Yesterday Connie and I took the dogs up to Kenosha Pass to do some hiking around and to see if we could get out of the heat. It was actually pretty warm up there, about 80 degrees. Last fall I posted some pictures of aspens we took on a visit up here. The dogs had …
Author: Reid Farmer
John Keegan, RIP
The New York Times reported his death yesterday. As the Times obituary states he was widely regarded as “the pre-eminent military historian of his era” and authored more than 20 books. An Englishman, he taught at Sandhurst and was the military affairs editor of The Telegraph for many years. His later books sometimes took a …
Monsoon Clouds
Lately we’ve been getting the summer monsoon flow, bringing moisture in these big clouds up from the Gulf of California. When we’re lucky we get rain out of these in afternoon thunderstorms. As bad as the drought has been we need all we can get and have been fortunate to get rain the last three …
Study of Hunter-Gatherer Energy Expenditure
I just ran across a link describing this study this morning: Hunter-gatherers, Westerners use same amount of energy, contrary to theory “Modern lifestyles are generally quite different from those of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, a fact that some claim as the cause of the current rise in global obesity, but new results published July 25 in …
Quote
History has no plot. It happens randomly, goes beyond human control. People plot, but things go amiss. The desire to capture the past is unquenchable but fruitless. A historian, whether of recent or long-past events, tries to tell it how it was, but the attempt is vain. Stanley Wells
Velvet
I saw a half-dozen bucks browsing out behind the garage early Sunday morning. All of them still had their antlers in velvet. Though I had left the dogs inside and tried to walk slowly and calmly, these fellows didn’t want to have anything to do with me. