passing into nirvana. The image of the supine Buddha is as long as 300 meters."

He also wrote in his book: "There is a stone image of a standing Buddha carved into the mountainside northeast of the palace. Shining in gold, and adorned with jewelry, the statue stands about 45 meters tall. To the east of the temple, stands another statue of a 30-meter-tall Buddha made with brass."

The statues he described in the book are believed to be the two Buddha statues that were destroyed by Afghanistan's former Taliban rulers in March 2001.

The research team considers that the description of the statues in Xuanzang's book is highly accurate, and the information concerning the existence of a supine Buddha is credible. It is believed that the palace and the temple are buried underground. No fact-finding probes have been conducted of the area due to the country's protracted conflicts.

The project to probe for the image of the supine Buddha was commissioned by Japan's National Research Institute for Cultural Properties. Eight researchers mainly from the institute will examine the area from Monday through Oct. 22.

The research team will use a ground-penetrating radar to determine the location of buried items and hollows under the ground, allowing the team to determine the size of the entire archaeological site before excavating it.

The radar emits electromagnetic waves into the ground using an antenna that can detect energy emitted from buried objects.

Researchers will use the radar at about 50-meter intervals over a 1.3-kilometer area from east to west, as well as 300 meters north-south of the two destroyed statues.

The image of the supine Buddha is believed to be located between the two statues.

"I don't think the image of the supine is as big as Xuanzang described in his book. It will probably be about 30 meters long, not 300 meters as he described," said Kazuya Yamauchi, the team's chief researcher.

Yamauchi said if the statue was as long as 300 meters, it should already have been discovered.

"I'm worried about whether the radar can detect the statue underground if it's not that big," he said.

The possibility that the image of the supine Buddha remains in the same condition as Xuanzang saw it in the 7th century is low, and it is highly probable that even if it is discovered, it will be damaged to some extent.

"If we succeed in discovering traces of the site, it will definitely be the key to finding out more about the former Bamiyan kingdom," Yamauchi said.

"The statue of the image of the supine Buddha will attract international attention, and it's a dream for those engaged in archaeology. I hope the Japanese research team can discover it," said Kosaku Yamada, professor emeritus of Wako University...
[link]

...before the French do.

Blogger Trick

2003-10-01T16:59:00.000+10:00

Yes, yes, we all know that Moveable Type is the way to go etc. although to be frank I'm telling you right now I'm not going to install any software to manage my blog that I didn't write myself. This is something that is definitely on the cards for some day soon but in the meantime for those few people who are so uncool as to be still using the venerable Blogger I thought I'd share a little thing that I learnt the other day which may be of interest...

For quite a while now I have been running in the right hand column a list of the headings for the posts that appear on the page (see the "Heads Up" list). This I think is a convenient indicator for people to quickly see what has changed or to spot something they may have missed. Any way I like it and all the groovy MT blogs have a "recent posts" list a bit like this by default.

Originally I implemented this feature in Javascript and it used the DOM (Document Object Model) to traverse the HTML tree in order to locate each heading, if present, or the first sentence of the post if not.

since then, however, the New version Blogger has implemented titles for posts as a built-in feature. To enable it go to:

Settings > Formatting > Show Title Field

Once enabled a new field labelled title appears in the post editor. To make it appear in your posts you need to add something like following to your template:

    <Blogger>

       ... heading stuff goes here

       <BlogItemTitle><p><b><$BlogItemTitle$></b></p></BlogItemTitle>

       ... body stuff goes here

     </Blogger>

So now you have titles for your posts and that's all well and good but one thing I didn't realise until now was that more than one of these <Blogger> blocks is allowed to appear within in a template. This enabled me to create a list of headings for my right column simply by adding the following to my template:

    <Blogger><BlogItemTitle><div><a href="#<$BlogItemNumber$>"><$BlogItemTitle$></a></div></BlogItemTitle></Blogger>

The best thing about this is that I can now pull out a whole bunch of Javascript that I no longer have to maintain. The page should load somewhat faster as well.

Hopefully someone else will find this of use.

Cordoba

2003-10-01T10:27:00.000+10:00

“olé.”
Used to express excited approval.
noun: A cry of “olé.”
etymology: Spanish, perhaps from Arabic wa-llh, by God! (used as an expression of admiration) : wa-, and; see w in Appendix II + allh, God; see Allah.
-- American Heritage Dictionary

When I visited Spain a few years ago, the place that I loved the most of all was Cordoba.

This is a city that apart from its relaxed atmosphere, its food and its flamenco exudes history from every corner and leaves you with the impression that it's built a bit like a layer-cake made up of different historical epochs, one on top of each other, each one just as remarkable and interesting as the next.

The notion is best exemplified by the magnificent of architecture of the Mesquita, a beautiful former mosque that was once the largest of its kind in the world. This building recalls a time when Cordoba was the capital of the Caliphate of Cordoba, a western arab emirate that had broken free from the rule of the Abbasid Caliphate based in Bagdad.

In tenth century Cordoba it was said:

When Allah was furnishing the empty shell of the world, al-Andalus petitioned for five blessings:

clear skies,

a beautiful sea bountifully stocked with fish,

trees hung with fruit,

fair women,

and a just government.

Allah granted all but the last wish, reasoning that if all the others were given a proper government, al-Andalus might rival Paradise.

A little history is in order if you want to fully understand the amazing scope of the Mezquita. The original Mosque was built in 785-787, soon after the Moorish conquest of 711. Abd al Rahman I wanted his mosque built quickly, so they used recycled materials from the former Visigoth church and ancient roman temple formerly on the site - thus many of the more than 850 columns are of slightly different heights or materials, and they compensated by slightly burying them or raising them on pedestals to make the columns uniform. The columns support the amazing double arches, which dominate the inside of the mosque. The bottom arches connect the columns, while the top arches support the roof. The red-and-white color is a result of the building materials used - sandstone (white) and brick (red). The brick was used for two reasons - not only is it cheaper than stone, but it also allows for some give and movement in the case of earthquakes. Later, the Mosque was expanded several times by Moorish leaders, each time to accommodate the growing Moslem population of Córdoba. The 10th Century expansion included the building of the Mihrab, the magnificent prayer niche whose sea-shell shape provided microphone-like acoustics. During that renovation, the powers-that-be wanted to show their wealth and power by making arches of pure sandstone, and just painting them with the brick pattern so they would match - a bad move, since this was the area of the mosque that was most damaged by earthquakes in later centuries.

The final major renovation of the Mosque was the most destructive, but it also lead to its current role - Roman Catholic Church. After the Christians re-conquered Córdoba, a small Christian chapel was built in the Mudéjar style in 1371. But the Bishop of Córdoba wasn't satisfied, and he wanted to show the full strength and glory of the Church, so he petitioned to Charles II (against the wished of many other church leaders in Córdoba) for permission to build a cathedral within the walls of the Mezquita. Having never seen the Mezquita for himself, Charles said "sure, the church is strong, go for it" (or something like that) and allowed the bishop to knock out dozens of arches smack dab in the middle of mosque and start construction on the cathedral. A few years later, when Charles II traveled to Córdoba to marry Isabella, he saw the Mezquita with his own eyes for the first time. He realized his mistake in letting the bishop cajole him into allowing the destruction of such amazing architecture, but it was far too late. It took 200 years (and therefore encompasses a wide variety of architectural styles, from Renaissance to Baroque) but the cathedral-within-a-mosque turned out pretty good, in the end. Although it is a shame that so much was destroyed, the exquisite decorations in wood, marble, and gold are simply breathtaking.

[moor]

...or really really trashy if you want my honest opinion.

Charles himself had complained that the conversion of the Mesquita to a baroque cathedral had destroyed "something unique to build something commonplace.''. Oh well, just another layer to Cordoba's layer-cake, I suppose.

Any way, it shouldn't be too surprising to discover that buried under the layers of Christian and Moorish architecture that Roman Cordoba was not just some second-rate provincial capital either but was in fact an imperial city of great prestige and pretention:

Discovered: Europe's biggest amphitheatre after the Coliseum
Archaeologists in the Spanish city of Cordoba have uncovered beneath the university's old veterinary faculty Europe's biggest Roman amphitheatre after the Coliseum.

The find, considered to be "of transcendental importance", dates from the first century AD, when Corduba, as it was then known, was the provincial capital of Betica, today's Andalusia, in imperial Hispania. "We initially thought it was a circus, the circular arena the Romans used for horse races and chariot rides," says Desiderio Vaquerizo, professor of architecture at Cordoba University. "But we discovered it was an immense oval amphitheatre - 178m by 145m and up to 20m high - that would have been used for gladiatorial contests and other bloodthirsty spectacles." The find reveals Cordoba as an imperial city built in Rome's image.

"The amphitheatre shows that Cordoba symbolised Rome's authority in the west: it was the setting for imperial ceremonies, the place where the emperor showed himself to the plebs and displayed all his power and authority before up to 50,000 spectators," Mr Vaquerizo told The Independent yesterday.

Less than one tenth of the arena is visible, but archaeologists plan to uncover one sixth of it - 2,000 square metres - in coming years.

The rest of the vast stadium - bigger, more sophisticated and elegant, than even that at Italica outside Seville - is likely to remain buried under buildings piled on over the centuries.

In bloodsoaked contests popular between the first and fourth centuries, gladiators were set against each other, or against lions or other wild beasts, or - with the huge space flooded with water - engaged in gigantic naval battles.

Archaeologists have found a plaque marking the seats reserved for a prominent Cordoban family honoured by imperial Rome. They also found 20 carved gravestones of fallen gladiators, the biggest such collection outside Rome, prompting experts to conclude that Cordoba was an important training school for gladiators. "Combatants were between 20 and 25, and their comrades, their concubines or their families carved epigraphs on stone tablets laid on the graves where the fallen were buried inside the amphitheatre," Mr Vaquerizo explained.

The inscriptions record the category of the gladiator, his victories, the laurels and prizes awarded, and the age he died.

Cordoba's amphitheatre was abandoned in the 4th century, when Emperor Constantine, influenced by Christianity, banned the murderous sports as immoral.

Then in 711, Muslims originally from Damascus occupied Cordoba and for the next 200 years built an entire neighbourhood upon the handsome curved terraces, plundering the stonework for buildings of their own. "The discovery is of transcendental importance for the city. It recovers the importance of Roman games, a key aspect of popular daily life," Mr Vaquerizo said. It shows the continuity of mass spectator sports from the Roman empire to today's fiestas and bullfights.

"The bullring originated in an amphitheatre; it is the historical thread linking today's popular fiestas to ancient times."

The university and the city authorities plan to turn the site into an archaeological park.
[link]

That last remark is so true, the other theme of Cordoba (and of the former Roman provinces generally) is one of continuity. This point was really brought home to me when I visited the ancient city of Nimes in Southern France, home to the best preserved Roman coliseum in the world.

Today it serves as a bull-ring.

13th Century tablet could lead to lost archives of Ramses II

2003-10-01T09:10:00.000+10:00

The discovery of a stone tablet detailing diplomatic ties between the ancient Egyptians and Hittites in the 13th Century BC could be the key to the lost archives of Ramses II, according to archaeologists.

Discovered at Qantir 120 kilometres north-east of Cairo, the tablet dates back to the time of the ancient Egyptian pharaoh, Ramses II (1298-1235 BC) and confirms his capital, Pi-Ramses, was in the Nile Delta.

"Its the first time that such a written record has been found in the capital of Ramses II, which confirms the location of Pi-Ramses," Mohammad Abdul Aksud, director of antiquities in the Delta region told AFP.

Although small and badly preserved, the tablet takes the form of an 11-line letter sent by the central Anatolian Hittite court to that of Ramses II, Mr Aksud said, which "could lead us to the lost archives of Ramses II".

It was found by a team of German archaeologists, lead by Egyptologist Edgar Pusch, secretary-general of Egypt's Supreme Council for Antiquities, Zahi Hawass told AFP.

It dates from shortly after the Egyptian and Hittite empires made peace in 1278 after years of war, Mr Hawass added.

The tablet is written in cuneiform script, invented in about 3,300 BC by the Sumerians and used throughout the Middle East until the first century AD.

Quoting Pusch, Hawass told AFP it was comparable to another tablet written in cuneiform found in Turkey and others found at Tell Al-Amarna, in southern Egypt.

Tell Al-Amarna was capital during the time of Akhenaton (1372-1354 BC), remembered in history for having switched his kingdom to monotheism with the worship of the one sun god, Aton.

The tablets found there show the earliest diplomatic correspondence ever discovered.

The Qantir tablet may be followed by the discovery of a temple in the same region, where Ramses II built his capital.

Ramses II married a Hittite princess to shore up peace with the central Anatolian empire, so he could concentrate on the threat posed in Mesopotamia, where the Assyrian empire was bent on conquest. [link]

The Complete "An Interview with Carver Mead"

2003-09-25T14:49:00.000+10:00

Back in November I blogged about an interview with Carver Mead conducted by the American Spectator.

As I have mentioned before, Mead makes some pretty interesting points about the sorry state of obscurantism that typifies our current interpretation of quantum mechanics. This is something he blames largely on Neils Bohr and the Copenhagen school. Einstein was never happy with the Copenhagen formulation which he thought represented an incomplete understanding of nature at the quantum scale.

Mead agrees with Einstein and goes on to claim that a lot of the confusion and counter-intuitiveness of quantum mechanics would go away if we stopped imagining elementary particles like electrons and protons as tiny points and instead saw them as waves with a boundary. Of course it helps to have already had a stellar career in solid-state physics under your belt before you start kicking around scientific giants of the likes of Neils Bohr.

Any way, this post has since generated quite a lot of interest and it is still a major source of Google referrals to this site. But some time after blogging this, the American Spectator took the article offline and unforgivably broke my link so I tried to cobble together enough of the interview from the bits and pieces I could find on the net. The result was less than perfect and had large chunks missing from it.

But you'll be happy to know that I didn't give up. Using my finely honed googling skills and a strong commitment to web archaeology, I have finally been able to reconstruct the complete interview from the digital equivalent of a collection of smashed cuneiform tablets and some hurriedly copied manuscripts (some in Greek). The result is undoubtedly the most authorative version of the interview extant anywhere on the web today!

So without further adieu, please allow me to present for your reading pleasure the complete and definitive "An Interview with Carver Mead". Enjoy.

Once upon a time, Caltech's Richard Feyman, Nobel Laureate leader of the last great generation of physicists, threw down the gauntlet to anyone rash enough to doubt the fundamental weirdness, the quark-bosonmuon-strewn amusement park landscape of late 20th century quantum physics. "Things on a very small scale behave like nothing you have direct experience about. They do not behave like waves. They do not behave like particles… or like anything you have ever seen get used to it." Carver Mead never has.

As Gordon and Betty Moore Professor of Engineering and Applied Science at Caltech, Mead was Feynman’s student, colleague and collaborator, as well as Silicon Valley’s physicist in residence and leading intellectual. He picks up Feynman’s challenge in a new book, Collective Electrodynamics (MIT Press), declaring that a physics that does not make sense, that defies human intuition, is obscurantist: It balks thought and intellectual progress. It blocks the light of the age.

In a career of nearly half a century that has made him the microchip industry’s most influential and creative academic, Mead is best known as inventor of a crucial high frequency transistor, author of dominant chip design techniques, progenitor of the movement toward dynamically programmable logic chips, and most recently developer of radical advances in machine-aided perception. In 1999, he won the half-million dollar MIT-Lemelson award for innovation. But any list of accomplishments underrates Mead’s role as the most important practical scientist of the late twentieth century. He is now emerging as the boldest theoretical physicist of the twenty-first.

Perhaps more than any other man, Mead has spent his professional life working on intimate terms with matter at the atomic and subatomic levels. He spent ten years exploring the intricacies of quantum tunneling and tunnel diodes, the first electronic devices based on an exclusively quantum process. Unlike most analysts, Mead does not regard tunneling as a mysterious movement of particles through impenetrable barriers. He sees it as an intelligible wave phenomenon, resembling on the microcosmic level the movement of radio waves through walls.

While pursuing these researches, Mead responded to a query from Intel-founder Gordon Moore about the possible size of microelectronic devices. Mead provided the empirical analysis behind Moore’s law (predicting a doubling of computer power every 18 months). When single chips held only tens of transistors, he showed that in due course tens of millions would be feasible. In collaboration with Feynman, Mead also developed a definitive course on the physics of computation that has yielded a minor industry of books and tapes and imitators. After a year in Coblenz with Nobel-prize winning physicist-turned-biologist Max Delbruck, Mead pursued a lifelong multi-disciplinary interest in the physics of neural systems. His researches on the human retina led to his invention of the revolutionary Foveon camera that achieves resolution and verisimilitude in cheap silicon superior to the best silver halide films. His study of the cochlea has informed the creation of unique directional hearing aids, produced by Sonic Innovations of Salt Lake City.

Now, in the opening years of the new millennium, Mead believes that it is time to clear up the philosophical and practical confusion of contemporary physics. He revisits the debate between the Copenhagen interpreters of quantum physics—Niels Bohr, Alfred Heisenberg, John von Neumann, Richard Feynman—and the skeptics, principally Albert Einstein and Erwin Schrodinger. Pointing to a series of experiments from the world of microelectronic and photonic technology that still lay in the future when Bohr prevailed in his debates with Einstein, Mead rectifies an injustice and awards a posthumous victory to Einstein.

During a lifetime in the trenches of the semiconductor industry, Mead developed a growing uneasiness about the “standard model” that supposedly governed his field. Mead did not see his electrons and photons as random or incoherent. He regarded the concept of the “point particle” as an otiose legacy from the classical era. Early photodetectors or Geiger counters may have provided both visual and auditory testimony that photons were point particles, but the particulate click coarsely concealed a measurable wave.

Central to Mead’s rescue project are a series of discoveries inconsistent with the prevailing conceptions of quantum mechanics. One was the laser. As late as 1956, Bohr and Von Neumann, the paragons of quantum theory, arrived at the Columbia laboratories of Charles Townes, who was in the process of describing his invention. With the transistor, the laser is one of the most important inventions of the twentieth century. Designed into every CD player and long distance telephone connection, lasers today are manufactured by the billions. At the heart of laser action is perfect alignment of the crests and troughs of myriad waves of light. Their location and momentum must be theoretically knowable. But this violates the holiest canon of Copenhagen theory: Heisenberg Uncertainty. Bohr and Von Neumann proved to be true believers in Heisenberg’s rule. Both denied that the laser was possible. When Townes showed them one in operation, they retreated artfully.

In Collective Electrodynamics, Mead cites nine other experimental discoveries, from superconductive currents to masers, to Bose-Einstein condensates predicted by Einstein but not demonstrated until 1995. These discoveries of large-scale, coherent quantum phenomena all occurred after Bohr’s triumph over Einstein.

Mead does not banish the mystery from science. He declares that physics is vastly farther away from a fundamental grasp of nature than many of the current exponents of a grand unified theory imagine. But he believes he can explain the nature of the famous mysteries of quantum science, from the two slit experiment where “particles” go through two holes at once to the perplexities of “entanglement,” where action on a quantum entity at one point of the universe can affect entities at other remote points at speeds faster than the speed of light. In his new interpretation, quantum physics is united with electromagnetism and the venerable Maxwell Equations are found to be dispensable.

But Mead does not bow humbly before all of Einstein’s conceptions. He dismisses the photoelectric effect as an artifact of early twentieth century apparatus. He also believes that General Relativity conceals more than it illuminates about gravitation. “All the important details are smoothed over by Einstein’s curvature of space time.” Gravity remains shrouded in mystery.

We arrived at Mead’s house in Woodside, high above Silicon Valley. It is a modernistic aerie with hardwood floors and cathedral ceilings, perched on the precipitous slopes of the Los Altos Hills. The dense stands of surrounding redwood trees, concealing the valley below, make for a cathedral outside as well as in. We found him eager to discuss his theories and his Promethean book. A short lithe man with a small beard and a taste for undulatory rainbow shirts, Carver speaks with quiet authority, quirky humor and a gentle but inexorable persuasiveness. He conveys the sense that during his fifty years of immersion in technology he has made electrons and photons his friends, and he knows they would never indulge in the outrageous, irrational behavior ascribed to them by physicists. In the process, he is also implicitly coming to the defense of reason, science, history, culture, human dignity and free will.

You open your new book with a dramatic statement. “It is my firm belief that the last seven decades of the twentieth century will be characterized in history as the dark ages of theoretical physics.” Can you explain that?

Modern science began with mechanics, and in some ways we are still captive to its ideas and images. Newton’s success in deriving the planetary orbits from his law of gravitation became the paradigm. To Niels Bohr early in this century, when the quantum theory was invented, the atom was thought of as a miniature solar system, with a nucleus as the sun and electrons as planets. Then, out of the struggle to understand the atom came quantum mechanics. Bohr gathered the early contributors into a clan in Copenhagen, and he encouraged them to believe that they were developing the ultimate theory of nature. He argued vigorously against any opponents.

Among whom was Albert Einstein. He had already scored a triumph with relativity theory by that time. But the history books tell us that he lost the argument with Bohr. Can you explain their dispute? And why do you now award the verdict to Einstein?

Bohr insisted that the laws of physics, at the most fundamental level, are statistical in nature. Physical reality consisted at its base of statistical probabilities governed by Heisenberg uncertainty. Bohr saw these uncertainties as intrinsic to reality itself, and he and his followers enshrined that belief in what came to be known as the “Copenhagen interpretation” of quantum theory. By contrast Einstein famously argued that “the Lord does not throw dice.” He believed that electrons were real and he wrote, in 1949, that he was “firmly convinced that the essentially statistical character of contemporary quantum theory is solely to be ascribed to the fact that this [theory] operates with an incomplete description of physical systems.”

So how did Bohr and the others come to think of nature as ultimately random, discontinuous?

They took the limitations of their cumbersome experiments as evidence for the nature of reality. Using the crude equipment of the early twentieth century, it’s amazing that physicists could get any significant results at all. So I have enormous respect for the people who were able to discern anything profound from these experiments. If they had known about the coherent quantum systems that are commonplace today, they wouldn’t have thought of using statistics as the foundation for physics.

Statistics in this sense means what?

That an electron is either here, or there, or some other place, and all you can know is the probability that it is in one place or the other. Bohr ended up saying that the only statements you can make at the fundamental level are statistical. You cannot grasp the reality itself, only probabilities related to it. They really, really, wanted to have the last word, and the only word they had was statistical. So they made their limitations the last word, saying, “Okay, the only knowledge that there is down deep is statistical knowledge. That’s all we can know.” That’s a very dangerous thing to say. It is always possible to gain a deeper understanding as time progresses. But they carried the day.

What about Schrodinger? Back in the 1920s, didn’t he say something like what you are saying now?

That’s right. He felt that he could develop a wave theory of the electron that could explain how all this worked. But Bohr was more into “principles”: the uncertainty principle, the exclusion principle—this, that, and the other. He was very much into the postulational mode. But Schrodinger thought that a continuum theory of the electron could be successful. So he went to Copenhagen to work with Bohr. He felt that it was a matter of getting a “political” consensus; you know, this is a historic thing that is happening. But whenever Schrodinger tried to talk, Bohr would raise his voice and bring up all these counter-examples. Basically he shouted him down.

It sounds like vanity.

Of course. It was a period when physics was full of huge egos. It was still going on when I got into the field. But it doesn’t make sense, and it isn’t the way science works in the long run. It may forestall people from doing sensible work for a long time, which is what happened. They ended up derailing conceptual physics for the next 70 years.

Let’s take a break—tell us a little about how you came to physics.

I was fortunate enough to get introduced to electricity at an early age, and I fell in love with it. By the age of six I was comfortable with all kinds of electrical phenomena.

So practice took precedence over theory?

Yes, but I wanted the theory to understand it. And that took time. But I never lost that intuitive grasp from having actually worked with it.

Tell us about your early life.

I was born in 1934 and grew up in California. We lived in a place called Big Creek, halfway between Yosemite and King’s Canyon, up in the Sierra country. A lot of snow falls on those mountains during the winter, and in the spring it runs off. Around the turn of the century they built a series of dams and power plants up there, the Big Creek Project. As late as World War II, it supplied about 90 percent of the power for Los Angeles. It was a marvelous way to grow up because I learned about electricity just by being around it. It was everywhere. My father worked in the power plant, and he taught me as best he could.

You lived near the plant?

We had these places called camps, which were a group of homes around the power plant. Originally they were tents for the construction workers. When I was 12, a guy who was a ham radio operator moved in. My uncle had gotten me started on radio, but then he went off to the war—he worked in Britain on the radar project. Anyway, this guy had a background in electronics and he was willing to teach me what he knew. That was just as the war was ending, so there was all this war-surplus electronics on the market, dirt cheap. With the little bits of money that a kid could earn, I could buy piles of electronics, and try to figure out what they were and why they were that way and how I could modify them. That was how I got my start—you could afford to do experiments, because the stuff was so cheap. You could build up equipment and try things, just to see what happened.

Where did you go to school?

Between two of the camps, way back in the woods, we had a little school. Twenty kids for all eight grades. There was one teacher through 4th grade and then it became a two-teacher school. My grandmother lived in Fresno in the Central Valley. They had a better high school, so I lived with her and went to high school there. Then I interviewed to go to Caltech and I remained there for my whole career.

What about the power plant?

Oh, there were things in the power plant that were just awesome. In the generator there’s this big wheel going around with these coils of wire, and this cascading water coming down two thousand feet through these great pipes and rushing through turbines. On the other side, there are these one-inch diameter cables, going down to Los Angeles. As a kid, I would watch them bring a new unit on line. The generator has huge inertia, but almost no friction, so you have to be really careful. You let a little water through and the rotation accelerates. Its speed comes up and up, governed by this instrument called a syncroscope that looks at the relative phase [timing of the troughs and crests of the wave of electricity] on the grid, and the voltage from the generator. Nobody ever gets those phases exactly right, but if you miss by much, the whole power plant goes boom—the difference in phase is enough to shear off the huge bolts, six inches in diameter, that bind the generator to the floor of the power plant. So electricity may be invisible, but it is powerful stuff; it’s not invisible really. It’s just invisible in the way we normally look at things.

So early on you knew that electrons were real.

The electrons were real, the voltages were real, the phase of the sine-wave was real, the current was real. These were real things. They were just as real as the water going down through the pipes. You listen to the technology, and you know that these things are totally real, and totally intuitive.

But they’re also waves, right? Then what are they waving in?

It’s interesting, isn’t it? That has hung people up ever since the time of Clerk Maxwell, and it’s the missing piece of intuition that we need to develop in young people. The electron isn’t the disturbance of something else. It is its own thing. The electron is the thing that’s wiggling, and the wave is the electron. It is its own medium. You don’t need something for it to be in, because if you did it would be buffeted about and all messed up. So the only pure way to have a wave is for it to be its own medium. The electron isn’t something that has a fixed physical shape. Waves propagate outwards, and they can be large or small. That’s what waves do.

So how big is an electron?

It expands to fit the container it’s in. That may be a positive charge that’ s attracting it—a hydrogen atom—or the walls of a conductor. A piece of wire is a container for electrons. They simply fill out the piece of wire. That’s what all waves do. If you try to gather them into a smaller space, the energy level goes up. That’s what these Copenhagen guys call the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. But there’s nothing uncertain about it. It’s just a property of waves. Confine them, and you have more wavelengths in a given space, and that means a higher frequency and higher energy. But a quantum wave also tends to go to the state of lowest energy, so it will expand as long as you let it. You can make an electron that’s ten feet across, there’s no problem with that. It’s its own medium, right? And it gets to be less and less dense as you let it expand. People regularly do experiments with neutrons that are a foot across.

A ten-foot electron! Amazing!

It could be a mile. The electrons in my superconducting magnet are that long.

A mile-long electron! That alters our picture of the world—most people’s minds think about atoms as tiny solar systems.

Right, that’s what I was brought up on—this little grain of something. Now it’s true that if you take a proton and you put it together with an electron, you get something that we call a hydrogen atom. But what that is, in fact, is a self-consistent solution of the two waves interacting with each other. They want to be close together because one’s positive and the other is negative, and when they get closer that makes the energy lower. But if they get too close they wiggle too much and that makes the energy higher. So there’s a place where they are just right, and that’s what determines the size of the hydrogen atom. And that optimum is a self-consistent solution of the Schrodinger equation.

So much for the idea of the quantum world as microscopic...

Bohr and his followers had this notion that you got to the quantum world only when things were very small. Well that’s because the only thing they knew that exhibited quantum characteristics was an atom. They said, “Well, an atom is so small, we’ll never see one.” Now, it turns out, people have put atoms in cavitie,s and you can see a single atom perfectly well. That experiment has been done many times now. In fact, if you do it properly, you can make atoms totally coherent. Do that with a lot of them, and you get Bose-Einstein condensate—a bunch of atoms in phase that act like one big matter wave. It was first demonstrated in 1995 by Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman in Colorado.

The early experiments that dealt with things like black-body radiation and light passing though double slits—couldn’t they detect those effects?

The experiments on which the conceptual foundations of quantum mechanics were based were extremely crude by modern standards. The detectors available—Geiger counters, cloud chambers, and photographic film—had a high degree of randomness built in, and, by their very nature, could register only statistical results. The atomic sources were similarly constrained—large ensembles of atoms, with no mechanism for achieving phase coherence. Understandably, the experiments that could be imagined were all of a statistical sort.

The most famous of those experiments involved a “single” photon that somehow succeeded in going through two holes at once.

That uses a point-particle model for the “photon”—a little bullet carrying energy. If you define the problem this way, of course, you get nonsense. Garbage in, garbage out.

So how should we think of a photon?

John Cramer at the University of Washington was one of the first to describe it as a transaction between two atoms. At the end of his book, Schrodinger’s Kittens and the Search for Reality, John Gribbin gives a nice overview of Cramer’s interpretation and says that “with any luck at all it will supercede the Copenhagen interpretation as the standard way of thinking about quantum physics for the next generation of scientists.”

So that transaction is itself a wave?

The field that describes that transaction is a wave, that’s right.

So how about “Schrodinger’s cat”—the thought experiment he proposed to illustrate the impossible conundrum of quantum theory. The cat is in a closed box, with a quantum-based trigger that either does or does not release poison. Gribbin summarizes the standard Copenhagen view of the situation: “Neither of the two possibilities has any reality unless it is observed.” So is the cat dead or alive? The standard quantum-theory answer—we’re quoting Gribbin again—would be: “The cat has neither been killed nor not been killed until we look inside the box to see what happened.” In other words, reality is observer-dependent.

That is probably the biggest misconception that has come out of the Copenhagen view. The idea that the observation of some event makes it somehow more “real” became entrenched in the philosophy of quantum mechanics, and, like the other misconceptions, is said to be confirmed by experiment. Even the slightest reflection will show how silly it is. An observer is an assembly of atoms. What is different about the observer’s atoms from those of any other object? What if the data are taken by computer? Do the events not happen until the scientist gets home from vacation and looks at the printout? It is ludicrous!

Gribbin goes on to describe an experiment with entangled photons, which shows quantum entities affecting one another at long distances with no passage of time. He says this “proves that there is no underlying reality to the world.”

That is the experiment proposed by John Bell, the late Irish physicist, and done in its most definitive form by John Clauser—I’m currently in discussion with him about his fascinating findings. But the results say nothing whatsoever about what is and is not real.

In your book, you ambitiously redraw the boundaries of physics. In the “dark age” of the last 70 years, you say, a fundamental distinction was drawn between classical physics—mechanics, electricity and magnetism—and modern physics, consisting of quantum theory and relativity. Bohr connected the two with his “correspondence principle.” What was that?

That was one of the big mistakes they made. They wanted the quantum domain to approximate the classical Newtonian world. And it simply doesn’t. But Bohr believed that if you picked a limit where there are enough wavelengths, everything would average out to the same result you get from Newtonian physics.

So by “correspondence,” he meant a correspondence between the quantum world and the larger Newtonian world?

Yes. And that was the wrong assumption. When you get to coherent quantum systems, they don’t have a Newtonian limit at all. Coherent quantum systems “scale” in a way that is entirely different.

You propose dividing physics into “coherent” and “incoherent” systems. What’ s the difference?

Okay. The quantum world is a world of waves, not particles. So we have to think of electron waves and proton waves and so on. Matter is “incoherent” when all its waves have a different wavelength, implying a different momentum. On the other hand, if you take a pure quantum system—the electrons in a superconducting magnet, or the atoms in a laser—they are all in phase with one another, and they demonstrate the wave nature of matter on a large scale. Then you can see quite visibly what matter is down at its heart.

Perhaps we can compare it to water in a bathtub. If you “reinforce” the bath water at the right moment, a big wave will suddenly slosh out onto the floor. That is the macro equivalent of what you are describing. But when the little wavelets lap against one another, then not much happens—incoherence, in other words. Is that right?

That’s right. In the coherent system, the waves are all in phase. But now, instead of water, let’s think of something solid, say a billiard ball. A billiard ball is an incoherent mixture of lots of little matter “waves” that are interfering with one another all the time.

But to our everyday understanding, on the “macro” level, a billiard ball is also “coherent” in the usual sense of that word. It obeys Newton’s laws, for example. Throw it with a certain velocity and we can predict where it will land.

Right, but that is a different sense of the word. As I describe them, coherent and incoherent systems are dominated by different sets of physical laws. With the incoherent systems that we see all around us, time is one-directional. And things that come apart don’t spontaneously come together again. And the inertia—of the billiard ball, for example—increases linearly with the number of atoms. With coherent systems, on the other hand, time is two-directional, and inertia increases with the square of the number of elements. In a superconducting magnet, the electron inertia increases with the square of the number of electrons. That’s foreign to Newtonian thinking, which is why Feynman had trouble with it. A coherent system is not more real, but it is much more pure and fundamental.

Can we finesse this business about time going backwards and forwards? Understanding quantum physics is hard enough as it is! When Bohr proposed the correspondence principle, he wanted to keep a single set of laws: “As above, so below.” And yes, in the microcosm, when things are jumbled up and “incoherent,” it does approximate the physics of the macro-world. But under appropriate conditions—what you term coherence—the micro-world seems to operates in a quite different way?

Right—Bohr put his foot on the wrong stone, the Newtonian side rather than the quantum side. The underlying reason is that Newtonian physics was phrased in terms of things like position and momentum and force which are all characteristics of particles. Bohr was wedded to particles.

Are coherence and incoherence absolutes—can something be “a little bit pregnant?”

Yes, it can be. Light from an ordinary fluorescent bulb has a certain amount of coherence, but light from incandescent bulbs has almost none. With coherence, all the waves have a common phase. When they’re out of phase you get all these fringes and interference patterns.

“Coherence” seems comparable to electricity—it has existed forever, and we could see it in the sky as lightning, but only in the nineteenth century were we able to harness it. And only recently have we been able to harness coherent phenomena.

Right. And once we have harnessed them in the laboratory, and begin to understand them, we can start to see them in the universe around us. There are increasing indications that many of the objects in the universe have coherent things going on in them. There are known to be masers in the atmospheres of some stars. It’s now thought that a lot of the beaming of pulsars has to do with laser-like action. That’s just surmised from the actions of these very mysterious objects—mysterious within the normal realm of incoherent physics. The universe is probably full of coherent physics.

That brings us back to Einstein—experimental results continue to vindicate his viewpoint, no?

The Bose-Einstein condensate, for example, or the quantum hall effect, or the superconducting quantum interference device—I list ten of them in my book, beginning in the mid-1930s and going up through 1995. Not many of your readers will have heard of them. But most people know what lasers and superconductors are, and they demonstrate nature acting in ways that Bohr and Heisenberg did not anticipate—a coherent state. Unfortunately, it was not until the 1960s that those results became widely known. So Einstein didn ’t have that information. He predicted coherent phenomena, but he didn’t have a single example that he could actually get his hands on.

So orthodoxy won the day.

And after Bohr defeated Einstein, nobody else would take on the argument. Because if they put Einstein under, think what they would do to you.

And yet it all turned on some very open questions...

Einstein’s basic point was that unpredictability does not mean intrinsic uncertainty. His other complaint was that Bohr was removing understanding from the field of physics. Bohr argued quite passionately that intuitive understanding was just not possible any more, and that you were old-fashioned if you insisted on it.

And so mathematical description was substituted for understanding?

Absolutely. It’s conceptual nonsense. You can calculate stuff with the theory, but the words people put around it don’t make any sense. That had the effect of driving the more conceptually-oriented students out of physics. We have ended up with more and more mathematicians in the physics departments. Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with mathematics—it’ s the language we use to express the precise relations of physical law. But there is an increasing tendency to mistake the language for the physics itself. Once we lose the conceptual foundations, the whole thing becomes a shell game. There are very few conceptual workers left in the field. Feynman was one of the last ones, and he wasn’t willing to take on the Copenhagen clan. Nobody was, until we come to A. O. Barut, John Dowling, John Cramer, and a few others.

A lot of the trouble seems to come down to the idea of matter being composed of particles, rather than waves.

Point particles got us into terrible trouble. If you take today’s standard theory of particle physics, and the standard theory of gravitation, it is well known that the result is “off” by a factor of maybe ten to the power of 50. That’s 10 followed by 49 zeroes. The amount of matter in the universe is way, way more than what is observed. And that discrepancy comes, at its heart, from assuming that matter is made made up of point particles.

What’s the problem with them?

Because point particles are assumed to occupy no space, they have to be accompanied by infinite charge density, infinite mass density, infinite energy density. Then these infinities get removed once more by something called “renormalization.” It’s all completely crazy. But our physics community has been hammering away at it for decades. Einstein called it Ptolemaic epicycles all over again.

Hold on...epicycles?

Ptolemaic astronomers assumed that the earth was at the center. But then it became more and more complex to calculate the orbits of visible planets. When you assume the earth is the center, you have to add epicycles to the existing orbits to adjust them. In the same way, when you assume photons are point particles, and all you can calculate is probability, you have to add epicycles of conceptual nonsense to “explain” even the simplest experiment.

So when results don’t fit theory. . .

The theory has to be adjusted, with band-aids stuck on top of one another. This happens all the time with science, but especially with the statistical quantum theory. It takes enormous work to take that theory and work it into a form that is useful for anything except those questions that it was initially devised for. And the band-aid epicycles are then announced as a triumph for the theory. It’s amazing how long they have gotten away with it.

Is there a message in all this?

What this is telling us is that we have simply not been thinking about it right. We have to start working through the whole subject again. And that is going to take real work. I’ve gotten a little start on various pieces of it. Barut and Dowling got some wonderful results with the hydrogen atom. But there’s a whole lot more work to do.

Running through your work is the idea that the deeper thing is probably simpler.

It always worked out that when I understood something, it turned out to be simple. Take the connection between the quantum stuff and the electrodynamics in my book. It took me thirty years to figure out, and in the end, it was almost trivial. It’s so simple that any freshman could read it and understand it. But it was hard for me to get there because all of this historical junk was in the way.

Much has been made of the philosophical implications of quantum theory.

Once Bohr and Heisenberg won scientific the debates, they went around pontificating about philosophy.

What was the thrust?

They said that if the quantum world is inherently uncertain, if the only information about basic physics is statistical, then we need to rethink our view of all of reality. In a way it was a throwback to the old arguments between science and religion. Newtonians used the ability to predict the planets’ positions as a refutation of standard religion, which said, well, “God puts them where he wants and you have just have to have faith about that.” Religion didn’t need to take a stand against Newton, but it chose to, starting with Galileo. And this terrible polarization set in.

So quantum theorists took us back to the unknowable, where things have to be taken on faith or on authority?

Yes, but as we look out at the universe today, there’s nothing that makes it anything but more awesome. In fact, as we look back at those pictures and we think, “Now how could anyone who had any deep sense of faith believe in a God that would make stars by punching little holes in a cardboard sky?”

What was anti-religious about the Newtonian view? He was personally religious.

Nothing, but his followers framed the issue as, “If you can predict it, that shows that religion is wrong.” The quantum theorists reopened the question as “No, you can’t predict it, because it’s basically statistical.”

You could say that for some people, the predictability of nature undermined faith in God (although it needn’t have done so). Quantum uncertainty undermined faith in science.

I think Einstein was being a scientist in the truest sense in his response to the Copenhagen interpretation. He said that none of us would be scientists if deep down we didn’t believe there is a set of regularities in the operation of physical law. That is a matter of faith. It is not something anybody has proven, but none of us would be scientists if we didn’ t have that faith.

What you’re saying is that in a rush to declare science complete, Bohr & co. essentially defined away a key assumption of science?

Faith in physics was undermined. Generations of students were basically driven out of physics because it was no longer comprehensible.

While theory was ailing, though, people were devising all kinds of interesting experiments and practical devices.

It was indeed a time of enlightenment for the experimental side—we had to go off and make our own picture of the world. We got ideas about what experiments would be interesting and went ahead with them. Tony Siegman’s book Lasers is the definitive treatment of the device that underlies the whole field of fiber optics. He shows that the statistical quantum assumption just gets in the way. In an 1,200-page tome, he hardly even mentions photons.

What the reaction in the profession to what you are saying?

People are trying to figure out what to make of it. People like the idea that there is a simpler way of thinking about this, but it’s a lot to get your head around. The world is full of specialists nowadays, and there aren’ t that many people any more who try to understand large fractions of what physics is about. So it is going to take time for people to realize this is a much simpler way to teach physics, and that they can grasp a lot more of it than by today’s method. And some people have said, “This is great—it never made any sense to me, which is why I quit being a physicist.”

You’ve crossed over into biology yourself—building silicon retinas and cochleas. And this is leading to some real revolutions—super-high-resolution cameras and hearing aids with greatly improved intelligibility. Can you tell us a bit about that?

Sonic Innovations is a company whose hearing aid, for the first time, uses our full knowledge of the human auditory system.

And Foveon, your camera outfit?

Foveon is about making the finest photographic images that have ever been made. We have about 60 employees, some of the most creative people I have ever worked with. We’ve been making our own low-volume, high-end cameras for two years. Now, the technology is just beginning to go into name brand cameras. You will be amazed!

Does it use coherence?

Every semiconductor derives its properties from the coherent nature of the electrons in it. The Foveon sensor uses these properties in a more fundamental and powerful way than other photosensors.

The computer industry has thrived by doing well what humans do badly, namely calculation. But computers seem to do badly what humans do well—speech, movement, perception.

The effort to build neurally inspired hardware has been much heavier going than I thought.

You write, “Biological solutions are many orders of magnitude more effective than those we’ve been able to implement using digital methods.” You write about the fruit fly as an embarrassment, because its sensory abilities so vastly outstrip the most powerful computer. What’s going on?

The fly has an autonomous system that avoids being swatted. It has the ability to see and navigate and make decisions on millisecond time scales. We’ve never been able to make artificial vision systems that come within orders of magnitude of that, with all the computation we can throw at them.

Why not?

That’s what I was trying to find out. It makes us look so stupid. And you don’t get popular by saying that. But it’s true. And the more we try, the more we realize it’s a much harder problem than we thought. What is it about the way that the fly, or the cat, or the fish process their information that makes it so much more effective at computing these things? They use what seems like really slow, slimy computational material, and yet they perform miracles with tiny amounts of power, tiny amounts of space and in real time and very fast.

What’s the problem?

We don’t know how even to formulate that problem, and we’ve been working on it since the dawn of computing. Every time we get another order of magnitude in computing capability, somebody says, “Now we’ve got enough!” But we haven ’t begun to get it.

It could be that when you find out what’s really going on, you’d be even more in awe.

As I have found out more about what’s going on, I have become more in awe. I ’m amazed, for example, by the chemical complexity of neurological processes. They’re not just digital or analog—they’re chemical and physical, with dimensions that we do not understand at all.

Now if your faith is correct, behind that awesome complexity lies some simple set of rules. No?

I think there are principles. And I think there are principles of computation that get us this exponential advantage, which don’t have to do with whether you do it with chemicals or electronics.

Are you saying, in effect, architectural principles?

You bet. I thought many times that I was on the verge of getting ahold of one of those. I haven’t been able to make a crisp statement of one yet, but I feel on the verge. Every time I talk to the biologists, I get all charged up again.

Does biology have a problem analogous to the physics problem—lots of people barking up trees, and not many looking at the forest?

Every scientific discipline does. Our establishment rewards that kind of behavior. It’s very, very hard to ask the deeper questions, because you won’ t get tenure that way.

For years, artificial intelligence research has pursued an approach that comes down to: “If we can just write enough code, we can figure out how to make the thing do logic and how to solve problems . . .” It hasn’t worked very well.

I think it just totally failed. Those AI systems can’t see. They can’t hear. They can’t act. And they can’t learn. Looking at the principles used by living systems has been much more successful. There have been recent successes in recognizing faces, fingerprints, things like that. The best results I have seen in reverse-engineering the brain have been the auditory processors done by my friend and collaborator Lloyd Watts. He has made remarkable progress by working with auditory neurobiologists and realizing the architecture of a much more capable hearing system in computational form. That’s one to watch.

And vision?

Silicon sensors have been built that can recognize motion. But to distinguish between a computer and a car—that is a really, really hard problem. And yet we do it effortlessly, and so do flies. So we don’t really know how to ask the question yet.

Sounds like the gluon researchers might be closer.

Oh, I would say so. It’s more likely that we will figure out first if there’ s missing matter in the universe. If so, what it is. And if not, what’s wrong with the general theory of relativity. We’ll figure that out before we figure out the brain. It’s just a really hard problem.

So we shouldn’t expect machines to take over any time soon.

Don’t lose sleep over it. Anybody who says, “Oh my God. These things are going to take over!”—it is just so far from anything real. People don’t even know where to put the decimal point.

Do you have any thoughts about gravitation?

Yes, I’ve been working on it quite actively. It’s funny—the most common force, everyone experiences it, and we just have no clue. It’s fascinating when you think about it. The two long-range forces that we have in nature are the electromagnetic force and the gravitational force. The first we understand better than anything in physics, and yet gravity—we basically have no clue what it is. It doesn’t fit with any of the other theories. It just gets pasted on. It’s really an acute embarrassment.

So there are still lots of mysteries in nature.

We are all just struggling our way in this wonderful realm of nature that we know really very little about. Feynman has this wonderful quote about how the “theory of gravity” once was that the planets were being carried along by a whole flock of invisible angels. Then we ended up with a theory that it is this force between two masses that pulls at right angles to the motion. So he said what we have done is we have gone back to the invisible angels except now they are pushing at a 90-degree angle to the motion.

Not angels but angles...

Once angels were the explanation, but now, for us, it is a “force,” or “field.” But these are all constructs of the human mind to help us to work with and visualize the regularities of nature. When we grasp onto some regularity, we give it a name, and the temptation is always to think that we really understand it. But the truth is that we’re still not even close. Isn’ t it wonderful that nature is like that? It would be so dreadful if nature were so dull that we, with our pathetic little prejudices, had it all figured out already.

Ever had that feeling?

2003-09-24T09:05:00.000+10:00

A leading museum has paid £240,000 for a plate which shows a portrait of a man whose head is made up entirely of penises. It is thought to have been made by Italian Renaissance ceramicist Francesco Urbini in the 16th century.
The head is framed by a garland carrying the inscription:

Ogni homo me guarda come fosse una testa de cazi
translation: "Every man looks at me as if I were a dickhead."

[more]

The pillage continues unabated

2003-09-23T12:32:00.000+10:00

Suffice it to say that this stuff really makes my blood boil...

The Theft of Ancient Cities
We are losing the cities of ancient Sumer, where the earliest civilization began, and are doing little to stop it. For thousands of years, these cities have lain relatively undisturbed, as mounds in the desert of southern Iraq. But now, in the chaos of occupation, they are being destroyed by illegal diggers in search of artifacts.
In the last few months, sleepy farming towns like Fejur, Rifai and Afak near the ancient cities have come to life as markets for the illegal antiquities trade. Sellers are hoping that some foreigner, such as a journalist, soldier or contractor, will pay them more than the agents sent by dealers, who give them only a few dollars per item.
Some of the artifacts are being sold inside the country, but the best are smuggled to dealers in Europe, who will sell them to collectors there, or transship them to the United States, Japan and elsewhere. Then, often bearing fraudulent certificates of provenance, they are sold to collectors who justify their collecting by saying that the objects are much safer with them than they are in Iraq. In truth, without their eagerness to possess the artifacts, there would be no illegal digging.
It is easy to dismiss the damage to Iraq's cultural heritage as an unfortunate by-product of war. All wars cause destruction of standing monuments and the theft of moveable artifacts. But most of the looting in Iraq has taken place after major hostilities had ceased. The huge market in illegal antiquities did not exist at all before the 1991 Gulf War, because Iraq had a strong antiquities law. Under the United Nations embargo, illegal digging occurred only at a few sites in the south. But now, in this period of occupation, there seems to be no limit to what will be destroyed.
[more]

Xuan Zang and the Third Buddha

2003-09-23T00:30:00.000+10:00

Then and now: A gap in a cliff is all that remains of the Bamiyan Buddhas--as they were in a photo taken in 1997 and again after the Taliban demolished the them in March, 2001

Does an enormous statue of a reclining Buddha lie buried somewhere near the ex-feet of the Bamiyan Buddhas? Archaeologist Zemaryali Tarzi claims to have "50 percent confirmed" its existence. This I take to mean "er, maybe".

Still, the belief in the existence of a third Bamiyan Buddha comes from a very good source: the observant and highly regarded writings of Xuan Zang, a 7th century Chinese monk who had visited Bamiyan in 630. Xuan Zang described seeing a 200 foot long statue of the Buddha inside a monastery at Bamiyan which was "reclining on his death bed".

Xuan Zang undertook the extraordinarily arduous and perilous journey from China to India to study Buddhism at its source and also to bring back and translate its sacred canon into the Chinese language. He achieved both of these goals: after studying at the famous Buddhist univerisity at Nalanda for there several years he returned home with more than 600 scriptures and established an institute for their translation in the imperial capital at Chang'an. His legacy was the establishment of Buddhism as a highly influential and enduring strain in Chinese thought as well as the preservation of many scriptures which have been lost in their original versions.

In 629, Xuan Zang set out for India along the Silk Route into Central Asia, passing through Tashkent, and Samarkand. He reached Bamiyan the following year before pressing on to Gandhara, the ancient heartland of Central Asian Buddhism.

From there he entered India proper, travelling through the Punjab, crossing the Ganges and passing through the topical rainforests of Southern Nepal to Lumbini, the birthplace of the Buddha. He travelled to Patna and spent two years studying at the university at Nalanda before finally returning home to China in 645.

Xuan Zang preserved in his eye witness accounts many aspects of ancient India that would have otherwise been lost to history. He keenly observed and accurately recorded geographical details, architectural features, cultural practices, local histories and legends which have since proved to be of immeasurable value to modern scholars and archaeologists.

His writings have led to several discoveries over the years, for example he described a great stupa, now lost, which had been built by the Buddhist monarch King Kanishka near his capital at Peshawar in the second century (note: the name Xuan Zang when rendered in the older style Wade-Giles romanization is spelt Huan Tsang).

Among all [King Kanishka's] buildings one of his remarkable structures was his greatest Stupa (a place where the ashes of Buddhist priests, monks, nobles, etc. are enshrined, and a big domical structure erected on it, and it became a place of worship for the Buddhists).
...
It is said that Gautama Buddha had predicted that four hundred years after his death a king would erect a stupa to contain many relics of the Buddha's bones and flesh. Kanishka had heard this story.

One day while hunting a white hare in the forest (Peshawar area), he met a shepherd boy building a stupa of mud. Fa-hien said that the shepherd was Indra in disguise. Kanishka ordered to build a stupa on the spot and enshrined a number of relics of the Buddha in it. Buddha had also predicted that the stupa would be seven times burnt down and seven times rebuilt, and the religion itself would disappear from here (Gandhara).

At the time of Huan Tsang's visit, it had been again reduced to ashes for the fourth time. Both the pious travelers relate the same legend according to which after the seventh time, the law of the Buddha would become finally extinct in the country. A Chinese source said that Kanishka himself placed a ball of clay on the stupa praying that it might become an image of the Buddha and the image at once appeared. Huan Tsang had mentioned in his accounts that there were big images of Buddha on the eastern side of the stupa, some were painted and some were gold-washed.

Xuan Zang described the stupa as having a square-shaped plinth which was 100 meters wide on each side and decorated with Stucco images of Buddha. Above this projected a stone tower some 50 meters metres high and above that a further 100 meters of wood. The tower was capped with 10 metres of gold-leafed iron finial and was in total height the equivalent of a modern 13 storey building. This was quite a remarkable engineering feat and it would have undoubtedly been considered an architectural marvel in its time. Using Xuan Zang's account, the foundations of the lost stupa were identified in 1895-97 by Alfred Foucher and excavated by D. B. Spooner in 1908-09.

In another example, Xuan Zang described a pillar at Lumbini in Nepal. The pillar had been erected by Asok, the great Mauryan emperor, near the tree which was said to mark the Buddha's birthplace. This pillar, which was subsequently lost for a millennia was only rediscovered in 1895, again largely thanks to Xuan Zang's writings.

A collection of legends about Asoka, included in the Divyävadana, a work composed probably in the 1st or 2nd century A.D., tells us (pp. 389, 390) how Asoka, the Buddhist emperor, visited the traditional site of this grove, under the guidance of Upagupta. This must have been about 248 B.C. Upagupta (Tissa: see PALl) himself also mentions the site in his Kathd Vatihu (p. 559). The Chinese pilgrims, Fa Hien and Hsuan Tsang, visiting India in the 5th and 7th centuries A.D., were shown the site; and the latter (ed. Watters, ii. 15-19) mentions that he saw there an Asoka pillar, with a horse on the top, which had been split, when Hsuan Tsang saw it, by lightning. This pillar was rediscovered under the following circumstances.
The existence, a few miles beyond the Nepalese frontier, of an inscribed pillar had been known for some years when, in 1895, the discovery of another inscribed pillar at Nigliva, near by, led to the belief that this other, hitherto neglected, one must also be an Asoka pillar, and very -probably the one mentioned by Hsuan Tsang. At the request of the Indian government the Nepalese government had the pillar, which was half- buried, excavated for examination; and Dr Führer, then in the employ of the Archaeological Survey, arrived soon afterwards at the spot.

The stone was split into two portions, apparently by lightning, and was inscribed with Pall characters as used in the time of Asoka. Squeezes of the inscription were sent to Europe, where various scholars discussed the meaning, which is as follows:

"His Majesty, Piyadassi, came here in the 21st year of his reign and paid reverence. And on the ground that the Buddha, the Sakiya sage, was born here, he (the king) had a flawless stone cut, and put up a pillar. And further, since the Exalted One was born in it, he reduced taxation in the village of LumbinI, and established the dues at one-eighth part (of the crop)."

Xuan Zang's writings once again proved useful to archaeologists in identifying the final resting place of the Buddha at Kushinagar.

Kushinagar (Kushinara of yore) is a revered place for Buddhist pilgrims, 55 kms away from Gorakhpur. It was here that the Tathagata, the reciter of truth, breathed his last with the words, "Behold now, brethren, I exhort you, saying, decay is inherent in all component things! Work out your salvation with diligence!" A temple dedicated to the event - the Mahaparinirvana temple today stands amidst a serene `sal' grove .... as if still reminiscing the great demise.

The huge statue of the Reclining Buddha, excavated in 1876 at the temple, is one of the most momentous of all sights for the devout. It was brought from Mathura by a devout monk, Haribala, during the reign of King Kumara Gupta in the 5th Century A.D. The whole of Kushinagar, since the Mahaparinirvana of Gautam Buddha, was turned into a memorial site with stupas including the relic stupa-Mukutbadhana and the Chaitayas and Viharas, built by the devout kings of the Gupta period.

The Chinese travellers Fa Hien, Hieun Tsang and T. Ising visited Kushinagar during different centuries and recorded a graphic account of the place which later fell to bad times, due to lack of patronage. These recordings provided the vital clues for excavations done centuries later by Sir Alexander Cunningham.

So, returning once again to Afghanistan, if Xuan Zang said that there was a reclining Buddha at Bamiyan, I think you can be fairly sure that there really was one. Unfortunately, another thing that you can be just as certain of is that the monastery that it once housed it would have been thoroughly destroyed by the Muslim iconoclasts that swarmed through Central Asia two hundred years later.

But at least these guys were not the Taliban -- and they didn't have at their disposal modern explosives or artillery, so some hope remains that remnants of this "Third Buddha" could still show up under the spade in an excavation.

Incidentally, Xuan Zang became so famous when he returned home to China that his remarkable journey quickly became the stuff of myth and legend. 900 years later these folk stories were compiled and rewritten by a scholar-official named Wu Ch'eng-en in a work that went on to become one of the most enduring and best loved works of Chinese literature. In the story, known as a Journey to the West, Xuan Zang is accompanied in his travels by four celestial creatures: a monkey, a pig and sea-monster and a dragon (which had transformed itself into a horse).

Unfortunately for Xuan Zang (also referred to as Tripitaka which is a pun on his name), his character in the book was reduced to something of wooden caricature whose main role it seems was to be constantly upstaged by the antics of Wu-k'ung, the delightfully mischievous monkey-god.

Dark Matter again

2003-09-08T12:00:00.000+10:00

First proposed as a way of explaining the curious rotational behaviour observed in spiral arm galaxies, the theory of Dark Matter has since gone on to become one of those essential building blocks of cosmological theories. But as an aether-like, invisible, undetectable, inexplicable substance that permeates everything and according to some may even make up 90% of the Universe, it seems like a bit of a Rigg's constant, a big fuzzy fudge factor that was invented to make theory fit facts rather than an actual quantity. I think it's fair to say that it indicates an incompleteness in our current understanding of the Universe.

Perhaps this latest finding will help to stimulate the search for some more satisfying answers.

Astrophysicists will be scratching their heads following the discovery that three elliptical galaxies seem to contain little or no dark matter. A team led by Aaron Romanowsky of the University of Nottingham in the UK found that the dynamics of the elliptical galaxies could be explained without the need for dark matter, in contrast to the motion of spiral galaxies. The unexpected result questions the widely held belief that elliptical galaxies form when galaxies rich in dark matter collide.
Dark matter was originally proposed to explain why galaxies rotate as though they contain much more matter than astronomers can detect with telescopes. The existence of this invisible mass - and its gravitational pull on ordinary baryonic matter - has become a cornerstone of modern cosmology, but now Romanowsky and colleagues have cast doubt on its existence in certain galaxies.
For three elliptical galaxies, the researchers measured how the rotational speed changed from the centre of the galaxy to its outer edge. To do this, they used the 4.2-metre Herschel telescope in La Palma to look for planetary nebulas - shells of gas ejected by sun-like stars at the end of their lives. The spectra emitted by these shells contain well-known absorption lines, which are red-shifted for nebulas receding from Earth and blue-shifted for those approaching us. The degree of this Doppler shift enabled the researchers to calculate the velocities of hundreds of nebulas, and therefore their galactic neighbourhoods.
To their surprise, Romanowsky and colleagues found that the rotational speed of the galaxies fell towards their outer edges - a result that Johannes Kepler would have predicted long before the advent of dark matter. In contrast, the rotational speed of matter beyond the visible edge of spiral galaxies remains constant. Astronomers believe this arises from the gravitational effect of 'halos' of dark matter around spiral galaxies. Now they must explain why certain types of galaxy appear to be rich in dark matter while others seem to be deficient.
[Dark matter deficiency puts theory in the shade]

Amino acid detected in space

2003-09-01T10:38:00.000+10:00

The idea that primitive life on Earth may have been seeded by a comet or asteroid impact is controversial. Since it was suggested more than 40 years ago, however, increasingly complex organic molecules have been discovered in space. Now astronomers have detected an amino acid - one of the building blocks of proteins - in interstellar dust clouds in our galaxy. The discovery of glycine in space suggests that interstellar molecules may have played a pivotal role in the prebiotic chemistry of the Earth

[more].

Kinda nodded off there for a minute

2003-09-01T10:36:00.000+10:00

Apologies (and thanks) to those persistent souls who have been visiting this site during this extended period of hiatus. It's been nearly a whole month since my last post and really things have not been too flash around here for the best part of two month before that. Blogging has been extremely disrupted by a combination of factors like: "being really busy", "running out of steam a bit", "disruptions to the working environment".

It started back in May when we rashly decided to put our house on the market only to pull it off again a week before auction. We haven't regretted either decision, it gave us an opportunity to spruce the joint up and in the process realise that we actually liked the place a lot more than the places we'd been looking at. The next thing that happened was a major work project which has been keeping me fully occupied, time to ~~surf~~ research has been severely curtailed of late.

Any way, Spring has sprung finally (and thankfully, I've reached the "enough" stage when it comes to Winter) and the pace at work has slackened to a slightly less hectic pace and so I hope to be able to get things back into some kind of shape here at the LapLog™ over the next week or so. Stay tuned.

A Real Estate Sky
This image was taken on a drab and overcast Winter's day so it was decided that the sky was to be photoshopped into something nicer for the sales brochure. An unexpected side-effect was that the two white chimneys on the roof became completely transparent, mere ghosts of their former selves.

Zeus Hypsistos

2003-08-03T22:52:00.000+10:00

The marble statue of Zeus sitting on a throne was discovered on an altar of what is believed to be a sanctuary of the chief Olympian god found at Dion, an ancient Macedonian city in central Greece. The sanctuary was discovered by chance, as it was below the surface of a river that was being drained as part of anti-flooding works. [more]

Athens - Diggers accidentally discovered a temple to Zeus at the foot of Mount Olympus in an indicating that ancient Greeks switched away from polytheism to the faith of a single God even before Christianity appeared in Greece, archaeologists said on Friday.

The sanctuary was found during works to broaden the bed of the Vaphyras river running through the Dion temple complex at the foot of Mount Olympus, northern Greece - the seat of Greek mythology's twelve Gods.

The findings include the sanctuary's foundations, 14 marble blocks with marble eagles engraved on them - Zeus's symbol - and a slightly smaller-than-life-size, headless marble statue of Zeus, said archaeologist Dimitris Pantermalis who supervises the Dion site.

The sanctuary dates to the centuries preceding Christ's birth. Insignia found on it refer to Zeus as "the highest".

"It is a special version of Zeus as a single God residing in heaven... we know that 'Zeus the Highest' played an important role in the transition to monotheism," Pantermalis said.

"The findings are dated before the birth of Christ, that's what's important," he added.

It is the first time that a sanctuary to 'Zeus the Highest' is found, Pantermalis said.

-- Temple to Zeus unearthed at Mount Olympus

IAA report: From the horse's mouth

2003-07-31T12:26:00.000+10:00

This is an official summary of the Israel Antiquities Authority's final report into the Yehoash Inscription and the James Ossuary.

Word of the almost simultaneously discovery of the bone box known as the “James Ossuary” and the Yehoash inscription, from an unknown source (not from an methodical excavation), together with the emotions raised by the finds and extensive public interest amongst Jews and Christians, obliged the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), the body responsible for all archaeological activities in Israel, to take action, to examine the finds and formulate a position on the subject. The IAA agreed to a short exhibit of the ossuary in Canada.
Numerous articles, all appearing within a short period of time, either confirm or deny the authenticity of the items. If the pieces are authentic (particularly the Yehoash inscription), then they are of great scientific value. The IAA was thus bound to do everything possible to arrive at the truth and present its conclusions...
-- FINAL REPORT OF THE EXAMINING COMMITTEES FOR THE YEHOASH INSCRIPTION AND JAMES OSSUARY

Statistical translation

2003-07-31T00:24:00.000+10:00

"Give me enough parallel data, and you can have a translation system for any two languages in a matter of hours," said Dr. Och, a computer scientist in the USC School of Engineering's Information Sciences Institute.
Och spoke after the 2003 Benchmark Tests for machine translation carried out in May and June of this year by the U.S. Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Och's translations proved best in the 2003 head-to-head tests against 7 Arabic systems (5 research and 2 commercial-off-the-shelf products) and 14 Chinese systems (9 research and 5 off-the-shelf). In the previous, 2002 evaluations they had proved similarly superior.
The researcher discussed his methods at a NIST post-mortem workshop on the benchmarking held July 22-23 at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.
Och is a standout exponent of a newer method of using computers to translate one language into another that has become more successful in recent years as the ability of computers to handle large bodies of information has grown, and the volume of text and matched translations in digital form has exploded, on (for example) multilingual newspaper or government web sites.
Och's method uses matched bilingual texts, the computer-encoded equivalents of the famous Rosetta Stone inscriptions. Or, rather, gigabytes and gigabytes of Rosetta Stones.
"Our approach uses statistical models to find the most likely translation for a given input," Och explained
"It is quite different from the older, symbolic approaches to machine translation used in most existing commercial systems, which try to encode the grammar and the lexicon of a foreign language in a computer program that analyzes the grammatical structure of the foreign text, and then produces English based on hard rules," he continued.
"Instead of telling the computer how to translate, we let it figure it out by itself. First, we feed the system it with a parallel corpus, that is, a collection of texts in the foreign language and their translations into English.
"The computer uses this information to tune the parameters of a statistical model of the translation process. During the translation of new text, the system tries to find the English sentence that is the most likely translation of the foreign input sentence, based on these statistical models."
This method ignores, or rather rolls over, explicit grammatical rules and even traditional dictionary lists of vocabulary in favor of letting the computer itself find matchup patterns between a given Chinese or Arabic (or any other language) texts and English translations.
[Romancing the Rosetta Stone]

Speaking of Rosetta Stones: Egypt is now demanding that the original one be returned. The British as always with these things are unmoved.

Thanks Peter

Sanskrit dictionary

2003-07-30T12:05:00.000+10:00

For three generations, they have compiled and argued, agonized and transcribed — toiling in monastic tedium to turn an intricate, 44-letter language into six volumes, so far, of word after long-forgotten word.
They have delved into the grammatical roots of "antahpravesakama" and debated the pun hidden in "anangada." They've done a brain-numbingly complete dissection of "anekakrta."
Now, 55 years after a group of scholars began composing the authoritative dictionary of Sanskrit, the long-dead language of India's ancient glory, they are almost done — with the first letter.
"Sanskrit," sighed Vinayaka Bhatta, chief editor of Deccan College's dictionary project, "is not easy to translate."
[After 55 years of toil, Sanskrit dictionary not even close]

Linguist baiting

2003-07-30T00:18:00.000+10:00

And here's a little snippet about the language spoken by Adam and Eve (well, not exactly, but...). It probably won't surprise anyone to learn that Adam was, in fact, a Basque.

Gene research is helping clear up the mystery of the origins of the Basque people, a culture that apparently came out of East Africa 50,000 years ago and passed through the Middle East on the way to Western Europe, a University of Nevada researcher says.

That's one of the reasons when reviewing documents written in the ancient Sumerian language, "you would swear you are reading Basque," said Joxe Mallea-Olaetxe, adjunct professor for the Center for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno.

It's also why some cities in the Middle East have names that could be Basque-related, such as Ur, Uruk and Mari, he said. The name of a Basque goddess is Mari.

"The Basque came out of East Africa 50,000 or so years ago and passed through the Middle East," Mallea-Olaetxe said during a recent presentation at Northeastern Nevada Museum as part of the National Basque Festival in Elko.

Mallea-Olaetxe said scientists traced the female gene back 150,000 years to East Africa but for research purposes followed the male Y chromosome that enables researchers to trace human whereabouts.

They started tracing the male gene to 60,000 years ago in East Africa, and then through the Middle East to Central Asia some 40,000 years ago, the professor said.

Linguists suspected long before the genetic research that an old language in Central Asia "looked suspiciously like Basque," Mallea-Olaetxe said. That language, Burushaski, is dead now, he said.

So genetic research is proving the linguists right, he said.

[Genes help solve mystery of Basque origins]

I'm sure they'll be greatly reassured, Joxe.

First Americans

2003-07-30T00:08:00.000+10:00

An archaeological site in Siberia -- long thought to be the original jumping-off point for crossing the Bering land bridge into North America -- is actually much younger than previously believed, shaking the theory that the first Americans migrated overland during the final cold snap of the last great ice age.

Using radiocarbon dating, scientists found that the Ushki site, the remains of a community of hunters clustered around Ushki Lake in northeastern Russia, appears to be only about 13,000 years old -- 4,000 years younger than originally thought.

The new date places the Ushki settlement in the same time period as the Clovis site, an ancient community found in New Mexico, making it highly unlikely that people could have traversed the thousands of miles from Siberia in such a short period.

"This was the last site out there in Siberia that could have been an ancestor for the Clovis," said Michael Waters, co-author of the research appearing today in the journal Science. "We have to think bigger now and start thinking outside the box."

[New questions about migration of first Americans]

The subject of when humans first arrived in America is hotly contested by academics.

On one side of the argument are researchers who claim America was first populated around 13,000 years ago, toward the end of the last Ice Age. On the other are those who propose a much earlier date for colonisation of the continent - possibly around 30,000-40,000 years ago.

The authors of the latest study reject the latter theory, proposing that humans entered America no earlier than 18,000 years ago.

[Date limit set on first Americans]

Roman Cosmetics

2003-07-29T23:51:00.000+10:00

A Museum of London conservator shows the contents of a Roman tin box after opening it for the first time since its discovery in London, July 28, 2003. Archaeologists excavating the site of a major Roman temple in London found the box containing a white cream still bearing the finger marks of the person who last used it, nearly 2,000 years ago, museum officials said. [more]

Almost 2,000 years ago, at a temple in Roman London, someone with slender fingers took a small tin box, scooped a blob of white paste into the lid, and used that as a palette to smear the paste on to ... a face? Hands? An image of a god? The archaeologists jostling for position yesterday, as the box was opened for the first time in almost 2,000 years, had no idea.
The beautifully made box was easier to open than a new jar of Marmite. There was a gasp as conservator Liz Barham gently twisted off the lid to reveal perfectly preserved fingerprints, so small they may have been those of a woman or even a child. There was a second gasp as the smell hit the company.
"Asses' milk?" wondered Francis Grew, the curator of archaeology at the Museum of London. "Asses' yoghurt," retorted Hedley Swaine, the keeper of early London archaeology.
"A somewhat sulphurous smell, highly characteristic of waterlogged deposits from that site," Ms Barham said carefully. "And cheesy," she added, unable to stop her nose from wrinkling as the paste warmed under the camera lights.
[2,000-year-old pot opened]

A Poverty of Evidence

2003-07-28T11:27:00.000+10:00

Linguistic nativism or the innateness hypothesis is the claim, advanced by Chomsky (1986) and Pinker (1994) amongst others, that human beings are endowed with an innately, presumably genetically, specified domain specific knowledge of language. This knowledge is tacit, that is to say not accessible to conscious thought, and it specifies in some detail the nature of possible human languages, including a set of syntactic categories, a set of possible phrase structure rules, constraints on admissible transformations and so on. The primary argument for this bold hypothesis is the so-called Argument from the Poverty of the Stimulus (APS), that the linguistic input or evidence available to the infant child is so impoverished and degenerate that no general, domain-independent learning algorithm could possibly learn a plausible grammar without assistance.
An obvious refutation of this argument is to demonstrate the existence of an algorithm that can learn a reasonable grammar, from that amount of data. It is that issue that this thesis is intended to study. Nonetheless the algorithms presented here are I hope of general interest as pieces of computational linguistics or machine learning research.
[more (PDF)]

Oded Golan arrested (and released)

2003-07-26T23:18:00.000+10:00

From James to John?

Police officials said they had found the ossuary, said to be worth as much as $2-million (U.S.), sitting on a toilet in a shed on the roof of Golan's modest Tel Aviv apartment. They also claimed to have found forging tools on the premises and several semi-completed forgeries. [more]

Slow bloggin'

2003-07-15T11:12:00.000+10:00

As you may have already guessed, I'm still pretty much in hiatus mode. There won't be much to see here for a few more weeks except perhaps the occasional news clipping.

In the meantime you might like to try browsing the archive.

Home away from home

2003-07-10T14:05:00.000+10:00

The image shows an impression by David A. Hardy of a possible scene from a moon orbiting the extra-solar planet in orbit around the star HD70642. The planet has a mass about twice that of Jupiter and orbits the star in roughly six years, with a nearly circular orbit of more than three times the Earth-Sun distance. The star HD70642 is a 7th magnitude star in the southern constellation Puppis, and has properties very similar to that of our sun. The similarity in appearance of the extra-solar planet to Jupiter arises because the planets have a similar mass. The possible existence of the moons has been inferred from our knowledge of the planets in our own solar system and from theories of planetary formation—they have not actually been detected.

The 'orbit' diagram shows the size and shape of the star HD70642 orbit compared with the orbits of planets in our own Solar System

Illustration of the Doppler Wobble Technique.

Astronomers looking for planetary systems that resemble our own solar system have found the most similar formation so far. British astronomers, working with Australian and American colleagues, have discovered a planet like Jupiter in orbit round a nearby star that is very like our own Sun. Among the hundred found so far, this system is the one most similar to our Solar System. The planet's orbit is like that of Jupiter in our own Solar System, especially as it is nearly circular and there are no bigger planets closer in to its star.

"This planet is going round in a nearly circular orbit three-fifths the size of our own Jupiter. This is the closest we have yet got to a real Solar System-like planet, and advances our search for systems that are even more like our own," said UK team leader Hugh Jones of Liverpool John Moores University.

The planet was discovered using the 3.9-metre Anglo-Australian Telescope [AAT] in New South Wales, Australia. The discovery, which is part of a large search for solar systems that resemble our own, will be announced today (Thursday, July 3rd 2003) by Hugh Jones (Liverpool John Moores University) at a conference on "Extrasolar Planets: Today and Tomorrow" in Paris, France.

"It is the exquisite precision of our measurements that lets us search for these Jupiters - they are harder to find than the more exotic planets found so far. Perhaps most stars will be shown to have planets like our own Solar System", said Dr Alan Penny, from the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.

The new planet, which has a mass about twice that of Jupiter, circles its star (HD70642) about every six years. HD70642 can be found in the constellation Puppis and is about 90 light years away from Earth. The planet is 3.3 times further from its star as the Earth is from the Sun (about halfway between Mars and Jupiter if it were in our own system).

The long-term goal of this programme is the detection of true analogues to the Solar System: planetary systems with giant planets in long circular orbits and small rocky planets on shorter circular orbits. This discovery of a -Jupiter- like gas giant planet around a nearby star is a step toward this goal. The discovery of other such planets and planetary satellites within the next decade will help astronomers assess the Solar System's place in the galaxy and whether planetary systems like our own are common or rare.

Prior to the discovery of extrasolar planets, planetary systems were generally predicted to be similar to the Solar System - giant planets orbiting beyond 4 Earth-Sun distances in circular orbits, and terrestrial mass planets in inner orbits. The danger of using theoretical ideas to extrapolate from just one example - our own Solar System - has been shown by the extrasolar planetary systems now known to exist which have very different properties. Planetary systems are much more diverse than ever imagined.

However these new planets have only been found around one-tenth of stars where they were looked for. It is possible that the harder-to-find very Solar System-like planets do exist around most stars.

The vast majority of the presently known extrasolar planets lie in elliptical orbits, which would preclude the existence of habitable terrestrial planets. Previously, the only gas giant found to orbit beyond 3 Earth-Sun distances in a near circular orbit was the outer planet of the 47 Ursa Majoris system - a system which also includes an inner gas giant at 2 Earth-Sun distances (unlike the Solar System). This discovery of a 3.3 Earth-Sun distance planet in a near circular orbit around a Sun-like star bears the closest likeness to our Solar System found to date and demonstrates our searches are precise enough to find Jupiter- like planets in Jupiter-like orbit.

To find evidence of planets, the astronomers use a high- precision technique developed by Paul Butler of the Carnegie Institute of Washington and Geoff Marcy of the University of California at Berkeley to measure how much a star "wobbles" in space as it is affected by a planet's gravity. As an unseen planet orbits a distant star, the gravitational pull causes the star to move back and forth in space. That wobble can be detected by the 'Doppler shifting' it causes in the star's light. This discovery demonstrates that the long term precision of the team's technique is 3 metres per second (7mph) making the Anglo-Australian Planet Search at least as precise as any of the many planet search projects underway.

[Astronomers find 'home from home' - 90 light years away! ]

Hakka

2003-07-09T01:09:00.000+10:00

Contributing yet another strand to the patchwork of overseas Chinese speech and customs were the Hakkas, latecomers to the southernmost provinces, moving into Fukien and Kwngtung in two separate migrations: during the tenth century and the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The Hakkas whose name means `guest families' have been described as the gypsies of China, people who live side by side with speakers of different dialects in enclaves scattered across six southern provinces, without a homeland of their own. They were a rugged lot, and even their women had to be hardy. Little wonder that the Hakkas were the only Chinese to refrain altogether from binding their daughters' feet into the `golden lilies' that were de rigueur everywhere else. One thing Hakka women were not was dainty.

Men moving across great distances into an unknown landscape, assailed by the hostility of settlers who have preceded them, band together; and if Hakkas were (and still are) thought a very clannish people, they had good reasons to be. The banding-together took a palpably defensive form, in communal living and communal housing Their dwellings, still to be seen today in a border area in Fukien province, are extraordinary constructions, rising out of the countryside like veritable fortresses, gigantic, multi-storied, round. They are built to a circular plan, with a thick outer wall of tamped earth pierced by tiny squint-holes, presenting a resolutely sealed and embattled look to the world. In the walled complex, an entire community, numbering six to seven hundred inhabitants, could be concentrated.

It was no easy matter to live among the Cantonese, to contend for land and water. Feuds were easily ignited in such an atmosphere, and there evolved a tradition of armed fighting between the migrant and the settler. We read of a period of prolonged fighting between the two in the years 1855-67, a war in which about half a million people are said to have lost their lives. It is not hard to see why the Hakkas emigrated to Nanyang [South-East Asia]. In China they were pushed on to marginal land, hilly country rejected by those who had got there first.

[from Sons of the Yellow Emperor : The Story of the Overseas Chinese by Lynn Pan, Mandarin Paperbacks 1991, page 16]

Here are some pictures of traditional Hakka round earth builidings (click to get a higher resolution version).

Round Earth Building

This type of building is round in shape and divided into three classes, small, medium and big. The small ones are usually 2 to 3 stories tall with a single ring. The medium dwelling is usually 3 to 4 stories tall with a large inner open space (single ring) or double rings. The large round building is usually 4 to 5 stories tall consisting of as many as three rings.
The very small round building has about 12 to 18 rooms, the small ones have 21 to 28 rooms, the medium ones have about 30 to 40 rooms, the large ones have about 42 to 58 rooms, and the super large round buildings have about 60 to 72 rooms.
Two-third of the round building are 3 stories high and hold roughly 20 families or 100 people. The round earth building is a "group-oriented" residence, usually with one main entrance. Its wall is usually around 1 meter thick. The main entrance door is padded with iron sheet and is locked by 2 horizontal wood bars. The wooden bars retract into the walls in order to open the door. In the event the wood bars are sawed through, the locking mechanism is still intact.
Inside the entrance is a huge central courtyard where all the doors of the rooms and inner windows are open to. At the ground level except the hall and the staircases, the rooms are used as kitchens and dining rooms. The rooms on the second floor are used for storage. The rooms on the 3rd level are used as bedrooms. The rooms in each level are identical. In front of each room, there is an open round hallway and usually there are 4 staircases to move from one level to another. Thus each family occupies one vertical units with lower level as kitchen, 2nd level for storage and miscellaneous use and 3rd level and above used as bedroom. Sometime there is no open round hallway. Instead, every family has its own private staircase. A typical room is about 10-13 square meter in size.
The larger round earth building has room around 15 square meters. The windows facing outside tends to be small, with the window size at the outer wall smaller and the window size at the inner wall larger enabling wider surveillance from the inside. It is extremely hard for outsiders to come in through the windows. There is usually no window at the ground level. While the round building is fairly large, it has an inner ring, which is like a round building within a round building. For round building that built earlier than 15th century, they have other defensive features that would counter siege. It is said that during Ming dynasty as Japanese pirates intruded the coastal areas, they always leave the Hakka's Earth Buildings area alone.

[Hakka - An Important Element of Chinese Culture]

Japan claims title to world's first bicycle

2003-07-07T14:19:00.000+10:00

The world's first bicycle was developed by a Japanese feudal lord in 1732, a model recently created on the basis of a Edo-Period drawing has suggested.

A 30-centimeter-long scale model of a bicycle designed in 1732.

Toshio Kajiwara, 60, a former bicycle company technical adviser, analyzed the drawing of a "newly-developed, boat-style ground vehicle," and Kenjiro Kawakami, professor of industrial archeology at Tama University of Arts, created a 1/5 scale model.

"Our discovery that a bicycle with pedals existed in Japan in the 1730s has drastically changed the history of bicycles," Kajiwara said.

It has been widely believed that the first bicycle was invented in France in 1861.

"The pedal structure of the 'newly-developed, boat-style ground vehicle' is identical to that of bicycles. However, it did not spread throughout Japan probably because most of the roads in the country were bumpy at the time," Kawakami, president of the Japan Industrial Archeology Society, said.

The drawing is in a document compiled by Kuheiji Hiraishi (1696 to 1771), the lord of the Hikone feudal clan in Shiga Prefecture. It is preserved at the Hikone Municipal Library.

The document says that a so-called "boat-style ground vehicle" developed by a farmer living in the Kodama district of Bushu (currently the Saitama Prefecture city of Honjo) became popular in Edo (Tokyo).

It shows that the vehicle could climb up slopes. One of Hiraishi's retainers living at the clan's Edo residence reported the vehicle to the lord who was also a scientist.

Since the vehicle's mechanism was unclear, Hiraishi designed his own boat-style ground vehicle and built it in 1732, the document says.

The vehicle comprises of a boat-shaped wooden body, a single front wheel and two rear wheels. The pedals are connected to a disk that resembles a flywheel with an iron rod similar to a crankshaft.
The document claims that it ran at about 14 kilometers per hour.

[Mainichi Shimbun]

Hardware requirements

2003-07-07T11:15:00.000+10:00

Greetings,
We need a vendor who can offer immediate supply. I'm offering $5,000 US dollars just for referring a vender which is (Actually RELIABLE in providing the below equipment) Contact details of vendor required, including name and phone #. If they turn out to be reliable in supplying the below equipment I'll immediately pay you $5,000. We prefer to work with vendor in the Boston/New York area.
1. The mind warper generation 4 Dimensional Warp Generator # 52 4350a series wrist watch with z80 or better memory adapter. If in stock the AMD Dimensional Warp Generator module containing the GRC79 induction motor, two I80200 warp stabilizers, 256GB of SRAM, and two Analog Devices isolinear modules, This unit also has a menu driven GUI accessible on the front panel XID display. All in 1 units would be great if reliable models are available
2. The special 23200 or Acme 5X24 series time transducing capacitor with built in temporal displacement. Needed with complete jumper/auxiliary system
3. A reliable crystal Ionizor with unlimited memory backup.
4. I will also pay for Schematics, layouts, and designs directly from the manufature which can be used to build this equipment from readily available parts.
If your vendor turns out to be reliable, I owe you $5,000.

BIG POST ERROR, POST ID 105702647564896991

2003-07-01T12:27:00.000+10:00

REPORT IT

It seems that the new blogger will blow away posts that are bigger than 7,800 characters. Hmmm.

(-_-)

Hiatus

2003-06-30T14:17:00.001+10:00

Hi*a"tus (?), n.; pl. L. Hiatus, E. Hiatuses (#). [L., fr. hiare, hiatum, to gape; akin to E. yawn. See Yawn.]
1. An opening; an aperture; a gap; a chasm; esp., a defect in a manuscript, where some part is lost or effaced; a space where something is wanting; a break.
2. (Gram.) The concurrence of two vowels in two successive words or syllables. Pope.
[Webster Dictionary, 1913]

Well, that's not exactly what I meant but it's close enough. I'm going to be taking a bit of a breather from the blog so there won't be any posts here for a couple of weeks.

Let me leave you with this delicious recipe that I discovered whilst Under the Fire Star.

I really love South Indian food, I only wish that there were some restaurants here in Melbourne that knew how to cook it¹.

The cornerstone of this cuisine is undoubtedly the humble sambar.

Sambar
Ingredients:

Vegetable 1/4-1/2 kg
New tamarind - a lump the size of a small lime
Red gram dhal (toor dal) 2/3 cup
Turmeric powder 1/2 tsp
Gingelly (sesame) oil 3 tsp (my note: or use any cooking oil)
Dry red chillies 10 (Medium) or 6 (Large)
Green chillies 2
Mustard seeds 1/2 tsp
Fenugreek seeds 1/2 tsp
Asafoetida powder - a pinch or to taste
Curry leaves (Chopped) 3 tbsp
Salt 1 tsp
Rice flour 1/2 tsp
Coriander leaves (Chopped) 3 tbsp

To serve 4 persons

A variety of vegetables -- drumstick, lady's finger (okra), onion, brinjal (eggplant), pumpkin, carrot, French beans, runner beans, etc, -- can be used to prepare sambar. Select any one vegetable. Cut into medium size bits and wash. Vegetables like onion, brinjal, lady's finger, French beans, runner beans and cluster beans can also be fried a little before adding. Amaranth stems, radish, runner beans, cluster beans or pumpkin may be cooked separately with just enough salt and then added.

Soak the tamarind in 1 cup water for 20 minutes. Squeeze it out, adding water little by little to prepare 1 cup of juice.

Choose a heavy vessel, e.g., stoneware, with a very narrow mouth. Wash the dhal. Clean and remove stones, if any. (If the dhal is cleanly husked, it need not be washed.) Boil 1 to 1 1/4 cups of water. Add the dhal, turmeric powder and 1 tsp oil. Cover with a shallow lid, filled with water. (A cup of water may also be placed on the lid.) Add this water to the dhal, if needed,while the dhal is cooking. Cook till very soft. (Some dhals do not cook soon. If so, add a pinch of baking soda. If baking soda is added, do not use turmeric powder, as the colour of the dhal will be spoilt.) Remove from fire and mash the cooked dhal. Keep aside.

Heat a vessel. pour in the remaining oil. Pinch red chillies into halves. Slit green chillies. Fry the pinched red chillies, mustard, fenugreek seeds and asafoetida to a dark brown colour (without blackening it). Add green chillies. Pinch curry leaves and fry for a few moments. Add the tamarind juice to the seasonings with salt. Add the cut and washed vegetable.

When the vegetable is cooked in the tamarind juice, add the mashed dhal. Allow it to boil well. Mix the rice flour in water. Add and stir well. Bring to boil once more. Boil for a few minutes. Remove from fire. Garnish with coriander leaves and a few curry leaves.

Note: Asafoetida water may be used in the place of asafoetida powder. If using asafoetida water, add to the sambar when boiling. To prepare thicker sambar, increase the quantity of dhal. The dhal can be cooked in a pressure cooker as well.

¹ - actually the reason why nobody makes it here was explained to me by a restaurant proprietor who gave me a crash course in curry economics. Sambal is a really thin sauce which goes with mountains of rice or is mopped up with roti. Customers are only willing to pay for curries with thick gravies, hence all the friggin' kormas. This law of currynomics also dictates that there will be a predominance of rendangs at Malaysian restaurants.

The only way I can think of breaking this nexus is to import a large number of South Indians to Australia. The idea is to build a large domestic market of people uninfluenced by weird Anglo prejudices against rice and roti (and for that matter complex carbohydrates in general). Expert roti makers should, as part of these reforms, have their visa applications fast-tracked.

You may have already guessed that I have a number of other cuisine-related immigration policy ideas that I'm likely to share with you one day.

² - Pauline Hanson was a fish 'n' chip shop proprietor (actually there is no point 2 to go with this footnote).

Eclipses and Pinhole Sundials

2003-06-26T22:22:00.000+10:00

Pinhole sundials are just the sort of wonderful devices that one might find in a cathedral built during the Renaissance.

The sundial works by focussing the sun's rays into a bright spot on the church's floor. The movement of this spot marks the course of the day.

The interesting aspect here is that the shape of the spot is not simply due to the shape of the hole that it passes through. The hole is so small that it actually acts like a lens and what is displayed is really an inverted image of the sun itself. It works just like a giant pinhole camera.

This becomes more apparent when the spot is observed during a solar eclipse...

[more]

reposted for the Collaboratory

MEMS Pinball

2003-06-26T21:43:00.000+10:00

Scientists in Sweden have developed a novel technique for making micromachines and demonstrated its potential by making a micro pinball table in which silicon cantilevers acted as the 'flippers', magnetic beads 150 microns in diameter were the balls, and the table measured 25 millimetres square.The table was tilted at an angle of 20 degrees to the horizon.

They found that the speed of a ball could reach up to 0.75 kilometres per hour - or 210 000 microns per second. This is equivalent to a football having an almost supersonic speed of 1125 km per hour (see a movie of the action).

"The pinball games are used for demonstrating this simple and easy process," says researcher Martin Bring. "It also demonstrates some of the effects that occur on the micrometer level, such as small apparent inertia."

[more]

2003-06-24T00:46:00.000+10:00

View morphing

I'm sorry but I just happen to think that this is really really cool.

Image morphing techniques can generate compelling 2D transitions between images. However, differences in object pose or viewpoint often cause unnatural distortions in image morphs that are difficult to correct manually. Using basic principles of projective geometry, this paper introduces a simple extension to image morphing that correctly handles 3D projective camera and scene transformations. The technique, called view morphing, works by prewarping two images prior to computing a morph and then postwarping the interpolated images. Because no knowledge of 3D shape is required, the technique may be applied to photographs and drawings, as well as rendered scenes. The ability to synthesize changes both in viewpoint and image structure affords a wide variety of interesting 3D effects via simple image transformations.
A different side to Mona [more]

Here is an animation of the complete rotation in 20 frames (64K MPEG). Those eyes really follow you around the room, don't they?

You might also like to check out La Gioconda in 3D! This image was made by taking two adjacent frames from the animation and putting them side-by-side. You'll need to cross your eyes to get the three dimensional effect.

2003-06-22T01:20:00.000+10:00

Update: Oded Golan's fakes

The Israel Antiquities Authority declares that the James Ossuary and the Jehoash Inscription are both forgeries.

James Ossuary

Epigraphical experts divided on authenticity of inscription

Ossuary is made of local limestone

Ossuary surface covered with a natural rock varnish overlaid by patina in places

Inscription carved through the varnish

"Patina" coating only the inscription was made from a solution of hot water and chalk

Conclusion: At some time long after the natural processes of varnish and patination in a damp cave environment had been completed, someone carved a series of letters through the natural varnish on the ossuary. Then he or she covered the freshly cut letters with an imitation patina made from water and ground chalk.
Jehoash Inscription

Numerous mistakes in grammar and eccentric letter forms

Made of a metamorphic stone found in western Cyprus and points west, not local sandstone

Patina covering inscription made from a solution of hot water, clay, chalk, carbonized particles, and micron-sized globules of metal--possibly gold

Conclusion: An obvious forgery

Nothing too surprising here but there are lots of things of interest in this article both about the artfulness of 21st century forgers and the techniques used by experts in order to expose them. IAA scientific panel member, Yuval Goren of Tel-Aviv University, had already expressed skepticism about the authenticity of Jehoash inscription before this current investigation. His skepticism focussed on the nature of the patina, a natural coating that forms on rocks over long periods of time. If an inscription can be shown to have been made prior to when the patina had formed then this implies that it is very old. However, as Goren has demonstrated, it's not all that hard for forgers to fake a convincing looking patina. By directly examining both of these artifacts, Goren and Avner Ayalon (of the Geological Survey of Israel) were able to determine that this kind of faking had in fact occurred.

Calcite (calcium carbonate, CaCO₃) is the primary component of naturally formed patina on buried archaeological artifacts in calcareous areas, such as the Jerusalem region. This is due to the fact that calcite dissolves in groundwater. With the loss of CO₂ from the groundwater by evaporation, the calcite crystallizes again on the stone's surface (just like the "stone" that collects inside a tea kettle). The oxygen within this recrystallized calcareous coating--the patina--has the same isotopic ratio as the water from which it was produced. And that value can even be used to determine the temperature at which the crystallization took place.

Ayalon determined in his analysis that while the calcite of the patina from the uninscribed surface of the James ossuary, and indeed the surfaces and inscriptions of other authentic ossuaries that he examined, had ratios that were normal for average ground temperature of the Jerusalem vicinity, the ratios of the "James Bond"--that strange mixture that covered only the letters of the inscription--was entirely different. In fact, they suggested that the crystallization took place in heated water, not the "cave environment" that the earlier geologists had claimed. The evidence pointed to an intentional faking of the patina over the letters of the "James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus" inscription--and nowhere else.

...the fake patina on the Jehoash Inscription shared the most telltale characteristics of the "James Bond" on the James Ossuary." The presence of undissolved microfossils in the mixture showed that it was made from powdered chalk, not natural crystallization and its isotopic ratios of oxygen for the calcite in the fake patina of the Jehoash inscription indicated again the crystallization was produced in hot water--not in the ground.

Incidentally, isotopic analysis of calcium carbonate is an powerful technique which has some other interesting uses. For example, in the study of long term climate change. Sea temperatures over periods of millions of years can be determined simply by analyzing the ratios of the oxygen isotopes trapped in the shells of molluscs.

Water, the compound making up the oceans of the Earth, is composed of the elements oxygen and hydrogen. These elements have several similar forms, known as isotopes. For example, the isotopes of oxygen are oxygen-16, oxygen-17 and oxygen-18, where the number refers to the number of protons and neutrons in the nucleus.

...In the hydrologic cycle, evaporation preferentially removes water with oxygen-16 (i.e. light oxygen). This oxygen isotope is therefore rich in the gas phase of water in clouds. Precipitation and runoff returns water with high oxygen-16 to the Earth's surface. During glacial epochs, this precipitated oxygen-16 is preferentially stored in polar icecaps and continental ice sheets. This leaves the oceans enriched in oxygen-18. In the opposite case, when the cliamte is very hot, icecaps do not exist, and oceans are no longer enriched in oxygen-18.
The stable isotopes of oxygen are used to reconstruct palaeoclimates. The abundance of oxygen-18 compared to oxygen-16 is displayed in a ratio of the the two isotopes. The relative value of this ratio is compared to a standard so that the climate change with respect to time can be measured.

The ratio of isotopes (signatures) can be recorded in the rocks that are forming at that time. For example, forams create their shell of calcium carbonate from the water and food they consume. When they die and their body sinks to the bottom of the ocean, this isotope signature is preserved in these shells. Sediment accumulates and eventually forms a rock which can become uplifted and be available for study.

Update: Rochelle Altman comments on the IAA finding. She disagrees that the entire inscription of the James Ossuary is a forgery, instead she says that the first part "Jacob son of Jospeh" is authentic while the "his brother of Yeshua" was a later addition.

She concludes with this parting shot at Hershel Shanks ("And just who is this Rochelle Altman anyway? Has anyone ever heard of her?")

On October 21, 2002, Mr. Hershel Shanks, lawyer turned publisher and managing editor of the Biblical Archaeological Review (BAR), a glossy popular pulp magazine, announced to a group of journalists, assembled for the purpose of a media circus...

Update: The Geological Survey of Israel (GSI) clarifies its position regarding the Jehoash Inscription which it had earlier this year declared as authentic. Despite this error, it's worth recalling that the GSI provided the services of Avner Ayalon whose work was of critical importance to the IAA finding.

Update: Hershel Shanks remains the optimist: Why I Am Not Yet Convinced the Ossuary Inscription Is a Forgery. Yuval Goren replies.

2003-06-19T12:24:00.000+10:00

Mithras

Mithra, known as Mithras to the Romans, was originally a Persian god of the sun. At the beginning of time Mithras had sacrificed the mythical great bull from the body of which flowed the blood which gave life to earth. With the Romans Mithras became the god of kings, justice and contracts. He was a deity particularly favoured by soldiers, who were bound in loyalty to their rulers and is often described as the soldier god.

"If Christianity had been checked in its growth by some
deadly disease, the world would have become Mithraic."

Joseph Renan, French religious historian and critic
Marc-Aurèle et la fin du monde antique

For over three hundred years the rulers of the Roman Empire worshipped the god Mithras. Known throughout Europe and Asia by the names Mithra, Mitra, Meitros, Mihr, Mehr, and Meher, the veneration of this god began some 4000 years ago in Persia, where it was soon imbedded with Babylonian doctrines. The faith spread east through India to China, and reached west throughout the entire length of the Roman frontier; from Scotland to the Sahara Desert, and from Spain to the Black Sea. Sites of Mithraic worship have been found in Britain, Italy, Romania, Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, Turkey, Persia, Armenia, Syria, Israel, and North Africa.

In Rome, more than a hundred inscriptions dedicated to Mithras have been found, in addition to 75 sculpture fragments, and a series of Mithraic temples situated in all parts of the city. One of the largest Mithraic temples built in Italy now lies under the present site of the Church of St. Clemente, near the Colosseum in Rome.

The widespread popularity and appeal of Mithraism as the final and most refined form of pre-Christian paganism was discussed by the Greek historian Herodotus, the Greek biographer Plutarch, the neoplatonic philosopher Porphyry, the Gnostic heretic Origen, and St. Jerome the church Father. Mithraism was quite often noted by many historians for its many astonishing similarities to Christianity.

The faithful referred to Mithras as "the Light of the World", symbol of truth, justice, and loyalty. He was mediator between heaven and earth and was a member of a Holy Trinity. According to Persian mythology, Mithras was born of a virgin given the title 'Mother of God'. The god remained celibate throughout his life, and valued self-control, renunciation and resistance to sensuality among his worshippers. Mithras represented a system of ethics in which brotherhood was encouraged in order to unify against the forces of evil.

The worshippers of Mithras held strong beliefs in a celestial heaven and an infernal hell. They believed that the benevolent powers of the god would sympathize with their suffering and grant them the final justice of immortality and eternal salvation in the world to come. They looked forward to a final day of judgement in which the dead would resurrect, and to a final conflict that would destroy the existing order of all things to bring about the triumph of light over darkness.

Purification through a ritualistic baptism was required of the faithful, who also took part in a ceremony in which they drank wine and ate bread to symbolize the body and blood of the god. Sundays were held sacred, and the birth of the god was celebrated annually on December the 25th. After the earthly mission of this god had been accomplished, he took part in a Last Supper with his companions before ascending to heaven, to forever protect the faithful from above.

However, it would be a vast oversimplification to suggest that Mithraism was the single forerunner of early Christianity. Aside from Christ and Mithras, there were plenty of other deities (such as Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis, Balder, Attis, and Dionysus) said to have died and resurrected. Many classical heroic figures, such as Hercules, Perseus, and Theseus, were said to have been born through the union of a virgin mother and divine father. Virtually every pagan religious practice and festivity that couldn't be suppressed or driven underground was eventually incorporated into the rites of Christianity as it spread across Europe and throughout the world.

[more]

2003-06-18T17:52:00.000+10:00

Facemarks

The ability to offend vast numbers of your friends and acquaintances has been greatly enhanced with the invention of email. I suppose the potential always existed with other forms of written correspondence but there's something about the immediacy of email which makes it seem more like a verbal form of communication rather than a textual one. That is, a verbal medium but one that is devoid of voice tone, facial expression or body gestures. When used carelessly it can far too easily lead to misunderstanding.

Hence we have the smiley or, somewhat more pretensiously, the emoticon to help us smooth out these thorns as much as possible. But the perils inherent in rapidly and remotely exchanging texts are hardly new. More than a century ago, telegraph operators had already discovered this problem when they started yammering away at each other using Morse code. The remoteness of communication through the wire meant that it was far too easy for a harmless joke to be taken the wrong way. The solution was to append a HI

i.e. . . . . . .

to the end of every humorous sentence. It was, in effect, a smiley.

Until recently, I had been under the impression that "HI" was some sort of an acronym, "humour intended" or something like that. Not so apparently, HI was really the product of a different kind of miscommunication:

Alfred Vail, Morse’s assistant, was the inventor of the telegraph hand-key and sounder. He also made changes where characters were defined by spaces and dashes, as well as dits. ‘HO HO’ or ‘HEE HEE’, were used for laughter or humor. These are incorrectly sent today as ‘HI HI’. The error results from the confusion in the early days of amateur radio, between the use of the Continental or International Morse code, and the Landline/Railway or American Morse code. In the American Morse code, ‘O’ is sent as two dits, spaced slightly farther apart than the two dits in the letter ‘I’ Radio amateurs, not familiar with the American Morse code,, picked it up as ‘HI HI’, instead of ‘HEE HEE’ or ‘HO HO’.

[A HISTORY OF SOME CW ABBREVIATIONS]

See this Morse code table for more information.

I was interested to learn (via LanguageHat) that the Japanese have developed a totally different set of smileys and emoticons from the ones we use in the West.

1.Chapter of "Expressions of feelings"

(These are the most popular ones. Everybody knows them)

(*^_^*)

(>_<)

Smiling (niko niko)

smile (nikott)

Wow! (wa--i!)

ouch! (itai!)

It's very popular.

Blushes when smiling.

Raising hands and saying "Wow"

Indicating pain or failure

p(^^)q

(-_-)zzz

Gyaaa--!

Wishing good luck
(ganbare!)

crying face (naki gao)

Sleeping (neteru)

Being surprised with eyes wide open.

Holding a banner and cheering

Crying with tears running down the cheeks.

Good night.

(^_^)V

(p_-)

? (hate?)

Victory! (pi--su!)

Expressing defeat
(maitta)

Magnifying glass
(mushi megane)

Saying "I don't understand" or asking "Do you understand?"

Making the victory sign,

Holding out the white flag of peace with a smile.

Trying uncover some secret

(^^)//

(^-^)b

(-_-)

Applausing (hakushu)

Tears of happiness
(naki warai)

Isn't it? (ne!)

Getting angry without showing it outside
(mutt..)

We use it when we want to appreciate so much something

sometime you may have the moment that you are too happy till tear come

Asking "Do you agree?" or "Isn't it?"

He gets angry but he doesn't express his emotion so much outside.

[more]

Some of these emoticons use characters that are not available on a Western keyboard. So for your signalling convenience, here is a list of ones that only use ASCII characters.

2003-06-18T13:55:00.000+10:00

Idaltu

Here's another article about the 160,000 year old skeletons recently unearthed in Ethiopia.

The discovery was largely an accident, one that never would have happened if not for El Nino. Back in 1997, the Pacific Ocean disturbance that affects much of the world's weather triggered punishing rains in Ethiopia. The deluges not only exposed buried fossils but also drove away the people of Herto and their livestock, which would have trampled the fragile bones. When White and the others happened to drive by the village, they noticed a fossil hippo skull poking out of the ancient sand. On closer examination, the skull bore marks indicating that the animal had been gashed with a stone tool. Clearly, human ancestors had once lived there.
When the scientists returned 11 days later, it took them only minutes to find the skulls of two adults, probably male. Six days after that, Berhane Asfaw of Ethiopia's Rift Valley Research Service found a third, the skull of a 6-or 7-year-old child, shattered into about 200 pieces. After years of painstaking cleaning, reassembly and study, the team was confident enough to tell the world that it had found the earliest true Homo sapiens — older by at least 1,000 generations than anything previously discovered. "It's not a modern human," says White, "but it's so close that there's no doubt it will become one. The child, in particular, is so like us that you couldn't distinguish it in a population of modern human children."

White and his colleagues think these hominids are distinctive enough to merit their own subspecies, which the team has dubbed Homo sapiens idaltu. (Idaltu means elder in the Afar language.) But whether or not the nomenclature holds up, says paleoanthropologist G. Philip Rightmire of the State University of New York at Binghamton, "the key point is that they are from the right place at the right time to be, broadly speaking, the ancestor of modern people. It's as near as we're going to get."

...Perhaps the most intriguing discovery, however, is that these ancestors behaved like us in at least one poignant way: all three skulls were deliberately tampered with after death, evidently as part of some sort of mortuary practice. "This," says White, "is the earliest evidence of hominids continuing to handle skulls long after the individual died."

"Handle" is an understatement. Cut marks on the skulls indicate that the overlying skin, muscles, nerves and blood vessels were removed, probably with an obsidian flake. Then a stone tool was scraped back and forth, creating faint clusters of parallel lines. The modification of the child's skull is even more dramatic. The lower jaw was detached, and soft tissues at the base of the head were cut away, leaving fine, deep cut marks. Portions of the skull were smoothed and polished.

"The cut marks aren't a classic sign of cannibalism," White said while showing the skulls to a TIME reporter in Addis Ababa. "If you wanted to get at the brain in order to eat it, you'd just smash open the skull." Instead, he suspects, the scratches might be a form of decoration. As for the polished areas, he says, "we know they weren't caused by the environment, because the marks go across the breaks between the recovered pieces. The child's skull looks as though it has been fondled repeatedly."
[more]

2003-06-16T21:56:00.000+10:00

Missing link

An international team of fossil hunters is reporting today the discovery of the world's earliest known "near-modern" humans -- a thickly muscled subspecies of Homo sapiens who used stone tools to butcher hippopotamus and buffalo by the shores of an ancient African lake.

UC Berkeley's Tim D. White and colleagues found the well-preserved, 160,000- year-old fossilized skulls of two adults and a child, along with skull fragments and teeth of seven other individuals, in 1997 while combing a fossil- rich area of Ethiopia about 140 miles northeast of the capital, Addis Ababa.

The discovery, reported today in the journal Nature, fills an important gap in the evolutionary sequence between earlier pre-human ancestors, known as Homo erectus, and our own species. The latest find is about 60,000 years older than the oldest known specimen of Homo sapiens.

The facial bones suggest strikingly modern features, although these early humans would be somewhat bigger and stronger than nearly anyone alive today. White said the discovery offers the best evidence so far of what our immediate ancestors must have looked like 100,000 to 300,000 years ago, "a period of time for which we had virtually no evidence."

Just how and where the human species emerged is still hotly debated. Some experts hold to a "multiregional" theory, which suggests human evolution followed many paths simultaneously in different parts of the world, including the Neanderthal lineage arising in Europe.

But White said this latest find offered strong support for the now-dominant "out of Africa" idea, which holds that our ancestors showed up first in Africa and then spread throughout the world. Neanderthals, by this argument, were a side branch that went extinct rather than an important component of the human rootstock.

"The African fossil record is pretty clear now in its message: Our species, Homo sapiens, evolved in Africa," White said.

Independent experts, including some multiregional theorists who disagreed with White's conclusions, said the new find ranked among the most significant fossil discoveries of recent years.

"It fills in an almost empty space in our knowledge of human evolution," said anthropologist John Hawks at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, in an e-mail exchange. "There are very few fossils from Africa during the time that the distinctive characteristics of recent people were evolving, and none can be placed in time as well as these remains."
[more]

2003-06-16T21:40:00.000+10:00

When humans faced extinction

Unlike our close genetic relatives - chimps - all humans have virtually identical DNA. In fact, one group of chimps can have more genetic diversity than all of the six billion humans alive today.
It is thought we spilt from a common ancestor with chimps 5-6 million years ago, more than enough time for substantial genetic differences to develop. The absence of those differences suggests to some researchers that the human gene pool was reduced to a small size in the recent past, thereby wiping out genetic variation between current populations...
Because all humans have virtually identical DNA, geneticists look for subtle differences between populations. One method involves looking at so-called microsatellites - short, repetitive segments of DNA that differ between populations. These microsatellites have a high mutation, or error, rate as they are passed from generation to generation, making them a useful tool to study when two populations diverged.
Researchers from Stanford University, US, and the Russian Academy of Sciences compared 377 microsatellite markers in DNA collected from 52 regions around the world. Analysis revealed a close genetic kinship between two hunter-gatherer populations in sub-Saharan Africa - the Mbuti pygmies of the Congo Basin and the Khosian bushmen of Botswana. The researchers believe that they are "the oldest branch of modern humans studied here". The data also reveals that the separation between the hunter-gatherer populations and farmers in Africa occurred between 70,000 and 140,000 years ago. Modern man's migration out of Africa would have occurred after this.
An earlier genetic study - involving the Y chromosomes of more than 1,000 men from 21 populations - concluded that the first human migration from Africa may have occurred about 66,000 years ago. The small genetic diversity of modern humans indicates that at some stage during the last 100,000 years, the human population dwindled to a very low level. It was out of this small population, with its consequent limited genetic diversity, that today's humans descended.
Estimates of how small the human population became vary but 2,000 is the figure suggested in the latest research.
[more]

2003-06-13T09:12:00.000+10:00

"Color-Filtered" STM

One of the most astounding inventions of the late 20th century, the scanning tunneling microscope, or STM, yields atomic-scale landscapes of electrically conducting surfaces such as metals. Now, researchers at the Colorado School of Mines have demonstrated a powerful new technique for filtering the images. Just as color filters make it easier to discern desired features in a photograph, "color-filtered STM" makes it easier to see desired atoms and chemical bonds on a surface. In the technique, electrons of different energies are analogous to different colors. Only electrons in desired energy ranges are allowed to jump or "tunnel" to the STM tip, to build up images of the atoms or chemical bonds of interest. In the image above, the left-hand side shows the atomic structure of the silicon (111) surface. Two different types of silicon atoms (marked in red and blue) exist at that surface (they differ by their position and the chemical-bonding environment on the surface). The atoms show up as bright spots in the two grayscale images on the right.

The next image is the kind that would be obtained with a conventional STM that has a metal tip. What shows up in this image are the atoms (shown in blue) that have the highest energy electrons associated with them.

The final image is a color- or energy-filtered image, in which the researchers have suppressed the blue atoms, and can now observe others that have electronic states at lower energy (shown in red). This silicon surface is actually a special case, in which the 'red' atoms actually lie sort of beneath the blue ones. Via energy filtering, researchers can thus "see through" the blue atoms and selectively image the red ones!

[more]

2003-06-13T02:33:00.000+10:00

Akhenaten's Heresy

Just as Queen Nefertiti has become an icon of pop-culture, King Akhenaten has at times been represented as though he were some kind of proto-Christian monarch. But what was the nature of Akhenaton's monotheism? Where did it come from?

It's important to realise that the essence of the Amarna Heresy was not the invention of a single individual but was born out of an long running conflict between the Amunist priesthood and the monarchy. The god Aten had always been closely associated with the monarchy and by elevating him to the status of supreme being, Akhenaton was in effect deifying the royal lineage.

So it may be argued, the cult of the single god was really a cult of ancestor worship.

Akhenaten and the Amarna Pharaohs
---from a lecture given by Dr. Nicholas Reeves in Madrid, 2002
We tend today to assume that kingly power in Egypt was as constant as, perhaps, its art appears, at first glance, to the uninitiated; but it was not. Power ebbed and flowed, and since the apogee of kingly power during the pyramid age things had changed. The recurrent theme in the history of Egypt’s New Kingdom, 1200 years on from the pyramids, is a jostling for earthly control between the throne and the priests of Egypt’s principal god, Amun of Thebes. Thanks to Amun’s divine support, Akhenaten’s predecessors had achieved a series of brilliant military victories in Syria-Palestine; and from these victories an empire was built. But there was a serious downside. The vast tribute which began to flow into Egypt to be dedicated, in great part, to the country’s principal god made this god’s servants rich and greedy for power. Eventually, Amun’s priests controlled a virtual state within a state—and they aimed higher still.

Crisis point had been reached around 1480 BC, a century before Akhenaten was born. Tuthmosis II, the ruling king, died and the throne was seized by his widow, the chief royal wife Hatshepsut, who blocked the accession of the true heir, Tuthmosis III, for 15 years. Supporting the fiction of the queen’s divine birth, and thus her right to rule, the Amun priesthood was instrumental in keeping her in office. The reward? Overriding temporal power and influence. With others pulling the strings, however, royal prestige fell to an all time low.

The interlude is, for us, a significant one, revealing clearly the extent of the Amun cult’s simmering ambitions—and its danger to the throne.

For a very brief moment the curtain of history lifts, to reveal series of vulnerable, all too human rulers—and a kingship whose power, despite the bombastic propaganda of Egypt’s temple walls, was in practice very much limited. The graffito on the left, found above the queen’s famous mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahri, says it all. In the wake of the Hatshepsut episode, however, a determined if cautious reaction by the royals may be discerned; what could be done by Hatshepsut’s successors to prevent a repetition of such priestly meddling clearly was done.

The danger would be averted by various means. From the thwarted heir, Tuthmosis III, on, the existence and number of pharaoh’s heirs was publicly emphasized for the first time, to ensure that the succession was clear and legitimate; and, for some years after the Hatshepsut episode, no queen of the ruling king would be elevated to the influential springboard-position of chief wife.

The kings pulled other levers too. Ancient tribal loyalties were brought into play, with a northern high priest, Ptahmose, appointed to head Amun’s cult, neutralizing the power of that southern god’s priesthood. More dramatically, the very basis of royal power began radically to be reassessed. The aim, towards which each of Hatshepsut’s successors would vigorously strive, was to re-establish the kingship on a sounder, stronger theological footing: in ways both large and small there would be a determined return to the values of the pyramid age, when the king’s divine, all-powerful status was unchallenged—a time when the principal power in the heavens was the sun-god Re, Amun’s more ancient and less politicised rival at Heliopolis in the north.

By the reign of Tuthmosis IV, two kings after Hatshepsut, a quickening growth may be discerned in pharaonic promotion of the sun cult. By the end of the reign of Amenophis III, further dramatic change occurs. It was traditionally believed that, in death, the Egyptian king’s soul would join with the Aten, the solar god’s sentient energy; now—apparently at the point Amenophis IV-Akhenaten is elevated to rule as junior king by his father’s side— Amenophis III proclaims that he has joined with this divine essence in life. Pharaoh is now a god.

With the death of Amenophis III comes further change: from this time on, the Aten is consistently shown in a new and peculiarly disembodied form—as a solar disc pouring its rays of light and life on Akhenaten and his family, and on them alone; and, significantly, the hieroglyphs which spell out the god’s name are now contained within two cartouches, or royal ovals.

How are we to understand these changes? What do they signify?

In fact, the conclusion is inescapable: pharaoh Amenophis III and his son’s increasingly powerful god, the Aten, had not only become one—the solar divinity of this elder king was now formalized in an abstract iconography which parallelled pharaoh’s own newly disembodied state in death. In other words, the Aten, focus of Akhenaten’s coming religion, seems from the very start to have been his father, Amenophis III.

Akhenaten’s first attempts to honour the Aten would be made at Thebes, the ancient centre of the Amun cult. This old god’s city, as we learn from an inscription, now received a new name—Akhetenaten, ‘Horizon of the Aten’. And here, in the midst of Amun’s realm, within the immense Karnak temple-complex, Akhenaten determined to erect a series of enormous structures, open to the sky, for the worship of his new god.

It was a brave challenge: with the arrogance of youth, Akhenaten had called the bluff of Amun’s troublesome priests. But it failed: opposition to the king’s plans was evidently intense. What happened, the king records in an obscure and badly damaged passage of his boundary stelae at el-Amarna: ‘it was worse than those things heard by any kings who had ever assumed the white crown [of Upper Egypt]’. Precisely what this ‘it’ was is never specified, but we may guess that a warning had been sounded. Perhaps in fear of his life, Akhenaten decided to head for friendlier territory further north.

Abandoning the old religious capital was a clever and immensely pragamatic response, which Egyptian history had seen employed at least once before—by Ammenemes I, founder of the 12th Dynasty 600 years earlier. This forebear, similarly anxious to by-pass hostile vested interests within the regime he had recently inherited, decided to establish a new capital at Itjtawy in the Faiyum—shortly, and significantly, just before he was murdered. By abandoning Thebes to Amun’s priests, Akhenaten, we may guess, was attempting to shake off his principal opposition in a similar way. Any residual rumblings to the changes pharaoh wished to impose, he hoped would be silenced by the opportunities afforded to his people by the construction of his god’s new city.

The site of Akhenaten’s new city was to be a virgin plain in Middle Egypt: el-Amarna. In antiquity it bore a version of a familiar name—Akhetaten, a second ‘Horizon of the Aten’; what the king had failed to achieve in Thebes, here at Amarna he determined to carry through. The city would be a veritable oasis of culture—and control.

Abandoned shortly after Akhenaten’s death, and never seriously reoccupied, much of the foundation still remains—the ruins of its houses and temples, the empty shells of its exquisitely decorated tombs; and, of course, the series of great, battered stelae which demarcate the limits of the foundation.

As I previously mentioned, each of these stelae is inscribed with the king’s foundation decree from which most of our knowledge of events at this time comes. But as revealing as their texts, it now seems, is the physical disposition of the monuments. For, connected up, the stelae astonishingly reproduce, on a massive scale, the ground-plan of el-Amarna’s principal religious structure—the Great Temple of the Aten. Akhenaten’s new city, evidently, had been conceived and designed with immense care as one vast religious edifice. And, like all temples, this one had its focus. This, revealingly, was the royal tomb itself, located beyond the break in the eastern cliffs through which the Aten was reborn every day.

The significance of this discovery cannot be emphasized strongly enough. For, with the royal tomb as focus of Akhenaten’s architectural scheme, the nature of the king’s enterprise stands clearly revealed. For, in the new theology, the royal tomb was the sepulchre not only of Akhenaten himself: as the place of the Aten’s rebirth, it represented the point of daily resurrection of his father and every king of Egypt, past, present and future, who had or would ultimately become one with the solar essence.

The cult of the Aten, in short, is revealed not simply as the worship of the father by his son, but as the cult of kingship itself. Akhenaten’s religion was ancestor-worship writ large. And it was the final act, in that reassertion of kingly power sparked by Hatshepsut’s abasement a century earlier, to Amun’s greedy and opportunistic priests.

New religion, new art, new city, new dreams—these were clearly heady days. Interesting times, as the Chinese would say. But as the initial excitement passed, the busy populace of el-Amarna will have found itself in an emotional daze, adrift in a sea of spiritual uncertainty. For the Egyptian people, the old religion had permeated and directed every aspect of life, and death; now, with the king’s proscription of the old religion, it was gone.

The Aten was a distant god, vague in its promises. Worse still, though it was visible to everyone in the sky above, the divinity was accessible only through the king as its prophet; pharaoh worshipped the god, and the populace worshipped pharaoh. It was another element of the king’s sinister determination to reassert kingly control—and ordinary Egyptians can have harboured little hope of change.

At some point between Years 8 and 12 of Akhenaten’s reign, things were to get very much worse. Secure in his new city, the king unleashed a ruthless, vindictive persecution of Amun and his consort, the goddess Mut: orders were issued to hack out the deities’ images and names wherever they occurred, throughout the length and breadth of the country. It was intended as an insult and final humiliation to Amun’s ambitious priests. But it also generated real and tangible fear among the ordinary people—for not only were the offending hieroglyphs of Amun’s name removed from Egypt’s public monuments. As archaeology shows, small, personal objects were dealt with in the same ruthless fashion. Fearful of being found in possession of such seditious items, the owners themselves had gouged- or ground-out the offending signs of Amun’s name—even within the tiniest cartouche-ovals on the scarab amulet we see here

Such displays of frightened self-censorship and toadying loyalty are ominous indicators of the paranoia which was now beginning to grip the country. Not only were the streets filled with pharaoh’s bully-boys—Nubians and Asiatics armed with clubs, seen everywhere in the reliefs of the period; it seems the population now had to contend with the danger of malicious informers.

And then—anticlimax: from the records, virtual silence. Of the king’s last years we know virtually nothing; the period draws to a close with less of a bang than a whimper. By Year 17 of the reign, it was all over: Akhenaten was dead and soon to be buried; power was in the hands of his wife, the beautiful Nefertiti, recently elevated to the status of junior pharaoh under the successive throne-names Nefernefruaten and Smenkhkare. And Nefertiti, in a desperate attempt to hold on to power, we find in negotiation with a neighbouring great power, the Hittites, for a prince to share the Egyptian throne. ‘My husband has died. A son I have not, but your sons are many’. The queen’s letter ended ominously: ‘I am afraid’. Nefertiti-Smenkhkare was obviously holding on to power by her fingertips, and indeed would soon fall. But perhaps it had hardly been worth the effort. As inscriptions of Tutankhamun—Akhenaten’s son and legitimate successor—record, the heretic king had bequeathed a country in economic and spiritual ruin. Even before Akhenaten’s death, as a power for change the Aten was effectively finished; and soon, as Tutankhamun’s monuments reveal, Amun and the gods of old were again in the ascendant—able to re-establish their hold on the monarchy, and to write, or ignore, history as they chose.

Two decades after Akhenaten’s passing, in 1319 BC, Horemheb ushered in the Nineteenth Dynasty and the start of the Ramessid royal line. Soon, under Amun’s guidance, the reaction to Amarna began in earnest, and all trace of the Atenist king and his reign was obliterated.

With this obliteration, the fears which had driven Akhenaten’s revolution were forgotten; too late, they would be remembered. Under Ramesses XI, around 1100 BC, the militaristic high-priest of Amun’s again-pampered cult, Herihor, declared himself pharaoh. Akhenaten’s nightmare was soon to become a reality: within a matter of years, the only real king of Egypt was Amun himself.

The Amarna era is a subject of never-ending fascination, upon the varied aspects of which there has, this evening, been time barely to touch upon. Pharaoh’s extraordinary art style, seen here in its most appealing aspect; Akhenaten’s possible illness; the sophistication of the king’s new city at el-Amarna; the eternal mystery of Tomb 55; and the current star of the period, Nefertiti, Akhenaten’s beautiful wife—a woman who, elevated to the status of junior pharaoh by her husband, clearly harboured Hatshepsut-like ambitions of her own. Each is a lecture in its own right.

Of Akhenaten himself, I believe we now have the basics. More of a reactionary than a revolutionary, he was the last in a line of kings for whom the humiliation of Hatshepsut’s betrayal to the ambitious Amun priesthood was very real. This humiliation, and the king’s own upbringing, it appears, under the rival priesthood of Re at Heliopolis, had instilled in him a determination to set things right by reaching back in time. His aim was to reimpose the structures of the Old Kingdom— a period of strength and purity when rulers ruled with untrammelled power, as the gods intended, and miracles like the pyramids could be achieved. It was an appealing vision, but Akhenaten’s determination to realise it would inflict untold suffering on his people.

2003-06-13T01:14:00.000+10:00

A beautiful one has come

Queen Nefertiti of Egypt's 18th dynasty never ceases to fascinate. Second only in fame to Cleopatra and through her most famous image, the bust made by Thutmose, even more admired for her beauty. It's remarkable to think that despite this, Nefertiti's name was hardly known in antiquity. To those who did remember her, as wife and joint ruler with the pharaoh Ahkenaten (1367-1350 BC) she became a reviled figure and after her death her images were systematically destroyed and cartouches bearing her name defaced. In a campaign of righteous fury and theological correctness, her memory deliberately erased.

The reasons for this hostility stem from the religious revolution enacted by her husband, Ahkenaten, these days referred to as the Amarna Heresy. King Akhenaten, frankly speaking, was a bit of a nut. He was, however, a nut that was way ahead of his time.

Early in his reign he decided to destroy the power of the priestly class by declaring that all of the ancient deities of Egypt's pantheon did not exist. The only one that did was the sun god Re, manifested as Aten, the disk of the Sun. By banning the worship of the traditional gods and shutting down their temples, Akhenaten in effect instituted the world's very first monotheistic religion.

With no other god but the Aten, there was now no need for an entire class of priests. The pharaoh was, in Akhenaten's scheme, the sole mediator between earth and heaven, all worship was to be directed through him. It was a vision of extraordinary megalomania (even by the standards of the pharaohs) and because it denied a place for the people's traditional gods, was also extraordinarily unpopular. When the pharaoh died, his cult of monotheism died with him¹.

But while Nefertiti played a prominent role in this revolution, she mysteriously disappeared a number of years before the end of Akhenaten's reign. In her place we find inscriptions dedicated to his second wife, Kiya and Nefertiti's daughter Meritaten who, in true Egyptian style, Akhenaten married. Theories abound that Nefertiti fell from the King's favour and was divorced or banished. Others have it that she simply changed her name and assumed the role of a priest-king in order to become the pharaoh's immediate successor.

Whatever the true story, Nefertiti was forgotten for thirty three centuries. It wasn't until the 19th century when the Ahkenaten's abandoned city, Akhetaten was rediscovered and excavated that the Queen's name and image once again became known. It was also here that the studio of Thutmose, the royal sculptor, that the famous bust of Nefertiti was unearthed by a team of archaeologists working for the German Orient Society under Professor Ludwig Borchardt of Berlin.

Nefertiti

Dr. James Simon (1851-1932), a Jewish Berlin merchant, financed a Deutsche Orient-Gesellschaft expedition to Amarna, where in December 1912, Ludwig Borchardt unearthed the limestone bust of Queen Nefertiti (ca 1350 BC), wife of the Egyptian pharaoh Akhnaton (Amenhotep IV). Simon initially kept the bust in his home, and then lent it to the Königliche Preußische Kunstsammlung in 1913. On July 11, 1920, he donated Nefertiti to the Prussian State.

In 1933 the Egyptian government demanded the return of the Nefertiti bust, which was on display in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum. Hermann Göring suggested to Egyptian King Fu`ad I that the German government might not object. But Hitler had other plans. Through the ambassador to Egypt, Eberhard von Stohrer, Hitler informed the Egyptian government that he was an ardent fan of Nefertiti:

I know this famous bust. I have viewed it and marveled at it many times. Nefertiti continually delights me. The bust is a unique masterpiece, an ornament, a true treasure!...Do you know what I’m going to do one day? I’m going to build a new Egyptian museum in Berlin. I dream of it. Inside I will build a chamber, crowned by a large dome. In the middle, this wonder, Nefertiti, will be enthroned. I will never relinquish the head of the Queen.

In the plans for the museum, there was to be an even larger hall of honor, with a bust of Hitler.

Hitler’s message to Egypt alarmed Göring, who spoke of an "exceptionally precarious situation." But Nefertiti has remained in Berlin, despite many subsequent Egyptian demands. In solitary grandeur, she is enshrined in her own room, illuminated by a spotlight. James Simon's descendants who survived the holocaust live in England and Beverly Hills, California.

It's curious that the bust of Nefertiti, despite its obviously high degree of finish, strangely lacked something:

Nefertiti's eye

The first person to lay eyes on Nefertiti's face in 3300 years was Mohammed Ahmes Es-Senussi. On December 6, 1912, he was digging in room 19 grid P_47 (the area was divided in grids measuring 600 square feet) when the rays of the sun lit up the gold and blue colors of the queen's necklace.

A shout from Mohammed brought all picks and shovels in the area to a stand-still. Professor Borchardt was sent for from his make-shift hut where he slumbered, on a canvas cot, after his mid-day meal. The statuette lay buried, head down, in the debris. Once uncovered, the sand-stone figurine stood twenty inches tall, and was in near perfect condition. The only visible damage was the chipped ear-lobes, and the in-lay of the retina of the left eye was missing.

As to the beauty of Nefertiti: it is timeless. Her face has become the best known in history, and her bust, which the German team smuggled out of Egypt to Berlin disguised as broken pieces of pottery, is the most copied and admired in the world.

The sand and dirt of room 19 (more than 30 cubic feet) was sifted again and again through a finer and finer mesh. All the ear pieces were found but the eye in-lay was never recovered. Only later, a closer examination revealed that it was never inserted.

Many theories, some likely and others far-fetched, have been advanced to explain this deliberate flaw in the masterpiece. It was suggested, for example, that the artist was interrupted at his work and left the work-shop with the in-lay in his possession, never to return. Or that the artist had fallen in love with the queen as she posed for him, was jilted by her, and in impotent revenge, refused to complete his masterwork. This is not as far-fetched as it first seems. The queen was known to be flirtatious. Another theory was that Nefertiti had gone blind in one eye. The artist had simply opted for realism over pharoanic dignity. Prevalence of eye disease in ancient Egypt was pointed to as well as the uniquely independent style of the artist. The graceful curve of the long neck, the arched eye-brow, and the hint of a smile on the queen's sensual full lips is a far cry from the symmetrical frozen immobility of the traditional Egyptian statuary.

This view too had to be abandoned, however, when new wall reliefs and other three dimensional figures were found. Some of these were clearly by the same hand that had carved the famous bust, and show the queen, some at an older age, with both perfectly good eyes. No satisfactory consensus has been reached to explain this archaeological mystery.

Since its discovery, the bust seems to have taken on a life of its own. Millions of replicas of the famous statue adorn homes and offices around the world. It is the key attraction of the Egyptian Museum in Berlin which receives some 500,000 visitors annually.

And in recent news the bust has even managed to sprout a body. Animatronics, surely, can't be far off.

But what became of the real Nefertiti? Just like Akhenaten, the whereabouts of her body has been a mystery. That's not to say that she has never been found, on the contrary, the problem seems to be that people keep finding her all the time!

Nefertiti. long considered one of the most powerful women of Ancient Egypt

Mummy of Ancient Egypt's Nefertiti found?

10 June 2003

The mummy of Queen Nefertiti, a co-ruler of Ancient Egypt and stepmother to the legendary boy king Tutankhamun, may have been found, archaeologists have announced.

Dr Joann Fletcher of the University of York in England and leader of the expedition, said her team may have unearthed Nefertiti from a secret chamber in tomb KV35 in Egypt's Valley of the Kings in Luxor.

Nefertiti, which means "the beautiful woman has come", has long been considered one of the most powerful women of Ancient Egypt. Her tomb was found near that of King Tutankhamun, the teenage king who ruled Egypt in the 14th century BC and whose tomb was first discovered in 1922.

Virtually all traces of Nefertiti and her 'heretic' husband pharaoh Akhenaten, who ruled from 1353 to 1336 BC, were erased after his unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the pantheon of the gods to worship the Sun god Aton - among the earliest known practices of monotheism.

"After 12 years of searching for Nefertiti it was probably the most amazing experience of my life," said Fletcher. "Although we can only suggest the identity as a strong possibility, the findings certainly have some wide-ranging implications for Egyptology."

Nefertiti, whose likeness was sculpted in a limestone bust now in the Egyptian Museum in Berlin, had an unusually high status during her husband's reign. Like her husband, Nefertiti's name was erased from historical records and her likeness defaced after her death.

The mummy was first discovered in 1898 and ignored. Fletcher was drawn to the tomb again during an expedition in June 2002 after she identified a Nubian-style wig worn by royal women during Akhenaten's reign. The wig was found near three unidentified mummies, two of them women and one a young boy.

One of the mummies, now believed to be Nefertiti, had a swan-like neck comparable to the queen, despite post-mortem blows to her face.

Fletcher also found other physical links, including the impression of a tight-fitting brow-band she once wore, a double-pierced ear lobe and shaved head. Nefertiti was one of only two of Egypt's royal women believed to have worn two earrings in each ear.

In an examination of the mummy in February 2003, scientists discovered a ripped-off right arm bent up with its fingers still clutching a royal scepter. Only pharaohs or queens were allowed to have their arms bent that way.

This evidence, including jewelry within the smashed-in chest cavity, fueled Fletcher's original belief that the mummy was Nefertiti.

"The identification is an interesting one, and will doubtless cause endless speculation," said Dr Salima Ikram, a leading expert on mummies at the American University in Cairo.

But Dr Susan James, an egyptologist who has long studied the three mummies, is skeptical. "What we know about [the mummy] would indicate that it is one of a young female of the late 18th dynasty, very probably a member of the royal family. However, physical evidence known and published prior to this expedition indicates the unlikelihood of it being the mummy of Nefertiti.

"Without any comparative DNA studies, statements of certainty are merely wishful thinking," she told the Discovery Channel, which funded the study for a special to air on 17 August 2003 in the United States.

^{Of course it's completely understandable why Dr Susan
James is a little skeptical about this latest discovery. After all,
she's the one who discovered the body of Nefertiti the last time. This
is how it was reported on the Discovery Channel website in June 2001
(unfortunately the page is no longer available online).}

Detective Work Finds Egyptian Queen

Nefertiti, the most famous queen of ancient Egypt except for Cleopatra, was 4 foot 8 inches (1.45 meters) tall, had long luxurious wavy hair, a hyperelongated neck and fine features that matched her legendary beauty.

The portrait emerged with the claim of Susan James, an Egyptologist trained at Cambridge, U.K., appearing in the current issue of KMT, A Modern Journal of Ancient Egypt.

Little is known about the "Great Royal Wife" of the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten, the immediate precursor — and, according to some scholars, the father — of Tutankhamun. No record survives to detail her death; no monument mourned her passing.

According to James, the long-sought mummy of Nefertiti has rested disguised under the catalog name of "mummy 61070." The mummy, better known as "Elder Woman," was discovered in 1898 by French archaeologist Victor Loret in a cache of royal mummies.

The female body was lying on the floor of a side room off the pharaoh's burial chamber along with two other mummies, a boy and a girl, all uncoffined and unwrapped.

Hair analysis led scientist to identify it as Queen Tiye, Tutankhamun's probable grandmother. But there are some discrepancies. Historical data show that Queen Tiye would have been at least over 40 when she died, while a recent skeletal dental study of the Elder Woman showed her to have died around the age of 29, plus or minus five years.

On the basis of Nefertiti's disappearance from official imagery, the queen might have died around 1336 B.C. at the age of 28 or 29.

The mummy bears a striking resemblance to various portrait heads of Nefertiti including the celebrated limestone bust on display at the Egyptian Museum in Berlin.

The relative narrowness of the mummy's skull matches closely that of the famous bust. Moreover, the philtrum — the groove between nose and upper lip — is very pronounced on both the Elder Woman's mummy and the busts of Nefertiti, while it is barely noticeable on other Tiye's portraits, according to James.

"These are interesting similarities. It would be fascinating to reconstruct the mummy face with forensic techniques and then match it with Nefertiti's known portraits," says Francesco Mallegni, an anthropologist at Pisa University who has reconstructed dozens of famous historical faces.

But Egyptologist John Taylor of the British Museum is skeptical: "It is very dangerous to treat sculpted images as reliable evidence in a study such as this. Egyptian human images can range from the idealistic to the naturalistic, but to what extent naturalistic images are 'portraits' is a moot point."

Both identifications hinge upon the discovery of a group of mummies by Victor Loret in 1898. In the tomb of Amenhotep, he found three unidentified mummies lying haphazardly on the floor and described them as the "Elder Lady" , the "Little Prince" and the "Young Man".

Taken by candlelight, this is a photo of three mummies. The mummy of the young boy is in the middle, flanked by the Elder Woman (on the left) and the Younger Lady (on the right). Notice the candles above the heads of the two women. The mutilated chest of the boy and the Younger Lady are visible. The raised arm of the Elder Woman is also apparent.

An unusually strange sight met our eyes: three bodies lay side by side at the back in the left corner, their feet pointing towards the door....

We approached the cadavers. The first seemed to be that of a woman. A thick veil covered her forehead and left eye. Her broken arm had been replaced at her side, her nails in the air. Ragged and torn cloth hardly covered her body. Abundant black curled hair spread over the limestone floor on each side of her head. The face was admirably conserved and had a noble and majestic gravity.

The second mummy, in the middle, was that of a child of about fifteen years. It was naked with the hands joined on the abdomen. First of all the head appeared totally bald, but on closer examination one saw that the head had been shaved except an area on the right temple from which grew a magnificent tress of black hair. This was the coiffure of the royal princes [called the Horus lock]. I thought immediately of the royal prince Webensennu, this so far unknown son of Amenhotep II

The last corpse nearest the wall seemed to be that of a man.

His head was shaved but a wig lay on the ground not far from him. The face of this person displayed something horrible and something droll at the same time. The mouth was running obliquely from one side nearly to the middle of the cheek, bit a pad of linen whose two ends hung from the corner of the lips. The half-closed eyes had a strange expression, he could have died choking on a gag but he looked like a young playful cat with a piece of cloth. Death which had respected the severe beauty of the woman and the impish grace of the boy had turned in derision and amused itself with the countenance of the man.

Later, it was determined that the "Young Man" was, in fact, a "Younger Lady".

So the current state of play is a tussle between two Egyptologists, in one corner Dr. Susan James of Cambridge University who backs the "Elder Lady" theory and Dr Joann Fletcher of the University of York (and the Di$covery Channel) who thinks it's really the "Younger Lady". On the sidelines are plenty of hecklers who think that both of them are wrong. Currently I don't think anyone is taking bets on the "Little Prince" having any residual nefertitiness.

As Dr James says, there's really only one way to settle this: with DNA testing. But the chances of this occurring are apparently plenty slim:

It is unlikely that Egyptian authorities will ever allow the study of the mummy's DNA (even if it could be retrieved), since this raises many concerns about the mummy's possible ancestry. Researchers have applied to study the DNA of King Tut--and Atlanta's Rameses I), but the Egyptian Government has been steadfast in its refusal to permit this.

(According to London's Sunday Times, Egyptian officials may have blocked research on King Tut, because "they feared Israel would use the tests to suggest the boy pharaoh was related to Hebrew patriarchs." And in another article at Thetimes.co.uk, noted Egyptian archaeologist Zahi Hawass is quoted as saying that DNA testing “is not always accurate and cannot be done with complete success when dealing with mummies. Until we know for sure that it is accurate, we will not use it in our research.” Is this a case of too much information may be a dangerous thing?)

Without a DNA study, however, it is unlikely that James or Fletcher will ever be able to determine which mummy is Nefertiti.

Elder Woman

See also:
Do we have the mummy of Nefertiti?
In this article, author Marianne Luban discusses the possibility (back as early as 1999) that Nefertiti is the "Younger Lady" mummy. Elsewhere she also discounts the "Elder Lady" theory.

¹ - while it is generally thought that the very first monotheistic religion was completely stamped out in the backlash which reasserted the old gods, it's interesting to speculate about the impression it may have had on a certain group of Western Semites that were living right next door. Egypt at this time was an empire and collected tribute from the Levantine nations. Ramesses II, who by some chronologies is thought to have been pharaoh when Moses was born (and according to legend his foster father), ruled from 1279 BC.

This was only 71 years after the death of Akhenaten.

Thanks once again, Peter.

2003-06-12T12:01:00.000+10:00

Ayodhya

The aftermath of the destruction of the Babri mosque at Ayodhya by a mob of Hindu extremists has been something of a running sore in Indian politics for more than a decade. Ayodhya was, according to legend, the place where Lord Ram was born although a mystery remains as to the exact location of his birthplace. Given Ram's enormous importance within Hinduism, it has been long assumed by many Hindus that a temple to Ram must have once marked this spot. Furthermore, the fact that one does not exist today must have been because Muslims had built a mosque over the demolished remains of this temple in the 16th century. With uncontestable logic like this but with not much in the way of actual historical evidence to go on, Ayodhya it seems was a disaster just waiting to happen.

The careers of many Indian politicians, especially those in the ruling party, were built on the wave of hysteria that accompanied the demolition. Recently the High Court of India ordered archaeologists to come up with some real evidence that there was indeed a temple at the site. The preliminary findings, however, have not been very encouraging.

Dig Finds No Sign of Temple at Indian Holy Site
LUCKNOW, India (Reuters) - A three-month excavation has found no evidence yet to back nationalist claims of a Hindu temple under the ruins of a mosque in northern India, a dispute that has sparked the worst rioting in the country since independence in 1947.

The state-run Archaeological Survey of India has submitted an interim report saying digging so far at the site in Ayodhya town had "not found remains of any structure that remotely resembles a temple," a source at the survey said on Wednesday.

The report is a setback for the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, which has come to power from the sidelines of the political landscape on the back of emotions whipped up by the divide.

Analysts say the party sees rivalry over the site as a potential vote winner both in state elections later this year and national polls in 2004.

Ayodhya, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, has been a flashpoint of bloody Hindu-Muslim tensions since a Hindu mob tore down the 16th-century Babri mosque at the site in 1992.

This triggered nationwide riots in which 3,000 died, the worst religious clashes since the bloodletting that followed independence and partition of British colonial India into Hindu-majority India and Islamic Pakistan in 1947.

The Archaeological Survey report contradicts a claim by Hindu hard-liners that 16th century Muslim invaders tore down a temple to the Hindu warrior god Ram to build the mosque at the place they believe he was born thousands of years ago.

While the dispute has lasted for over a century, it came to the forefront in the late 1980s, whipped up by a campaign in which the BJP played a large part.

"This report covers 30 of the total 60 trenches in which excavations are going on," said the Archaeological Survey source, who did not want to be identified.

FINAL REPORT SOON

He said the final report would be submitted to the Uttar Pradesh state court within two weeks of the end of excavations scheduled for June 15.

Political analyst and independent member of parliament Kuldip Nayar said the report was a setback for the Hindu nationalists but was not the end of the story.

"It shows that the campaign propagated by the BJP and other groups was baseless," he said.

"But the controversy is likely to go on as the report may be rejected by those who find it inconvenient."

Madan Mohan Pandey, counsel for the Hindu nationalist Vishwa Hindu Parishad, which is leading the campaign to build a Hindu temple on the site, dismissed the findings.

"This report is meaningless to us. It is not the final report, but only a progress report submitted by the ASI."

Zafaryab Jilani, counsel for the Sunni Central Waqf Board, the key Muslim claimant for the disputed site, was elated.

"We are confident that no temple was ever pulled down to build the mosque. The excavations have only proved our position."

Ayodhya has dozens of Hindu temples, drawing thousands of pilgrims every year, but Muslims, who make about 12 percent of India's mainly Hindu population, say there is no proof a Hindu temple ever existed at the site in dispute.

The excavations began after a court order in March for investigations to resolve the dispute, and were extended after the Archaeological Survey sought more time to complete its digging.

In March, the Supreme Court dismissed a government-led plea to lift a ban on Hindu prayers near the site saying it was needed "to maintain communal harmony."

See also:
Q & A The Ayodhya dispute at the BBC
Ayodhya - the truth for some Hindu perpectives
The Ayodhya Issue Homepage for more news about the dispute

2003-06-10T17:16:00.000+10:00

Emperor's enigma: Tomb's secrets stay sealed

For more than two millennia, the weathered, unimposing tumulus of Qin Shihuangdi, China's first emperor, has loomed among the cornfields and fruit trees east of Xian.
While the discovery 29 years ago of the marvelous terra cotta warriors that guard the burial site came as a complete surprise, the existence of the mound was common knowledge. Yet, to this day, the tomb of Qin (pronounced "Chin") Shihuangdi — who united warring states and took the name "China's First Emperor" — remains untouched by the spades of archaeologists. A conundrum wrapped in legend and rumor, the resting place of the emperor holds the promise of a treasure trove that staggers the minds of those who have studied, contemplated and dreamt of unearthing it.
"It is the greatest enigma in archaeology," said Wang Xueli, a professor at the Shaanxi Provincial Archeological Institute who is considered one of the foremost experts on the burial site. Upon its completion, the Emperor's earthen mound rivaled the pyramids of Egypt in scope and ambition. While the pyramids have been opened and found largely looted and empty, nobody knows exactly what Qin Shihuangdi's sepulchre contains.
In the past 12 years, the Shaanxi provincial government, mindful of the vast potential for tourist revenue, repeatedly has sought permission from the National Cultural Relics bureau. But the answer has remained the same: China does not have the financial and technological resources for such a vast undertaking.
There are more urgent excavations to be done. This task should be left to future generations. Said an official at the bureau: "We have the responsibility to preserve the artifacts for posterity."
[more]

2003-06-05T01:12:00.000+10:00

Some datapoints

Killer Diseases Through Time

Historic Pandemics

Cases

Deaths

Justinian Plague, 6th Century
China Plague (Bubonic)

*142 million

~100 million

"Third Pandemic"
1896-1930

30 million

12 million

Spanish Flu Pandemic
1918-1919

1 billion

21 million

Sources: WHO, CDC
*Based on estimated historic mortality rate of 70%

Pandemics Today

Per Year

Per Year

Malaria

300-500 million

1 million

Tuberculosis

8 million

2 million

AIDS

6 million

3 million

Source: The New York Times

Recent Outbreaks

Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever
in the Republic of Congo,
from 2000 to May 6, 2003

143

128

Meningococcal Disease
in Burkina Faso,
from Jan. to April 20, 2003

7146

1058

Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome
Worldwide, as of May 20

7919

662

Source: WHO

The next one is going to be a real doozy. You can trust me on that.

2003-06-03T08:58:00.000+10:00

The evolution of numbers

Fun with Numbers

The numbers we all use (1, 2, 3, 4, etc.) are known as "arabic" numbers to distinguish them from the "Roman Numerals" (I, II, III, IV, V, VI, etc). Actually the arabs popularized these numbers but they were originally used by the early phonecian traders to count and keep track of their trading accounts.

Have you ever thought why ........ 1 means "one", and 2 means "two"? The roman numerals are easy to understand but what was the logic behind the phonecian numbers?
It's all about angles! It's the number of angles. If one writes the numbers down (see below) on a piece of paper in their older forms, one quickly sees why. I have marked the angles with "o"s.
No 1 has one angle.
No 2 has two angles.
No 3 has three angles.
etc.

and "O" has no angles
Interesting, isn't it?

An ancient phonecian manuscript explains this and I thought it to be fascinating <g>.
-- from Dr Malka's Orthopaedic Pages

Hmmm, fascinating and ingenious too!

But what's with that crazy serif on the 7, or that European stroke running through it? Why does the 9 get an extra curl while the 6 doesn't? And surely the 8 needs two more angles to make it look a bit more like the real thing? While Dr Malka appears to have quite a few sound things to say about Carpal Tunnel Syndrome or Osteoporosis, on this subject I think I'll need to seek a second opinion.

One can't deny that we owe a great deal to the Phoenicians, especially with regard to their most brilliant invention, the alphabet. Furthermore, it's not too much of a stretch to suppose that the shapes our numbers have over time been strongly influenced by this alphabet. This influence may have operated at more than one level. At its most obvious, from the effects of scribal juxtaposition, the mixing of numerals and letters together on the same page leading to a certain stylistic uniformity. But there may also have been a more indirect one, though the influence of Greek and Semitic symbols on the scripts of the ancient India.

In the last few centuries BC, India emerged from a dark age that had endured since the fall of the Indus valley civilization fifteen hundred years earlier. It was at this time that the written word started to reappear, especially in the form of edicts and inscriptions left by Ashok, the great emperor of the Mauryan Empire. These words were written in a script known as Brahmi and in amongst its letters we find symbols to express numeric quantities which look like this:

Even in this embryonic form it is possible to see the outlines of their future shapes, but it is important to realise that they did not as yet comprise a fully developed place-notation system, something which requires the symbol zero. Instead Brahmi used special symbols to represent 10, 20, 30, 100, 1000 and so on.

The inclusion of zero or "nothing" as a numeral occurred some time around 600 AD and it transformed the Indian counting system into one that allowed numbers to expand without end. It could achieve this remarkable feat economically and without cumbersome notation or need to invent more and more symbols, a feature that all previous systems lacked. In computer parlance, the new positional system was reallyscalable.

As a slight diversion it is worth looking at how the Greeks represented numbers at the time. Many of us are familiar with Roman numerals but what system did the Greeks use? All of the famous classical mathematicians were Greeks, right?

The Sand Reckoner

Greek mathematical notation was not positional; it utilized many symbols and was cumbersome to work with.

The "M" is a myriad, and represents 10,000. The Greek work is murious (uncountable, pl. murioi). The Romans converted to this to myriad.

It has been argued that the reason why this innovation occurred in India rather than the West was largely because of a peculiarly Indian fascination withastronomically huge numbers.

The traditional Indian cosmology states that the universe undergoes cyclic periods of birth, development and decay, lasting 4.32×109 years, each of these periods is called a Kalpa or ``day of Brahma''. During each Kalpa the universe develops by natural means and processes, and by natural means and processes it decays; the destruction of the universe is as certain as the death of a mouse (and equally important). Each Kalpa is divided into 1000 ``great ages'', and each great age into 4 ages; during each age humankind deteriorates gradually (the present age will terminate in 426,902 years). These is no final purpose towards which the universe moves, there is no progress, only endless repetition. We do not know how the universe began, perhaps Brahma laid it as an egg and hatched it; perhaps it is but an error or a joke of the Maker.

This description of the universe is remarkable for the enormous numbers it uses. The currently accepted age of the universe is about 1018 seconds and this corresponds to about 7 Kalpas+335 great ages. A unique feature of Indian cosmology is that no other ancient cosmology manipulates such time periods.

In the Surya Siddanta it is stated that the stars revolved around the cosmic mountain Meru at whose summit dwell the gods. The Earth is a sphere divided into four continents. the planets move by the action of a cosmic wind and, in fact, the Vedic conception of nature attributes all motion to such a wind. It was noted that the planets do not move in perfect circles and this was attributed to ``weather forms'' whose hands were tied to the planets by ``cords of wind''

The Brahmi script went through a continuous evolution, spawning numerous variants, the most important of which was the Devanagari (or sometimes simply Nagari) script. With Devanagari numerals, the 1 was rotated by 90 degrees and had developed a serif-like loop at the top. The 2 and 3 took on their familiar shapes due to shortcuts taken by scribes, who chose to link the parallel bars rather than lifting their pens.

Knowledge of Indian numerals spread quickly to the West. As early as 662, Severus Sebokht, a Nestorian bishop who lived in Keneshra on the Euphrates river, wrote:

I will omit all discussion of the science of the Indians, ... , of their subtle discoveries in astronomy, discoveries that are more ingenious than those of the Greeks and the Babylonians, and of their valuable methods of calculation which surpass description. I wish only to say that this computation is done by means of nine signs. If those who believe, because they speak Greek, that they have arrived at the limits of science, would read the Indian texts, they would be convinced, even if a little late in the day, that there are others who know something of value.

However, it had to wait until the Arab conquests before the Indian numerals began to be adopted widely and even then only very gradually. In the 11th century, the Muslim mathematician and astronomer al-Biruni referring to Indian numerals wrote:

Whilst we use letters for calculation according to their numerical value, the Indians do not use letters at all for arithmetic. And just as the shape of the letters that they use for writing is different in different regions of their country, so the numerical symbols vary.

While the Devanagari numerals already look quite familiar to Western eyes, in the process of adoption by the Arabs led to a stylistic split between East and West. The Western Arabs of Morocco and Andalusia continued to use numerals that quite closely resembled their Devanagari forebears, even as late as the 14th century:

However in the East, the numerals evolved quite rapidly in a different direction.

This example comes from a work dating from 969.

But only 120 years later they looked like this.

And this is what they look like today in modern Arabic

On closer examination, it can be seen that the numbers 2, 3 and 7 have become rotated by 90 degrees but the other figures have not. One explanation for this is that Arab scribes who write from right to left do so by turning the paper 90 degrees so that the right hand edge is at the top. Lines are then laid down by writing them from top to bottom in columns. It's thought that some scribes less familiar with the Indian signs failed to rotate them correctly.

From Spain and North Africa, the Devanagari numerals passed practically without modification to Europe and the rest is, so to speak, history...

Margarita philosophica by Gregor Reisch (early 16th century)
Pythagoras thinks: Hmm, me thinks this referee dame is unfairly prejudiced.

But while migration of the Indian numerals westward was to have a dramatic effect on later developments, it would be wrong to think that this was the only direction of their movement.The first millennium AD was India's Golden Age, a time when India's power and prestige were at their zenith and its culture was being transmitted to all of its neighbours, both East and West.

This was the time of Greater India.

Buddha statue on the upper terrace of Borobudur Stupa, Java, Indonesia
So here then is a brief survey of some of the other paths taken.

Tibetan

Burmese

Cham

Western (Cambodia)

Eastern (Vietnam)

Khmer

Thai

Javanese

Further examples can be found at the excellent Omniglot.

thanks Dave, finally!.

Addendum: While we are on the subject of Devanagari you may find this article about efforts to OCR Sanskrit interesting.

Sanskrit, in which classical Indian literature was composed, is among the world's oldest recorded languages. But putting works created over the past 3000 years on to the web has not been easy.
Documents written in Devanagari, the script used for Sanskrit and other South Asian languages, can be scanned as images. But optical character recognition (OCR) software for turning Devanagari texts into digital information that can be searched and reformatted has not been commercially available.

That has not been for lack of effort. Because Devanagari is also used for widely spoken contemporary languages such as Hindi, several research teams based in India are working on OCR technology to capture it.

thanks, Peter

Tangentially related: see my earlier post on the Evolution of writing.

2003-06-01T23:45:00.000+10:00

Scientists use DNA fragments to trace the migration of modern humans

...Since all human beings have virtually identical DNA, geneticists have to look for slight chemical variations that distinguish one population from another. One technique involves the use of "microsatellites" - short repetitive fragments of DNA whose patterns of variation differ among populations. Because microsatellites are passed from generation to generation and have a high mutation rate, they are a useful tool for estimating when two populations diverged.
In their study, the research team compared 377 microsatellite markers in DNA collected from 1,056 individuals representing 52 geographic sites in Africa, Eurasia (the Middle East, Europe, Central and South Asia), East Asia, Oceania and the Americas.
Statistical analysis of the microsatellite data revealed a close genetic relationship between two hunter-gatherer populations in sub-Saharan Africa - the Mbuti pygmies of the Congo Basin and the Khoisan (or "bushmen") of Botswana and Namibia. These two populations "may represent the oldest branch of modern humans studied here," the authors concluded.
The data revealed a genetic split between the ancestors of these hunter-gatherer populations and the ancestors of contemporary African farming people - Bantu speakers who inhabit many countries in southern Africa. "This division occurred between 70,000 and 140,000 years ago and was followed by the expansion out of Africa into Eurasia, Oceania, East Asia and the Americas - in that order," Feldman said.
This result is consistent with an earlier study in which Feldman and others analyzed the Y chromosomes of more than 1,000 men from 21 different populations. In that study, the researchers concluded that the first human migration from Africa may have occurred roughly 66,000 years ago.
[more]

2003-06-01T23:31:00.000+10:00

Samaritans: Guardians of the faith

Most people know little about today's Samaritans. Many believe that the name refers to an ancient Biblical race of which no vestige survives. They are often surprised to learn that the Samaritans, who accept only the Pentateuch as Holy Writ, are a vital, intelligent group with a rich history and a distinctive language and literature, practicing their own form of worship and following age-old traditions and customs.
They claim direct descent from Ephraim and Manasseh, sons of Joseph, who entered the Promised Land with Joshua and settled in the Samaria region; while their priests stem from the tribe of Levi. The Samaritans rather resent the name by which they are known; preferring to call themselves "Shamerim" --in Hebrew, guardians-- for they contend that they have guarded the original Law of Moses, keeping it pure and unadulterated down the centuries.
Their numbers are not large, and today less than five hundred are left of a great nation that is said to have been counted in hundreds of thousands --there were estimated to be over three-quarters of a million in the early part of the Christian era. About half of the remnant live on their ancestral site, close to Mount Gerizim (1), and the other half in Holon, near Tel Aviv.
[more]

2003-05-30T10:09:00.000+10:00

Kippot recognition

This is snipped from Steven Morgan Friedman's semi-regular random thoughts newsletter.

I was recently talking to a friend's wife, who teaches at Yeshiva University--the leading Orthodox Jewish university in New York--and she pointed out to me that the colors and patterns of the kippot (the little hats that Jews are required to wear at almost all times, also known as a "yarmulkes" or even "skull-caps") that students wear reveal their attitudes towards everything from Judaism and Israel, to life and pot-smoking. I pressed her for examples, and to my great interest and surprise, she recited for me the unofficial list of associated affiliations. Later, I e-mailed her and asked her for this list, which I would like to share with you now, with, of course, the caveat that these are just one keep observer's insights from one social context:
- Black velvet is worn by the most frum [very observant] men: Lubavitchers, Chabadniks, and others in the more modern orthodox realm who are very observant
- Black leather indicates less religious but still very observant and traditional people
- Knitted yarmulkes with a white center demonstrate strong Zionism
- Knitted yarmulkes with other colors in the center don't make a specific political statement but show more openness to modernism than the black of any material; they're often made for guys by their girlfriends (especially the ones with names knitted into them) but not always
- Knitted yarmulkes worn on the very front of the head show that the wearer went to an orthodox Jewish day school
- Full-head yarmulkes (like the Sephardic-styled, embroidered ones or the knitted ones of thicker yarn than cover the head nearly to the ears) show much more openness to liberalism and modern ideologies. At YU, guys with these kippot tend to be rebels or pot-smokers or guitar players. This statement is, of course, a terrible generalization but has some kernel of truth.
- The very little yarmulkes show some kind of coolness, but I don't know what the exact statement is. Same goes for yarmulkes with smiley-faces, watermelons, Nike swooshes, names of sports teams, etc. I think those say, sure, I'm religious, but I can be cool and "with-it" too
- Guys with velvet yarmulkes under their big black hats are hard core. At YU, they are almost always Ba'al T'shuvah, but in the rest of the world they're just really really religious and tend to eschew the trappings of American capitalism.

Also of interest, you might like to check out Steven's online cliche finder or his list of etymologies.

2003-05-28T00:38:00.000+10:00

"stylometry"

A new computer program can determine the sex of an author by detecting subtle differences in the words men and women prefer to use.
For instance, female writers tend to choose grammatical terms that apply to personal relationships, such as "for" and "with," more frequently than men do.
"Women have a more interactive style," said Shlomo Argamon, a computer scientist at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago who developed the program. "They want to create a relationship between the writer and the reader."
Men, on the other hand, use more numbers, adjectives and determiners - words such as "the," "this" and "that" - because they apparently care more than women do about conveying specific information.
Argamon said the intent of male writers often was to say: "Here's something I want to tell you about, and here are some things about it."
Women, he found, write the pronoun "she" more often than men do, although both sexes use "he" about equally.
[more]

thanks, Pete

2003-05-27T17:10:00.000+10:00

The Dark Side of the Genome

While we speak of matters dark:

Researchers shine their lights on noncoding sequence
The dark side of the moon is a misnomer. Light reaches la luna's entire surface, but one half is unviewable from Earth. The human genome, the now essentially decoded map of life, likewise has a light side--the genes encoding mRNA and protein--and a dark side, which is coming into view for the first time. The dark side encompasses more than its opposite: The majority of the genome comprises intronic regions, stretches of repeat sequence, and other assorted gibberish that has attained the ignoble dubbing, "junk."
The first exploratory missions to the human genome's faceted surface are turning up traces regarding the extent of the junk. At a recent National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) conference, numerous presenters invoked Sydney Brenner's classic distinction: "Garbage you throw away and junk you keep, because you think you might want to do something useful with it, and of course you never do."
Comparative, computational, and experimental studies can shine light on these unexplored DNA elements. Some are known regulatory stretches; others encode RNAs but offer scarce hints at their function. Eric Green, chief of NHGRI's genome sequencing branch, says, "I think the challenge is going to be in the nongenic, functional portion of the genome."
[more]

2003-05-23T10:36:00.000+10:00

Dark matter revisited

A new study using the Sloan Digital Sky Survey provides the most direct evidence yet that galaxies reside at the center of giant, dark matter concentrations that may be 50 times larger than the visible galaxy itself.
The study very directly supports the generally accepted astronomical theories on dark matter and contradicts an alternative theory of gravity known as Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND).
Lead investigator, Francisco Prada, of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany and the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias in Spain, and a team of colleagues from New Mexico State University at Las Cruces and at other Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) institutions, will present the results of the team's research at a joint conference of the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes and the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, May 26-30 in La Palma, Canary Islands, Spain.
Prada and his colleagues studied the motion of about 3,000 satellites orbiting isolated bright galaxies and found strong evidence of dark matter gravitational effects.
The study "is important because it is a direct measurement of some of the properties predicted for dark matter," said Anatoly Klypin of New Mexico State University.
Although it cannot be observed directly, dark matter is believed to account for about 27 percent of the total mass of the universe, compared with only about 3 percent for normal, observable matter. The rest, according to standard models of the structure and evolution of the universe, consists of dark energy and radiation.
Prada and his colleagues observed 250,000 galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) telescope to find good candidates for a study of the gravitational effects of dark matter. From the SDDS data, they identified about 3,000 satellites -- generally small galaxies orbiting large ones ? for which they could measure velocities.
The velocity of a satellite declines predictably as the satellite moves away from the object it is orbiting, due to the effects of gravity. In the case of planets in our solar system, where there is too little dark matter to have a gravitational effect, the decline is rapid because there is no mass between the planets and the sun, he said. But in the outer reaches of galaxies, where dark matter is believed to be clustered, the decline in velocity would be much more gradual if standard cosmological models are correct.
"Our results imply the presence of dark matter," Prada said. The findings provide strong evidence against the MOND alternative theory of gravity, he said. MOND, controversial since it was proposed in 1983, eliminates the need for dark matter in explaining the nature of the universe, by changing the law of gravity in areas such as the outskirts of galaxies. [more]

For more background see my Dark Matters post back in January in which I cite the MOND theory as a possible alternative explanation to dark matter.

2003-05-21T23:22:00.000+10:00

Journey to the centre of the earth

Blast a crack in Earth's crust, pour in a few thousand tons of rock-busting molten iron, and then toss in a grapefruit-size instrument designed to ride the plunging elevator of liquid metal to the planet's core.
That scenario sounds like science fiction. Even its author, geophysicist David J. Stevenson of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, calls the proposal "highly speculative." However, in the May 15 Nature, he contends that such a mission to explore Earth's interior is technically feasible.
People have drilled into our planet's crust to investigate conditions there, but even the deepest borehole penetrates only about 10 kilometers, says Stevenson. Seismic analyses suggest that the continents, the thickest portions of Earth's outer layer, are between 200 and 250 km thick. Below that hardened crust lies the viscous mantle, which surrounds a liquid outer core and a solid inner core that are both made predominantly of iron.
All that iron sank to Earth's core because it's so dense, and Stevenson's plan would exploit that property. If scientists pour molten iron into a narrow crack at least 300 meters deep, the pressure at the bottom of the fissure would be enough to fracture the rock there, Stephenson says. As the crack grows deeper, the molten iron would flow downward and maintain pressure at the crack tip. The self-propagating crack—which high pressure in deep rocks would seal after the iron passed by—would progress at about 5 m per second and reach Earth's outer core in about a week.
[more]

Update
here's a link to Stevenson's original article: A Modest Proposal: Mission to Earth’s Core

Planetary missions have greatly enhanced our understanding of the solar system and how planets work. There is no correspondingly ambitious effort for Earth’s interior, where there are some equally fascinating scientific issues. I describe here a mission to Earth’s core in which a probe is imbedded in a large volume of liquid iron alloy that migrates to the core along a crack propagating under the action of gravity. The time to reach the core is ~ a week and the minimal required volume of iron ~ 108 kg, or about one hour of Earth’s iron production. The probe communicates its scientific results using high frequency seismic waves sensed by a ground-coupled LIGO.

2003-05-21T17:46:00.000+10:00

Jomon

Long before the invention of agriculture or the domestication of cattle, sheep, pigs, chickens and dogs, even before the ancestors of the American Indians crossed the Bering Strait into North America, the Japanese were already living in villages and cooking their meals in ceramic pots.

By 10500 BC (and possibly much earlier), the Japanese had developed the art of making ceramics. It's not clear whether this knowledge then spread to other regions or was independently rediscovered but it's worth noting that pottery does not appear in the "Cradle of Civilization" of West Asia any earlier than 7000 BC.

Archaeologists usually describe the appearance of pottery as the transition of a society from "paleolithic" to "neolithic", that is the change from a hunter gathering existence to a settled one based on food production with agriculture and animal husbandry. The extremely early date for the appearance of pottery in Japan, however, creates problems for such a simple and neat categorization. The Japanese "neolithic" period is notable for its essential lack of agriculture. Despite having abandoned nomadism in favour of the sedentary life of the village, the Japanese of this period could not in any way be described as farmers, "intensive foragers" would be a far more accurate description.

The richness of Japan's environment at the end of the last Ice Age was the principle reason for the emergence of this unique way of life. The first modern humans had walked to Japan from the Asian mainland some 30,000 years ago. At the time, Japan was a narrow isthmus that was connected both to Korea and to Siberia in an arc land that enclosed within it an enormous freshwater lake (now the Sea of Japan). When global temperatures began to rise, and with it sea levels, the islands became cut off and the big game that these paleolithic hunter gathers had relied upon started to become scarce due to increased hunting pressure. Fortunately at the same time, the warmer climate made the islands much more favourable to alternative food sources and the early Japanese switched from their meat-oriented diet to one based on a bountiful harvest of fruits and nuts produced by forests of deciduous trees. The rising sea-level flooded shorelines and made fishing much easier by creating countless shallow, silt-bottomed and nutrient-rich inlets.

With these resources at their disposal and the need to manage them the transition was made to living in permanent dwellings. This is not to say that life wasn't hard, the average life expectancy was only thirty years and periods of famine were not uncommon, but when compared to their contemporaries elsewhere in the world, the neolithic Japanese had many advantages and were able to collect enough to feed themselves. They achieved this without having to resort to the drudgery and back-breaking labour of subsistence farming (or indeed create the kind of rigid hierarchical class society that became such a trademark of Japan in later times).

The culture of the Japanese neolithic period has been aptly named after the style of its pottery, Jomon which literally means "cord motif" style. The Jomon made pots for storage, cooking and carrying. On the coasts, they used them to evaporate seawater to make salt for trading with forest communities further inland. The pots was generally made by women who built them up by pinching together coils of clay. Then they were elaborately decorated and hardened in open fires. It's interesting that in a culture with no precursors or preconceived notions of what "pottery" should look like, often turned instead to the designs of their reed baskets for models. To simulate the effect of weaving, the pots were often impressed with strands of twisted fibres.

By the time of the Middle Jomon period (about 4500 years ago), the designs had become extremely ornate and, at times, quite spectacular. This is not the kind of exquisitely minimalist art that we have come to associate with Japan. On the contrary, Middle Jomon art is brash, vibrant and flamboyant.

Flame pattern vessel

Coil-formed pottery, Japan, Jomon period, about 2500 BC.
The earliest known Japanese ceramics, made between the 11th and 5th centuries BC, are known as Jomon wares. The entire prehistoric Jomon culture derives its name from the method by which these ceramics were made: Jomon means, literally, "cord motif." In an age before potters wheels or kilns, artisans made vessels by building up basic forms with coils of clay, manipulating the soft surface to create the desired designs, sun-baking pots until dry, then firing them in above-ground bonfires of piled brushwood. The Jomon people lived in tribal units along rivers and coasts of Japan, and each area is identified with unique variants in its ceramics. The northeast Nigata region, for example, produced distinctive "flame pattern" vessels exemplified by this exuberant pot from about 2500 BC, one of the largest and best-preserved examples of its type known to exist. The hunting-gathering Jomon people used vessels--even spectacular creations like this one--mainly for cooking and for other, highly utilitarian purposes.

Jomon Women's Pottery

The Jomon Period (c. 12, 000 - 300 BCE) is named for the cord-marked patterns found on much of the pottery produced during this time.

Jomon people were able to develop an unusually sophisticated hunting-gathering culture in part because they were protected from large-scale invasions by their island setting and also because of their abundant food supply... Its people lived in small communities, in the early Jomon period there were seldom more than ten or twelve dwellings together. All in all, the Jomon people seem to have enjoyed a peaceful life, giving them the opportunity to develop their artistry for even such practical endeavors as ceramics.
Jomon ceramics may have begun in imitation of reed baskets, as many early examples suggest. Other early Jomon pots have pointed bottoms. Judging from the burn marks along the sides, they must have been planted firmly into soft earth or sand, then used for cooking...still other early vessels were crafted with straight sides and flat bottoms, a shape that was useful for storage as well as cooking and eventually became the norm. Often vessels were decorated with patterns made by pressing cord onto the damp clay (jomon means "cord markings"). Jomon usually crafted their vessels by building them up with coils of clay, then firing them in bonfires at relatively low temperatures. It is thought that Jomon pottery was made by women, as was the practice in most early societies, especially before the use of the potter's wheel.
During the middle Jomon period (2500-1500 BCE), pottery reached a high degree of creativity. By this time communities were somewhat larger, and each community may have wanted its ceramic vessels to have a unique design. The basic form remained the straight-sided cooking or storage jar, but the rim now took on spectacular, flamboyant shapes... Middle Jomon potters made full use of the tactile quality of clay, bending and twisting it as well as incising and applying designs. They favored asymmetrical shapes, although certain elements in the geometric patterns are repeated. Some designs may have had specific meanings, but the lavishly creative vessels also display a playful artistic spirit. Rather than working toward practical goals (such as better firing techniques or more useful shapes), the Jomon potters seem to have been simply enjoying to the full their imaginative vision.

excerpts from ART HISTORY, edited by Marilyn Stokstad (Abrams, 1996)

Despite this remarkable head start along the road to "Civilization" that was attained by the Jomon, the advantages of having such a rich biological environment after a while led to a kind of backwardness and ultimately to stagnation. By the late Jomon (1000 BC), foods obtained from natural sources were becoming increasingly harder to get. It was only around this time that agriculture and metallurgy and many of the other trappings of civilization entered Japan, several millennia behind developments on the mainland.

Jomon Pottery
The Jomon pottery culture not only begins early, but it continues till well down into the first millennium BC, for the Bronze Age did not begin till very late in Japan. Thus the majority of Jomon pottery is of the third and second millennia BC, when it achieved numerous exotic forms. Jomon means twisted cord in Japanese, and the main characteristic is the twisted cord decoration.

See also:
The Jomon period in Japan exhibit at the Niigata Prefectural Museum web site

2003-05-16T12:50:00.000+10:00

How the Balkans got balkanized

Written in 1993 at the height of the conflict in Bosnia, this paper by E. A. Hammel nicely summarises the demographic history of the Balkans and how it became so, well, really really complicated.

Demography and the Origins of the Yugoslav Civil War
What did this migrational process do to ethnic identification and its cultural symbols? The three primary elements of ethnic identification in the Balkans are kinship, language, and religion. They are not neatly related. Ethnic identification is summarized in labels, such as Serb, Croat, Muslim -- these especially in the context of the Civil War. Kinship is reckoned shallowly and rather bilaterally among most Muslims, deeply and more patrilineally among Orthdox, and something in between among Catholics. It was not difficult to record genealogies 14 generations deep in upland Serbia and Montenegro as recently as the 1960s but hard to do so more than 3 generations deep among Bosnian Muslims. Thus, the efficacy of kinship in defining ethnic groups varies. Especially among the Orthodox, consciousness of kinship ties to populations in areas of origin is strong.
Language is a tricky criterion. The Slavic speakers are sharply distinct from Albanians, Hungarians, Germans, Turks, Greeks and others. However, a large proportion of the local population in any area through which a major linguistic boundary runs are bilingual. Among the Slavic speakers, linguistic differentiation is gradual, in a dialect continuum from northwest to southeast; the Slavic languages have differentiated less than the Germanic or Romance languages, and mutual intelligibility is quite high. Only minute attention to dialect detail makes ethnic symbolization possible. This dialect continuum has been segmented by internationally imposed political boundaries and the centralizing efforts of core states, and the intellectuals of such states have sometimes been busy erecting linguisting boundaries to serve nationalist interests. In general, the linguistic divisions are based on the particular word we gloss as the interrogative pronoun, "what?" (sto, ca, kaj), and the rendering of the unstable "jat'" vowel of Late Common Slavic as "i", "ije" or "je", or "e". Even these isoglosses are not neatly distributed. Without going into detail, I note that the northwest shift of Slavs fleeing the Turks drove a wedge of Montenegrin and Herzegovinian dialect up through Bosnia into Croatia-Slavonia, separating speakers who had once formed a band running across Bosnia and Slavonia from the Adriatic to the Drava.
Religion is the most public and the most commonly invoked criterion of ethnicity. The religious history of the region is complicated. The Slavs were Christianized in the 10th Century by the efforts of the SS Cyril and Methodius, Macedonian monks who developed two alphabets for the translation of the Scripture into what we now know as Old Church Slavonic, a dialect very close to Old Common Slavic. They began their work with the central Slavs in Moravia, where German monks had failed before them. The essentially protestant nature of their linguistic efforts was a thorn in the side of Rome and a symbol of the emerging schism in the Church, which was formalized within little more than a century. The original alphabet, the Glagolithic, persisted in Dalmatia and Bosnia where it came to have a regional symbolic quality, replaced by Latinic in the Catholic church and by Cyrillic, the second of the two alphabets, in the Orthodox. In Dalmatia Glagolithic was used in the Protestant Reformation. The quality of political separatism evinced in the Reformation was manifested more exotically in the Bogumil heresy in Bosnia from about the 11th to the 15th Centuries. Bogumilism, a dualistic Manichean Christianity, originated in Bulgaria in the 10th Century in an Orthodox context and spread throughout the Balkans, and may have been ancestral (or at least fraternal) to the Albigensian heresy in France and the Paterene heresy in Italy as well. It was extirpated in mediaeval Serbia by Emperor Stefan Dusan who vacillated between Rome and Byzantium, finally accepting the latter, but flourished in Bosnia where it provided a neutral ground between the two contending churches that symbolized the Eastern and Western Roman Empires. It is claimed to have been popular first among the peasantry and then adopted by the Bosnian nobility. With the arrival of the Turks, all of the Bogumils seem to have converted to Islam, led perhaps by the nobility who were able to preserve their feudal privileges by becoming vassals of the Sultan. Islam, like Bogumilism, afforded a refuge from both contending Christian empires.[7]
These three dimensions of ethnicity: kinship, language, and religion, crosscut. Cvijic notes Catholic populations whose ancestry lies in Orthodox areas and who maintain kinship ties with families who are Orthodox. There are Catholic Serbs in Dubrovnik who celebrate that distinctively Orthodox feast of the household saint called the slava. The Catholic inhabitants of Konavlje south of Dubrovnik refer to the Orthodox as od stare ruke (of the old hand), suggesting their own prior membership in the faith.[8] There were at one time some Protestant Slavs, principally in Slovenia, to some extent in Dalmatia, but most of all in Slavonia under the Turks where there was no interference from Catholic bishops, but the Counter-Reformation erased them from the local religious map. There are Albanians of all three faiths: Orthodox, Catholic, and Muslim. Hungarians and Germans in the region are either Catholic or Protestant. Religion thus does not define ethnicity across major language divisions; no Catholic Croat claims common ethnicity with a Catholic Hungarian. On the other hand religion divides language communities into endogamous subsets, some of which are taken as identifiable ethnic groups. For example, Catholic and Muslim Albanians recognize that they are Albanians, but of different faiths. On the other hand, Catholic and Orthodox Slavs do not recognize common ethnicity; no Croat peasant claims co-ethnicity with Serb peasants, and neither with Muslim Slavs, even if they speak virtually identical dialects.[9]
Out of this kaleidoscope emerge the politically relevant ethnic groups that we see opposed in the Balkans today and quintessentially in Bosnia and Herzegovina. While the elements of kinship, language, and religion are the symbolic characteristics of ethnic membership, they fail to define the ethnic groups in any consistent or historical way. Croats, Serbs, and Muslim Slavs in Bosnia speak dialects that are only narrowly distinguishable. The dialect of the Bosnian Serbs is closer to that of most of the Croats of the region than it is to the Serbian of the core of Serbia. Similarly, the dialect of most Bosnian Croats is closer to that of the Serbs of the region than it is to that of the Croats of northern Dalmatia or the core of Croatia. The symbol that they use to differentiate themselves is religion, but religion fails in that task outside the region (for example with the Catholic Serbs of Dubrovnik).
These contending ethnic groups are clusters of symbols that are the detritus of imperial history and that are currently mobilized by political organizers to make impermeable boundaries where such boundaries did not exist before. It is not a new process. Under the Austrians, the Slavs of the Military Border were originally thought of all as Vlachs, whether Catholic or Orthodox; only later under their most Catholic majesties was there pressure to make the boundary of religion at least as wide as that of the State. Exactly that homogenizing instinct to achieve a congruence of political borders and symbolic qualities led Franjo Tudjman[10] and the Croatian Democratic Party to strip the krajina Serbs of their cultural distinctiveness and privileges, granted to them by the Communist Party as a way to prevent the rise of mini-nation states. The attempt to limit symbolic expression had the same result it did under Maria Theresa and Joseph II -- armed rebellion. This ethnic cleansing of a resident population is now met by ethnic cleansing of territories through the mechanisms of terror and expulsion as Serbia seeks to extend its boundaries to match the old Ottoman ones in Bosnia. Serbia is not above the first strategy, either, as it limits the use of Albanian in official and educational discourse, bent on completion of the slavicization of Illyrians that resulted in much of Montenegro.[11] [more]

2003-05-16T12:36:00.000+10:00

Mappamundi

So what planet was this "Sir John Mandeville" guy from anyway?

Easy answer, this one¹:

This is the Hereford Mappamundi (i.e. Map of the World) which dates from around 1290. To help you get your bearings, here is a somewhat inaccurate (but helpful nonetheless) simplified sketch of the map which annotates most of the important features.

The Mappamundi is a remarkably beautiful and rare glimpse into the medieval mindset and its view of the world. It is the largest map of its kind (54 x 64 inches) to have survived and resides at Hereford Cathedral in England just as it has done for the past 700 years. The map depicts the world as a flat disk with East at the top and it shows all of the features of the (then) known world, including Africa, India and China. Paradise is depicted somewhere east of India and the Holy Land with its important sites expanding to fill the middle of the map and Jerusalem at its centre.

This is a work of cosmology as much as a cartography. It is an attempt to explain the world as well as to depict its features. It was made in a time when the general population was "uneducated and very provincial. In the Hereford map they could revel in this pictorial description of the outside world, which taught natural history, classical legends, explained the winds and reinforced their religious beliefs."

The Hereford Mappamundi
ASIA:
This "continent" forms the upper, eastern portion, of the map; actually consuming more than half as it encompasses the 'world-center' Jerusalem. The letters A. S. I. A., in red, are hard to locate being widely separated, placed vertically from the Garden of Eden to Jerusalem. During the Middle Ages, when clerics were engaged in rediscovering and annotating the writings of their predecessors, certain additions and alterations were made to the then existent Roman maps. The practice of placing the East at the top was acceptable to the Church, owing to the special sanctity attached to that quarter, and, Paradise, shown here as an island, was inserted at this point. On the Hereford map there is a drawing of Adam, Eve and the serpent, and below to the right, the expulsion from the Garden. These same Churchmen, in accordance with scriptural texts, placed Jerusalem in the center of the world: This is Jerusalem: I have set it in the midst of the nations and countries that are around her (Ezekiel V:5). They also wished to show as much detail in the Holy Land as possible, consequently the area allotted to Palestine was disproportionately enlarged. Palestine on this map, as well as other parts of the map, have a number of Biblical places and incidents inserted, i.e., a pictorial crucifixion outside a walled-Jerusalem; the track of the people of Isreal from Egypt across the Red Sea to Jericho; the Ark on Arrat in the Armenian mountains; the granaries of Joseph (Joseph's Barns) as the pyramids were considered to be; the very conspicuous Tower of Babel; Moses on Mount Sinai receiving the tablets; Lot's wife; and the river Jordan flowing through to the Sea of Galilee to the Dead Sea, where Sodom and Gomorrah lie submerged. Some of these details of the Holy Land were taken from itineraries made for the use of pilgrims.
On the right of Palestine is Egypt, which is included in ASIA. Here the Nile and its delta is shown, along with the sphinx and the pyramids. Cairo is misnamed Babylon, and Alexandria is depicted with its lighthouse. On the left of Palestine is Asia Minor, between the Aegean Sea and the Black Sea, along with Troy, Laodicea, Antioch, and Noah's Ark..
The actual Babylon stands conspicuously in the middle as a multi-storied city. An enigmatic creature, perhaps the spirit of evil, protrudes from one side, the Tower of Babel is near at hand, the Euphrates River flows into the city and out the other side. A long description gives details of the origin of this city with mighty walls and 100 gates. Above Babylon is India in gold letters, a country of mountains and rivers, dragons, giants and pygmies, and strange beasts and birds. Above India is the Garden of Eden with four rivers flowing from it which submerge (to prevent men from finding their way back to Paradise) to reappear as the legendary sources of the rivers Tigris and Euphrates which are shown flowing south to the Persian Gulf; the river Ganges which is shown flowing east forming a delta before reaching the ocean, and the Nile. To the left of India, in northwest Asia, across mountain ranges which may represent the Himalayas, are the Chinese, called Seres, with a reference to their silk as an article of export. To the right of India is Arabia, the Red Sea and Persian Gulf extending to the ocean enclosing the island of Ceylon at the base.
In the Middle Ages scholars were also greatly interested in the exploits of Alexander the Great who became legendary, therefore a number of drawings and inscriptions in Asia are associated with him: i.e., five bell-tents, the central one with a cross, rising from an altar-style base on the boundary between Asia and Africa; a gateway with opened doors at the end of an eight-mile mountain pass, representing the Caspian Gates through which Alexander was said to have passed on his way north; the city of Choolissima, conventionally drawn, capital of the land of Magog, taken by Alexander after a long siege; two islands in the northern ocean, Miopar and Mirabilis, appeased by presents and entreaties; the island of Terraconta inhabited by intractable cannibalistic Turks "from the stock of Gog and Magog" ; and finally the battlemented wall with which he imprisoned "the accursed descendants of Cain". Below this area is the land of the Scythian races. Obviously knowledge of this part of the world was very limited and the space was thus filled with dramatic pictures.
AFRICA:
This continent is located in the lower portion of the map on the right. Strangely the name EUROPE in great gold letters stretches down the length of Africa, similarly Europe is labelled AFRICA. It should be noted that the extremities of Africa and Europe are correctly given in small writing, terminus Africe and terminus Europe. The most conspicuous feature in Africa is the blue band of the Nile running parallel with the ocean. The river begins as a lake near Mount Hesperus and apparently ends as a lake, but it submerges to reappear as the Lower Nile, forming Africa's eastern boundary. Behind the blue band of the river is a grim array of grotesque figures to indicate the existence of primitive peoples. On the north the continent is bounded by the Mediterranean, with cities along the coastline, notably Carthage facing its rival Rome across Sicily. Mons Mercurii opposite Crete is Cape Bon. It is clear that Africa has been drawn from information collected from maps and itineraries of the Roman Empire prior to 600 A.D. Consequently the Roman provinces are delineated, Libya, Tripolitania, Numidia, and Mauritania. The Atlas Mountains are shown forming a single peak. The ocean is dotted with islands, including the Canaries, Madeira and Teneriffe are called the Fortunate Islands, an allusion to their temperate climate.
EUROPE:
When we turn to this area of the Hereford map we would expect to find some evidence of more contemporary 13th century knowledge and geographic accuracy than was seen in Africa or Asia, and, to some limited extent, this theory is true. By the 13th century trade and commerce were well developed, and travel throughout Europe was relatively easy. However this type of 'word-of-mouth' information is slow to be collected and eventually reflected on maps. Scholars, such as G.R. Crone, believe there to be about a two century lag between the actual circulating knowledge of the world and the geographical content on the Hereford map. Europe is not easily recognizable since actual coastlines are disregarded in this highly stylized format and the river systems seem to dominate. The Danube, Rhine, and Rhone are accurately shown rising in the Alps and flowing to their respective mouths. The Iberian and Italian peninsulas are not represented as such. Beginning with Spain, at the bottom-center, the Pyrenees form a line running north and south, with many rivers and towns displayed. Italy is merely a bulge between the Mediterranean and the Adriatic; the Alps are fairly accurate, with towns in the area being chiefly derived from the Antonine Itinerary. Rome is honored by a popular hexameter, Roma caput mundi tenet orbis frena rotundi [Rome, the head, holds the reins of the world].
Greece has its Mt. Olympus and such cities as Athens and Corinth; the Delphic oracle, misnamed Delos, is represented by a hideous head. Macedonia, Thrace, and Bulgaria are also shown in this area.
France, with the bordering regions of Holland and Belgium is called Gallia, and includes all of the land between the Rhine and the Pyrenees. Paris, owing to its famous university, has one of the most imposing castellated buildings on the entire map. Unfortunately, though, the area of France has been defaced by indelible scratching and scribbling, probably done at a time when anti-French feelings ran high in England. The Rhine, Moselle, Seine, and Loire are incorrectly given a general north-south direction, consequently displacing some sixty towns that occur near them.
Norway and Sweden are shown as a peninsula, divided by an arm of the sea, though their size and position are misrepresented. Norway, alone, is named, and there is a strange figure which seems to depict a man on snow skis, with an inscription, roughly translated, he runs on skis. There is only a vague conception of the form of the Baltic Sea. Germany is equally obscure and vague, Upper Germany is noted as being occupied by Slavic people, and Lower Germany has a note, this is Saxony. The principle rivers, the Rhine, Vistula, Ems, Weser, and Elbe are given, and the towns included are Bremen, Hamburg, Magdeburg, and Prague. North of the Danube is Dacia with a note, this is Russia, and a picture of a bear. The river Don forms the boundary between Europe and Asia.
On the other side of Europe, Iceland, the Faeroes, and Ultima Tile are shown grouped together north of Norway, perhaps because the restricting circular limits of the map did not permit them to be shown at a more correct distance. As can be seen, beyond the perimeter of the former Roman rule, the detail and accuracy is rather lacking. What contemporary knowledge the map does display of this area comes from the 11th century writer Adam of Bremen.
The British Isles are drawn on a larger scale than the neighboring parts of the continent, and this representation is of special interest on account of its early date. With the exception of four maps drawn by Matthew Paris, about 1250 (Slide #225), this is the earliest medieval attempt at a detailed map of these islands to have survived. The appearance of this portion of the Hereford map, in particular the narrow form of the English Channel and North Sea, strongly suggest that an existing map of the British Isles (probably not Matthew Paris') has been fitted into the general framework of this world map by cutting out a segment of the main land mass of Europe. This would explain the distortion of the coastline, particularly in southeast England, and perhaps also the complete omission of East Anglia. The circular shape of the map, again, no doubt accounts for the curved outlines of western Scotland and Ireland.
On the Hereford map, the areas retain their Latin names, Britannia insula and Hibernia, Scotia, Wallia, and Cornubia, and are neatly divided, usually by rivers, into compartments, North and South Ireland, Wales, Cornwall, England, and Scotland. Cathedral cities such as Durham, Lincoln, Hereford, and Canterbury are displayed; castles and towers such as London, Conway, Caernarvon, Dover, and Edinburgh, and the mountains of Snowdon and Grampians are just some of the exceptional detail included admist these special isles.
[more]

¹ - of course, being fixed firmly at the centre of the Universe in those days, technically the world couldn't have be called a planet.

2003-05-16T10:35:00.000+10:00

Okay, false alarm

Neither a bang nor even a whimper. Blogging will resume in just a moment.

2003-05-15T11:23:00.000+10:00

Did I mention that the world was going to end today?

Good night, everybody.

2003-05-13T00:01:00.000+10:00

Mandeville

Sir John Mandeville was an Early-Renaissance writer of travel tales, similar in style and content to his near-contemporary, Marco Polo. But history has judged the two quite differently: whereas Marco Polo has become a household word, synonymous with bold explorations, Mandeville has been largely forgotten. It was not always so.
During his lifetime, and for a couple of centuries afterwards, Mandeville was the more famous of the two. A copy of Mandeville - but not Polo - was in the possession of Leonardo da Vinci. More telling, about 300 manuscripts (hand-written copies) of Mandeville survive, compared to only about 70 of Polo.
So what accounts for these reversals of fortune?
Mandeville wrote his book about 1356, or shortly thereafter. Its original tile was "The Voyages and Travels of Sir John Mandeville, Knight," but is now generally known as "Travels of Sir John Mandeville." Polo's book, originally titled, "Descriptions of the World," came out about 1300. Whereas Mandeville wrote his book himself, Polo used the services of a professional writer, Rusticello, who based the book on Polo's notebooks. (Mandeville is the better written.) Standards of what constitutes a historical/geographic work have greatly changed since Polo/Mandeville's time. Both books -- but especially Mandeville -- contain a fascinating pastiche of facts (often distorted), impressions, opinions - and utterly fantastic claims. Reading these today, one is left with the bewildering impression of a farrago of National Geographic and supermarket tabloids. [more]

You can read his entire book online. In this excerpt, he describes some of the weirdos that you'd be likely to meet if you sailed to the islands of Indonesia.

The king of this isle is a full great lord and a mighty, and hath under him fifty-four great isles that give tribute to him. And in everych of these isles is a king crowned; and all be obeissant to that king. And he hath in those isles many diverse folk.
In one of these isles be folk of great stature, as giants. And they be hideous for to look upon. And they have but one eye, and that is in the middle of the front. And they eat nothing but raw flesh and raw fish.
And in another isle toward the south dwell folk of foul stature and of cursed kind that have no heads. And their eyen be in their shoulders.
And in another isle be folk that have the face all flat, all plain, without nose and without mouth. But they have two small holes, all round, instead of their eyes, and their mouth is plat also without lips.
And in another isle be folk of foul fashion and shape that have the lip above the mouth so great, that when they sleep in the sun they cover all the face with that lip.
And in another isle there be little folk, as dwarfs. And they be two so much as the pigmies. And they have no mouth; but instead of their mouth they have a little round hole, and when they shall eat or drink, they take through a pipe or a pen or such a thing, and suck it in, for they have no tongue; and therefore they speak not, but they make a manner of hissing as an adder doth, and they make signs one to another as monks do, by the which every of them understandeth other.
And in another isle be folk that have great ears and long, that hang down to their knees.
And in another isle be folk that have horses' feet. And they be strong and mighty, and swift runners; for they take wild beasts with running, and eat them.
And in another isle be folk that go upon their hands and their feet as beasts. And they be all skinned and feathered, and they will leap as lightly into trees, and from tree to tree, as it were squirrels or apes.
And in another isle be folk that be both man and woman, and they have kind; of that one and of that other. And they have but one pap on the one side, and on that other none. And they have members of generation of man and woman, and they use both when they list, once that one, and another time that other. And they get children, when they use the member of man; and they bear children, when they use the member of woman.
And in another isle be folk that go always upon their knees full marvellously. And at every pace that they go, it seemeth that they would fall. And they have in every foot eight toes.
Many other diverse folk of diverse natures be there in other isles about, of the which it were too long to tell, and therefore I pass over shortly.

Okay, so he might have got a few of the details a bit wrong but at least he knew, even back in 1356, that the world was round (please take note American high school teachers).

And after, go men to Belgrade, and enter into the land of Bougiers; and there pass men a bridge of stone that is upon the river of Marrok. And men pass through the land of Pyncemartz and come to Greece to the city of Nye, and to the city of Fynepape, and after to the city of Dandrenoble, and after to Constantinople, that was wont to be clept Bezanzon. And there dwelleth commonly the Emperor of Greece. And there is the most fair church and the most noble of all the world; and it is of Saint Sophie. And before that church is the image of Justinian the emperor, covered with gold, and he sitteth upon an horse y-crowned. And he was wont to hold a round apple of gold in his hand: but it is fallen out thereof. And men say there, that it is a token that the emperor hath lost a great part of his lands and of his lordships; for he was wont to be Emperor of Roumania and of Greece, of all Asia the less, and of the land of Syria, of the land of Judea in the which is Jerusalem, and of the land of Egypt, of Persia, and of Arabia. But he hath lost all but Greece; and that land he holds all only. And men would many times put the apple into the image's hand again, but it will not hold it. This apple betokeneth the lordship that he had over all the world, that is round. And the tother hand he lifteth up against the East, in token to menace the misdoers. This image stands upon a pillar of marble at Constantinople.

The central scene shows a Bible story from the Old Testament: Caleb and Joshua are bringing grapes back to Moses from the 'Promised Land' - a sign that there was a rich, fertile land awaiting the Hebrew tribes that had fled from Egypt. The couple are flanked on either side by strange figures known as blemyahs.

2003-05-07T23:26:00.000+10:00

Panawave

This is a highly disturbing the development.

The world is going to end on May the 15th and I'm stuck here while Japan's best and most avant-garde performance art troupe, the inimitable "Panawave Laboratory" are on their final tour.

If you haven't heard of them before, Panawave's routine consists of driving about in rural Japan, draping themselves and everything else in white cloth and terrifying the villagers with stories about communist guerrillas blasting everyone with electromagnetic radiation, hilarity ensues.

White cloth brigade
A caravan of vehicles belonging to a New Age group holed up on a mountain road in western Japan for almost a week left today after it was searched by hundreds of police and warned it was breaking traffic laws, an officer said.

The group, Panawave, has become a focus of media attention in Japan since it began camping along the little-travelled two-lane road in western Gifu prefecture last Friday, obstructing traffic and draping trees with white cloth.

Panawave says it is seeking sanctuary from electromagnetic waves generated by left-wing guerrillas in Japan as part of a conspiracy to destroy its leadership.

It claims the cloth neutralises the effects of the waves. [more]

Panawave in Pictures

	White-robed members of a mysterious doomsday group which calls itself "Panawave Laboratory" make their way around their mountain road camp draped with white sheets in "protection against electromagnetic waves" in Kiyomi village, central Japan. Cult members are convinced that the human race will be destroyed on May 15 this year because of a dramatic change in the angles of the Earth's axis.
	Panawave group members wrap a tree in white cloth near their camp to deflect electromagnetic waves that they say have made their founder gravely ill.
	A Panawave cult member in all white costume holds a mirror-like shield during a face-off with local police officers in a mountain road in Yamato, central Japan. For years, they have traveled the backroads of Japan in an all-white caravan, swathing their camps in white fabric.
	The white-clad cult members, who were forced by police to leave Hachiman, Gifu Prefecture, where they had occupied a section of road for a week since April 25, made a short journey in their fleet of white vehicles and arrived at a neighboring village of Kiyomi in the predawn hours of Friday May 2.

[more]

Thanks, Drew

2003-05-06T15:37:00.000+10:00

Jehoash: definitely a fake

A Major Exciting Event on the Temple Mount
An Ancient Hebrew Inscription is Found Dating from the Ninth Century BCE Describing Temple Repairs by King Jehoash of Judah
...
The way in which the Arabs on the Temple Mount handled the discovery of the [Jehoash] inscription was also terrible, with no respect given to it and its holiness. They merely sold it to a collector of antiquities in Israel. It was a godly miracle that it was not sold by them to Arabs or other collectors outside Israel. In this way the inscription remained in Israel and its story could be shared with all the people of Israel and the world. It was only G-d Who closed an historical circle between one of the righteous kings of Judah and his people, Israel, in our endtime generation. It is no accident that this dramatic discovery was made at this time so close to the climax of the godly redemptional process of Israel when the Third Temple is soon to be built. This is a message from the G-d of Israel to the people of Israel to do what King Jehoash did and to repair and rebuild the Temple. This is the most important and exciting point of this discovery. We pray and will do everything possible to ensure that the Israeli Government and people will understand and accept this godly message and will do what G-d expects — immediately build the Third Temple.
[more]

On Relics, Forgeries, and Biblical Archaeology
[The Jehoash Inscription] has become a stone of contention in the bitter contemporary battle for the spiritual and physical possession of Jerusalem's Temple Mount, where, according to some sketchy and unsubstantiated reports, it was originally found. The militant Israeli group "The Temple Mount Faithful" posted photographs and detailed descriptions of the Jehoash Inscription on their website, declaring it "completely authentic," and noting that "people feel that the timing is no accident and that it is a clear message from the G-d of Israel Himself that time is short, the Temple should immediately be rebuilt..." A few days later, Abdullah Kan'an, secretary-general of Jordan's Royal Committee for Jerusalem Affairs, issued a press release asserting that extremist factions in Israel were using the claims of the discovered tablet to support their bid to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque and rebuild the Temple, and further warned that "If that happened, God forbid, a holy religious war will definitely inflame the whole region."
[more]

Hold that Holy War!

The Jehoash Inscription is a forgery and contrary to the findings of the Geological Survey of Israel, not a terribly good one at that. Even Hershel Shanks and Biblical Archaeology Review have despite some reluctance now accepted the inevitable.

While this should not come as much of a surprise to regular readers of Laputan Logic, for the sake of completeness please excuse me while I flog this rotting carcass one more time...

Assessing the Jehoash Inscription
The Paleographer: Demonstrably a Forgery

by Hershel Shanks

Was it too good to be true? In recent months, the world learned of an inscribed tablet apparently written by Jehoash, the ninth-century B.C.E. king of Judah. But almost immediately, questions were raised about its authenticity.

After examining the text of the Jehoash Inscription, Frank Moore Cross, professor emeritus at Harvard and America’s leading expert in ancient Semitic inscriptions, to cite one notable example, has concluded that the inscription itself “leaves little doubt that we are dealing with a forgery, and that, fortunately, it is a rather poor forgery”
...
The Linguist: Hebrew Philology Spells Fake

by Edward L. Greenstein. Department of Bible, Tel Aviv University

The language of the Jehoash Inscription is fake. It is not idiomatic ancient Hebrew but rather a perversion of it. If authentic, it would be a phenomenal find. But clearly it is not a genuine artifact.

To be declared authentic, any inscription that has not been excavated under controlled conditions by professional archaeologists must pass three basic tests. One is physical: The stone, the patina and any markings must all be judged to be ancient by an archaeological laboratory.

Second, the shape and form of the letters must be appropriate to the time and place that the inscription is believed to hail from. This is the paleographical test.

Third, the language, rhetoric and form of the inscription must be those common to monumental royal inscriptions of the First Temple period (tenth through early sixth centuries B.C.E.). This is the philological test, the area of my expertise. Paleographers have already declared the inscription a forgery. Geologists are apparently divided. As an expert in the language of the Hebrew Bible, I have no difficulty in declaring the Jehoash Inscription a fake. Colleagues with whom I have discussed the matter agree.

I will discuss several examples here [some of which are also referred to in the discussion of Frank Moore Cross’s analysis; we include Cross’s examples because Greenstein comes at the subject from a slightly different angle—Ed.] One might argue that one or two of them are not enough to prove that the Jehoash Inscription is a fake, but one can hardly ignore the cumulative weight of all.
[More]

This doesn't mean, however, that Shanks is ready to concede that the James Ossuary is also a fake. On this matter, where expert opinion remains genuinely split he continues to vehemently defend the bone box against the critics.

The lesson here is that if you are in the fake antiquities business, as with so many endeavors, keep it simple and don't overreach. Be economical with the "evidence" and try keep it as ambiguous as possible. Hopefully, in this way the artifact will be placed well beyond the reach of scientific proof or disproof. Let the preconceptions of others do the rest.

The hubris of Jehoash's forger was in being too anxious to provide scientists with conclusive proof. Greenstein makes this point quite nicely:

[W]hy would someone invest so much into producing an object that seems authentic physically but not linguistically?

[One possible reason is that the] forger does not realize how poorly he (or she) understands Biblical Hebrew. He or she possesses certain technical skills, but not of the linguistic kind. The chutzpah of the forger is evident in the length and full legibility of the inscription that he or she has tried to put over on us.

The James Ossuary, on the other hand, seems likely to keep them all guessing for a long time to come.

2003-05-02T00:27:00.000+10:00

Rongorongo

The Small Santiago Tablet (length: 319mm, width: 122mm)

Introduction
In 1864, the French lay missionary Eugène Eyraud -- the first known non-Polynesian resident of Earth's most isolated inhabited island, Easter Island or Rapanui -- reported in a letter to his superior that he had seen there "in all the houses" hundreds of tablets and staffs incised with thousands of hieroglyphic figures. Two years later, only a small handful of these incised artefacts were left. Most rongorongo, as the unique objects were subsequently called, had by then been burnt, hidden away in caves, or deftly cannibalized for boat planks, fishing lines, or honorific skeins of human hair. The few Rapanui survivors of recent slave raids and contagions evidently no longer feared the objects' erstwhile tapu or sacred prohibition.
When Eugène Eyraud died of tuberculosis on Rapanui four years later in 1868, his fellow missionaries there, who had arrived only in 1866, knew nothing of the existence of incised tablets and staffs on the island. Rongorongo comprised the Easter Islanders' best-kept secret. Rapanui's rongorongo script comprises one of the world's most fascinating writing systems. This is principally because rongorongo is Oceania's only indigenous script that predates the twentieth century and because it represents one of the world's most eloquent graphic expressions...
[more]

While plenty have claimed to be able to read it (including the author of the quote above, Steven Roger Fischer), the Rongorongo script of Easter Island remains undeciphered to this day.

The Easter Island Tablets
by Jacques B.M. Guy
Easter Island, also known as Rapa Nui or Rapanui, with its statues and with its unique writing system (known as Rongorongo), has provided such fertile breeding ground for various crackpot theories, from sunken continents to alien visitors, that a short introduction is necessary.
...
What Then, Do We Know?
Very little. We will probably never know what the tablets mean: too few have survived. Let us then be content with the little of which we can be sure.
Each tablet was prepared before carving. Shallow grooves were cut lengthwise, probably using an adze with a blade of shell or of obsidian. They are 10 to 15mm wide, and can be clearly seen in a photo pp.6465 of Catherine and Michel Orliac's excellent little book. The signs themselves were engraved in those grooves, probably with shark teeth or obsidian flakes, as oral tradition has it.
Of the 21 tablets we have, three bear almost exactly the same hieroglyphic text. A fourth one, called "Tahua" or "The Oar" bears only part of that text, and in a very different, more lapidary, style. Indeed this tablet is an oar made of European ash, as were used in the British navy two centuries ago. At the earliest, it could date from the beginning of the eighteenth century, at the latest, from the end of the nineteenth. There must therefore have been then literate Easter Islanders, because this "Oar" is not a mere copy. It looks like a compilation, a digest of earlier texts, lost, except for its beginning, found on those other three tablets (see "On a Fragment of the Tahua Tablet" in the Journal of the Polynesian Society, December 1985).
The overwhelming majority of the hieroglyphs are anthropomorphic. They are little figures, facing you, or sideways; standing with dangling arms; or sitting with their legs sometimes stretched, sometimes crossed; with a hand up, or down, or turned to the mouth; some hold a staff, some a shield, some a barbed string. Some sport two bulging eyes (or are they ears, or coils of hair?); some a huge hooked nose with three hairs on it; some have the body of a bird. The writing often looks like an animated cartoon. You can see the same little fellow repeated in slightly different postures. One tablet shows the same figure in three successive postures, sitting sideways, playing, it seems, with a top. Or is it a potter at the wheel? A jeweller with a drill, making shell beads?

There are also many zoomorphic figures, birds especially, fish and lizards less often. The most frequent figure looks very much like the frigate bird, which happens to have been the object of a cult, as it was associated with MakeMake, the supreme god.
When you compare the tablets which bear the same text, when you analyze repeated groups of signs, you realize that writing must have followed rules. The scribe could choose to link a sign to the next, but not in any old way. You could either carve a mannikin standing, arms dangling, followed by some other sign, or the same mannikin holding that sign with one hand. You could either carve a simple sign (a leg, a crescent) separate from the next, or rotate it 90 degrees counterclockwise and carve the next sign on top of it.
All we can reasonably hope to decipher some day is some two to three lines of the tablet commonly called "Mamari". You can clearly see that they have to do with the moon. We happen to have several versions of the ancient lunar calendar of Easter Island. The most interesting was collected by William Thomson in 1886, whose report was published by the American National Museum in 1889, in a monograph "Te Pito te Henua, or Easter Island". Thanks to Thomson, we know for instance that the night called "kokore tahi" corresponded to 27 November 1886. Using an almanac of 1886 or astronomical software, we can match his list against the actual phases of the moon at the time of his stay on Easter Island, and use this comparison as a key to deciphering the hieroglyphs of the calendar (see " The lunar calendar of Tablet Mamari", Journal de la Société des Océanistes, Paris, 1990). Thomson also collected the names of the months with the corresponding dates in our calendar. By an extraordinary stroke of good luck, the traditional Easter Island year corresponding to 18851886 happened to have 13 months, whereas all other authors reported only 12 months. By calculating the dates of the phases of the moon in 1885 and 1886 we can reconstruct this ancient calendar and, to a certain extent, how it worked, and when the extra month ("embolismic month" in technical jargon) had to be inserted (see "A propos des mois de l'ancien calendrier pascuan", Société des Océanistes, Paris, 1992). Some day, perhaps, someone will discover a tablet the hieroglyphs of which are the names of the months, or which contains the rules for deciding when this thirteenth embolismic month was to be inserted.
I have mentioned failed attempts at decipherment. Many have claimed that the Easter Island hieroglyphs are the spit image of the writing of this or that extinct civilization, from India to the Andes, and made the Easter Islanders their descendants. First, this is untrue. The Easter Island hieroglyphs have a distinct style, unique in the world. Second, this is downright silly. There are not a million different ways of drawing a "mannikin standing", a "fish", a "staff", a "bow", an "arrow". Ask a fouryear old to draw you a "man with a stick" and compare that with the hieroglyphs of Easter Island. You are sure to find a few that look very much like that "man with a stick". Does that make the child an heir to the ancient Easter Islanders?
[more]

A segment of the Santiago Staff with part of lines 4 and 5 clearly visible

When I look at these riotous dancing figures, I can't help being reminded a little of the subway graffiti of Keith Haring (gallery).

Enlargement showing fine details of the middle of lines 3 to 7, verso of the Small Santiago Tablet.

For more information the Easter Island script, rongorongo.org is the best collection of resources available anywhere on the web. The site includes the full corpus of texts for the language, a catalogue of symbols and photographs of all existing inscriptions.

2003-05-01T12:06:00.000+10:00

Yamata-no-Orochi

Susano-o and the Dragon
Susano-o [the mythical progenitor of the Japenese Imperial Family] descended from heaven to earth. He arrived at the river Hi, in the province of Idzuno. He heard the sound of weeping.
He came upon an old man and old woman who were pitifully saying their farewells to their daughter. The old man was named Ashi-nazuchi, and his wife, Te-nazuchi. He asked them the nature of their grief, and they explained that they formerly had eight daughters. The other seven daughters had been devoured by an eight-headed serpent [Yamata-no-Orochi].
Susano-o fell in love with the young woman, (named Kushi-nada-hime) and offered to save her, in exchange for her hand in marriage. They immediately granted his request. Susano-o changed Kushi-nada-hime into a comb and stuck her into his hair. He asked the old couple to brew and bring him a large amount of sake, poured it into eight buckets, then waited for the serpent.
Finally, the serpent arrived. It indeed had eight heads, and red eyes like winter-cherries. It also had eight tails. Upon finding the sake, the each of the heads eagerly drank the sake, became drunk and fell asleep. Then Susano-o drew his ten-span sword and chopped the serpent into little pieces. When he struck one of the tails, his weapon became notched. He cut open the tail and within it is found a magnificent sword.
After the battle, Susano-o gives the sword to his sister Amaterasu, as he feels he is unworthy of the sword. The sword is known here as the Murakumo-no-tsurugi, (lit. Sword of gathering clouds of heaven) it belongs to the insignia of the Imperial House of Japan.

An image of [a likely replica of] the famous Murakumo-no-Tsurugi later renamed Kusanagi-no-Tsurugi or "The Grass-Cutting Sword", thought to have come from the tail of the serpent Susano-o slayed.

Weapons of Wonder
As otherworldly as all this sounds, the origin of the tale of Yamata-no-Orochi and the sword is believed to be utterly down-to-earth. Specifically, it is thought to stem from the itinerant groups of men skilled in the ways of making fine steel from iron-rich sand who, long, long ago worked deep in western Honshu's wooded mountains.
To make this prized metal (from which the finest blades were fashioned) required enormous quantities of water and wood, as well as a large group of experts led by one known as the murage.
Among these, some specialized in excavating ditches and sluices on the slopes down which vast amounts of water were channeled with iron-sand-rich soil to separate the mineral from the dirt by exploiting their different specific gravities.
Others chopped trees and burned wood to make charcoal, while some built the specialized clay tatara smelters -- 3 meters long by 1 meter wide and high -- into which 10 tons of iron sand would be poured over three days, heated with 12 tons of charcoal at more than 1,400 degrees, to yield some 3 tons of steel. Of this, about half was the prized tama-hagane from which Japan's famed swords are made, a steel distinctly different from its Western and Chinese counterparts made from iron ore.
With such prodigious quantities of fuel required, these groups of steelmakers constantly had to be on the move, as their smelters' appetites left entire mountainsides stripped of timber and streams polluted with runoff.
For villagers, these roaming steelmakers were a serious threat to their livelihood, both by denying them fuel and loading streams with mud that ruined their fishing and fouled their paddies. Hence the theory is that the monster, Yamata-no-Orochi, represented tatara steelmakers -- its burning red eyes being their fiery smelters and its bleeding body the muddied streams flowing from the mountains where they worked.
...
As early as the 13th century, during the Kamakura Period (1183-1333), when the samurai class started to rule the nation, Japanese swords were recognized as superior to any made elsewhere in the world. Indeed, according to the late historical novelist Ryotaro Shiba, during the Muromachi Period (1392-1573) Japan's most popular exports to Ming Dynasty China were these fearsome weapons. In his travelogue, "Satetsu no Michi (The Road of Iron Sand)," Shiba says this was because although metal casting was common in China at that time, steelmaking was virtually unknown.
However, with the introduction to Japan of matchlocks, bows and spears during the 16th-century Warring States Period, swords became more symbolic of the samurai rather than their prime tools of combat. To preserve this symbolic aura, the warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536-98) ordered that no one but members of the samurai class could possess a sword. And to ensure his edict was observed, he launched "sword hunts" aimed primarily at reducing the danger from the many farmers' uprisings. As well, however, it also served to further entrench the ruling class, called bushi (samurai), by turning the swords into their spiritual emblem throughout the Edo Period (1603-1867).
[More]

The tip of a Masamune sword

2003-04-30T10:17:00.000+10:00

The tomb of Gilgamesh

The Epic Of Gilgamesh - written by a Middle Eastern scholar 2,500 years before the birth of Christ - commemorated the life of the ruler of the city of Uruk, from which Iraq gets its name.
Now, a German-led expedition has discovered what is thought to be the entire city of Uruk - including, where the Euphrates once flowed, the last resting place of its famous King.
"I don't want to say definitely it was the grave of King Gilgamesh, but it looks very similar to that described in the epic," Jorg Fassbinder, of the Bavarian department of Historical Monuments in Munich, told the BBC World Service's Science in Action programme.
[more]

This is story is remarkable, not only because of the potential importance of this find but also by the implication that Western archaelogical digs have already recommenced in Iraq after being terminated by the first gulf war twelve years ago – and even before the restoration of electricity and running water to Baghdad.

2003-04-28T10:32:00.000+10:00

The foreignness of the French

Timeliness, as may been seen from this and the previous post, is not exactly Laputan Logic's strong suit. Nevertheless, I think this one is still topical.

Long after the acrimoniousness of the "debates" in the UN Security Council pre the Iraq invasion, there still seems to be quite a bit of enduring resentment in the United States against the French nation and its people. "Freedom Fries" remain defiantly on sale at the Capitol Hill cafeteria and the word "french" has entered the American punditocracy's lexicon as an epithet for the lowest kind of untrustworthiness, a bit like that English word welsh (see also my entry on Welsh and Walloon).

It wasn't always this way. Let's face it, without France's friendship during the American War of Independence (declaring war on Britain in 1778 and committing so much in the way of resources that they effectively bankrupted their economy in the process), Americans would be speaking English right now. Then, of course, there was the Statue of Liberty, a gift of international friendship from the people of France to the people of the United States and in celebration of the centenary of that independence. And what Great American Novelist worth his salt would have missed the opportunity to waste his youth and brain cells in the cafes and bars of Paris in the early 20th century? American and French mutual mistrust of the British virtually guaranteed that the two great nations were to maintain a warm regard for each other, one that was to last for the good part of two centuries.

But those days are long gone now. America is now in the process of de-Frenchifying (de-frenchfrying?) itself and its language although the latter may be a little harder to pull off than some would like. Being myself of a nation which also has a long and proud history of friendship with the United States (but one with the distinction of having thoughtlessly thrown itself into every major war and/or quagmire that the US has found itself in since WWII), I thought I'd best do my bit in the cause of this new and very just linguistic war against the hateful Gauls.

The first point I'd like to make is that the French are foreigners. Using this obvious fact as a starting point, I wondered whether perhaps the English word "foreign" might even be derived from the word "french" by some route. Alas, this was far too naive, the word "foreign", unsurprisingly in retrospect, actually pertains to the concept of the "outside world". It comes to us from Late Latin via Old French and is closely related to the word "forest", i.e. "somewhere out there, out in the wilderness".

But while the word for foreigner itself didn't yield anything promising, I did discover that the word French or rather its precursor Frank turns out to be the quintessential word for foreigner in many of the world's languages. This coinage dates back to the Crusades, a time when floods of ideologically-crazed young Europeans washed up on the shores of the Levant egged on by popes, ambitious princes, mad monks and Venetian merchants. The bemused locals, when confronted by these Christian liberators, lumped them all under the name of the biggest group, "the Franks" and the name stuck good. Centuries later when the Western hoards once again swarmed out Europe, this time into the Orient, Arab and Persian traders had already introduced this useful term to Africa, India and South-East Asia (where, in the latter case, Islam was seen as a very welcome antidote to Christian missionary zeal).

So here then without any further adieu, is a survey of "the French as foreigners" in a number of the world's languages¹.

Arabic	faranj
Aramaic	frang
Cambodian	farang
Ethiopian	fa'ra'nj
Greek	frangos
Hindi	firangi
Malay	barang (foreign goods)
Malayalam	farangi
Persian	farangg
Samoan	palangi
Tamil	pirangi
Thai	farang
Turkish	ifrangi
Vietnamese	pha-rang

So take that, you primates capitulards et toujours en quete de fromages!!

This table was collated from information from this article from the LINGUIST mailing list. While the conclusion is reached that the Samoan word palangi is not really connected to farang, this article claims a connection to the Malay word barang or "foreign goods" but then denies a link to farang from there (by the way, the title of this piece is "lingua franca").

¹ - This word does have one teensy weensy disadvantage of being a collective term which refers to all Westerners, which includes, unfortunately, Americans

Another thing I found out from the LINGUIST article: Greek text written in Latin characters is called frangovlakhika (the spelling of this term has been rendered for your reading convenience into frangovlakhika). See the Welsh post for more information about the meaning of Vlak.

2003-04-28T00:17:00.000+10:00

Cakewalk

The cakewalk was originally a 19th-century dance, invented by African-Americans in the antebellum South. It was intended to satirize the stiff ballroom promenades of white plantation owners, who favored the rigidly formal dances of European high-society. Cakewalking slaves lampooned these stuffy moves by over-accentuating their high kicks, bows, and imaginary hat doffings, mixing the cartoonish gestures together with traditional African steps. Likely unaware of the dance's derisive roots, the whites often invited their slaves to participate in Sunday contests, to determine which dancers were most elegant and inventive. The winners would receive cake slices, a prize which gave birth to the dance's familiar name.
After Emancipation, the contest tradition continued in black communities; the Oxford English Dictionary dates the widespread adoption of "cakewalk" to the late 1870s. It was around this time that the cakewalk came to mean "easy"—not because the dance was particularly simple to do but rather because of its languid pace and association with weekend leisure.
The cakewalk's fame eventually spread northward, and it became a nationwide fad during the 1890s. Legendary performers Charles Johnson and Dora Dean were the dance's great popularizers, and cakewalk contests were a staple of Manhattan nightlife around the turn of century, for whites as well as blacks. Early ragtime songs, with their trademark syncopated beats and brassy sounds, were often known as cakewalk music.

2003-04-24T14:35:00.000+10:00

Fortunata means "lucky"

Receipt of sale:

"Vegetus, assistant slave of Montanus the slave of the August Emperor, has bought the girl Fortunata, by nationality a Diablintian (from near Jublains in France), for 600 denarii¹. She is warranted healthy and not liable to run away ..."

[More]

Here we have a slave of a slave buying himself a slave in first century² Roman Britain.

This receipt for the purchase, discovered in London in 1996, was originally written on a wax writing tablet using a stylus. The wax has long since vanished but because the scribe had been so heavy handed, the text has been preserved scratched into the wooden backing board.

¹ - 600 dinarii at the time was the equivalent of two years wages for a Roman soldier or in today's money, according to the Torygraph, enough to buy a rilly cool little sports car!

² - But we could tell that already just from a quick glance at the script, right, Readers? After all, we're all expert paleographers now.

2003-04-22T09:55:00.000+10:00

The Evolution of Writing (well, Western writing anyway)

Having trouble reading those Vindolanda tablets? That might be because they are written in Old Roman Cursive, a kind of a scrawl developed around the 1st century AD to serve a literate population's everyday need for quickly writing things down without too much bother. Whereas the more familiar Roman capitals which had evolved from Phoenician (via Etruscan and Greek) were designed for carving into stone for public display, cursive styles were for personal correspondence and tuned to rapid writing with a pointed stylus on papyrus, wax or wood.

Old Roman Cursive differs from later handwriting styles in that most of the letterforms still resemble the squarish capitals but are connected occasionally with ligatures. Words are often abbreviated and word divisions are not always shown, sometimes being denoted by a space while at others by a dot. Numerals are usually distinguished from ordinary letters by the use of a superscript bar or leading and trailing dots.

1st century AD Majuscule-Cursive

2nd century AD Majuscule-Cursive (as in Vindolanda)

3rd century AD Minuscule-Cursive

By the 4th century things were really starting to go a little pear-shaped. Fortunately, Rome fell not long after and order was restored in the 8th century with the standardisation of the Carolingian Minuscule & Majuscule under the learned despotism of Charlemagne (although we should not fail to mention at this point that cute Irish script that you still see today adorning theme pubs from Boston to Bangalore).

Alas, the barbaric Gothic hoards could not be held at bay for long and even the Franks themselves eventual succumbed to their inner Germanity thus ushering in a Dark Age of condensed and nasty pointy black letters.

It took the cultural renaissance of Italy to finally reject the Northern Gothic style and to reassert the earlier rounder letter shapes. The Humanists took the Carolingian writing as its model (largely in the mistaken belief that it was the style of the ancient Romans). In concert with the contemporary revolution brought by the invention of the printing press, this Humanist style eventually supplanted the Gothic¹ style throughout the whole of Europe and went on to become the basis for the typefaces that we still use today and it's cursive form the basis of our handwriting style.

Of course there's a lot more to it than this. Be sure to read the whole ripping yarn over at the wonderful Textism.

¹ - Of course it was with the Gothic Fraktur typeface that Gutenberg typeset the first ever printed book and this font continued to be used in Germany for books and newspapers right up until the 20th century. When the Nazis came to power, the Humanist typefaces where declared "un-Aryan" and only Gothic and Fraktur typefaces were deemed suitable for use by Third Reich. However, in 1941 in a surprising reversal, the Führer suddenly decided that Fraktur was too "Jewish" and banned its use. The Humanist Antiqua type was then made the standard in it's stead. One explanation for this curious decision was a very practical one, with all of the conquered territories that were under German occupation at the time, hardly any of its subject peoples were able to read the Gothic script.

2003-04-22T01:12:00.000+10:00

Experimental layout

This is my first attempt at a stylesheet based layout. Please report any weirdness or sluggishness.

2003-04-19T23:23:00.000+10:00

Vindolanda

Vindolanda, was a fort that once guarded part of the Northernmost frontier of the Roman Empire. Situated a kilometer South of Hadrian's wall, it was garrisoned for over three centuries starting from the late first century AD.

In 1972 while digging a drainage ditch as part of an excavation of the site, a deposit of organic matter was discovered under a layer of clay. The clay had served to seal this material in anaerobic conditions which preserved a number wooden artifacts, items which under normal conditions would have decayed to nothing centuries before. Chief amongst these was over 1,000 post-card sized wooden tablets handwritten in ink and dating from the first and early second centuries AD.

These tablets contain letters of soldiers, merchants, women and slaves and provide a tantalizing glimpse into the lives of a community living on the frontier of the Empire during this formative period.

	"... the Britons are unprotected by armour (?). There are very many cavalry. The cavalry do not use swords nor do the wretched Britons mount in order to throw javelins."
	"Claudia Severa to her Lepidina greetings. On 11 September, sister, for the day of the celebration of my birthday, I give you a warm invitation to make sure that you come to us, to make the day more enjoyable for me by your arrival, if you are present (?). Give my greetings to your Cerialis. My Aelius and my little son send him (?) their greetings. (2nd hand) I shall expect you, sister. Farewell, sister, my dearest soul, as I hope to prosper, and hail. (Back, 1st hand) To Sulpicia Lepidina, wife of Cerialis, from Severa."
	"... he beat (?) me all the more ... goods ... or pour them down the drain (?). As befits an honest man (?) I implore your majesty not to allow me, an innocent man, to have been beaten with rods and, my lord, inasmuch as (?) I was unable to complain to the prefect because he was detained by ill-health I have complained in vain (?) to the beneficiarius and the rest (?) of the centurions of his (?) unit. Accordingly (?) I implore your mercifulness not to allow me, a man from overseas and an innocent one, about whose good faith you may inquire, to have been bloodied by rods as if I had committed some crime."

This is a fascinating and very well designed website and one that nicely demonstrates what online archaeology should be all about. All of the tablets found are available in a searchable database.

2003-04-18T10:03:00.000+10:00

Giza from a different angle

This featured image is a 61-centimeter pan-sharpened image of the Great Pyramid in Giza, Egypt, collected by QuickBird on February 2, 2002. The Great Pyramid is estimated to have been built circa 2650 B.C., and was erected as a tomb for the Egyptian pharaoh Khufu of the Fourth Dynasty. Upon the completion of its construction, the Great Pyramid stood 145.75 meters (481 feet) high, and over the millennia has lost approximately 10 meters (30 feet) off the top. It stood as the tallest structure on Earth for more than 43 centuries.

To help make sense of the surrounding structures, take a look at this map of the Giza plateau area.

The satellite image is from Digital Globe which has lots of other interesting aerial photos. Thanks to Scott for making me aware of this site.

2003-04-18T09:42:00.000+10:00

More parallels

Adding to my list of uncanny parallels between the Jehoash Insciption and the James Ossuary stories is this one:

On the Jehoash Inscription: Hershel Shanks, editor of the Washington-based Biblical Archaeology Review, said the tablet, if authentic, would be "visual, tactile evidence that reaches across 2,800 years."

On the James Ossuary: Beneath his soft-spoken, scholarly manner, a slightly awestruck tone underlies Shanks' words..."To me, the ossuary provides a visual and tactile bridge over 2,000 years".

2003-04-17T13:10:00.000+10:00

SARS Sequenced

Scientists have announced that they have sequenced the SARS virus. SARS is thought to be caused by a type of virus called a coronavirus which has an irregular shape but with 'crown-like' appearance. Most human coronaviruses do not grow in cultured cells and so relatively little is known about them. Fortunately, SARS has been able to be successfully cultivated in primate cells.

Labs crack killer's code
Scientists have worked out the genetic sequence of the virus that is thought to cause severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). The code supports the idea that the disease leapt from animals into humans - and should help to refine a diagnostic test.
Over the weekend, two research groups separately revealed the complete genetic make-up of the suspected SARS virus, called a coronavirus. The flu-like disease has infected an estimated 3,169 people and killed 144 since November last year.
The sequence suggests that the coronavirus is "far from anything known before", says Herbert Schmitz of the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine in Hamburg, Germany. Although it is more than 75% identical to known animal and human viruses in some regions, it diverges widely in others.

This is what the SARS virus looks like

And here's that sequence that they've been talking about. Let me hum a few bars for you.

ctacccagga aaagccaacc aacctcgatc tcttgtagat ctgttctcta aacgaacttt
aaaatctgtg tagctgtcgc tcggctgcat gcctagtgca cctacgcagt ataaacaata
ataaatttta ctgtcgttga caagaaacga gtaactcgtc cctcttctgc agactgctta
cggtttcgtc cgtgttgcag tcgatcatca gcatacctag gtttcgtccg ggtgtgaccg
aaaggtaaga tggagagcct tgttcttggt gtcaacgaga aaacacacgt ccaactcagt
ttgcctgtcc ttcaggttag agacgtgcta gtgcgtggct tcggggactc tgtggaagag
gccctatcgg aggcacgtga acacctcaaa aatggcactt gtggtctagt agagctggaa
aaaggcgtac tgccccagct tgaacagccc tatgtgttca ttaaacgttc tgatgcctta
agcaccaatc acggccacaa ggtcgttgag ctggttgcag aaatggacgg cattcagtac
ggtcgtagcg gtataacact gggagtactc gtgccacatg tgggcgaaac cccaattgca
taccgcaatg ttcttcttcg taagaacggt aataagggag ccggtggtca tagctatggc
atcgatctaa agtcttatga cttaggtgac gagcttggca ctgatcccat tgaagattat
gaacaaaact ggaacactaa gcatggcagt ggtgcactcc gtgaactcac tcgtgagctc
aatggaggtg cagtcactcg ctatgtcgac aacaatttct gtggcccaga tgggtaccct
cttgattgca tcaaagattt tctcgcacgc gcgggcaagt caatgtgcac tctttccgaa
caacttgatt acatcgagtc gaagagaggt gtctactgct gccgtgacca tgagcatgaa
attgcctggt tcactgagcg ctctgataag agctacgagc accagacacc cttcgaaatt
aagagtgcca agaaatttga cactttcaaa ggggaatgcc caaagtttgt gtttcctctt
aactcaaaag tcaaagtcat tcaaccacgt gttgaaaaga aaaagactga gggtttcatg
gggcgtatac gctctgtgta ccctgttgca tctccacagg agtgtaacaa tatgcacttg
tctaccttga tgaaatgtaa tcattgcgat gaagtttcat ggcagacgtg cgactttctg
aaagccactt gtgaacattg tggcactgaa aatttagtta ttgaaggacc tactacatgt
gggtacctac ctactaatgc tgtagtgaaa atgccatgtc ctgcctgtca agacccagag...

Catchy isn't it?


	A 30-centimeter-long scale model of a bicycle designed in 1732.

	(^_^)		(>_<)
Smiling (niko niko)	smile (nikott)	Wow! (wa--i!)	ouch! (itai!)
It's very popular.	Blushes when smiling.	Raising hands and saying "Wow"	Indicating pain or failure

	p(^^)q		(-_-)zzz
Gyaaa--!	Wishing good luck (ganbare!)	crying face (naki gao)	Sleeping (neteru)
Being surprised with eyes wide open.	Holding a banner and cheering	Crying with tears running down the cheeks.	Good night.

	(^_^)V		(p_-)
? (hate?)	Victory! (pi--su!)	Expressing defeat (maitta)	Magnifying glass (mushi megane)
Saying "I don't understand" or asking "Do you understand?"	Making the victory sign,	Holding out the white flag of peace with a smile.	Trying uncover some secret

(^^)//		(^-^)b	(-_-)
Applausing (hakushu)	Tears of happiness (naki warai)	Isn't it? (ne!)	Getting angry without showing it outside (mutt..)
We use it when we want to appreciate so much something	sometime you may have the moment that you are too happy till tear come	Asking "Do you agree?" or "Isn't it?"	He gets angry but he doesn't express his emotion so much outside.

Historic Pandemics	Cases	Deaths
Justinian Plague, 6th Century China Plague (Bubonic)	*142 million	~100 million
"Third Pandemic" 1896-1930	30 million	12 million
Spanish Flu Pandemic 1918-1919	1 billion	21 million

Pandemics Today
	Per Year	Per Year
Malaria	300-500 million	1 million
Tuberculosis	8 million	2 million
AIDS	6 million	3 million

Recent Outbreaks
Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever in the Republic of Congo, from 2000 to May 6, 2003	143	128
Meningococcal Disease in Burkina Faso, from Jan. to April 20, 2003	7146	1058
Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Worldwide, as of May 20	7919	662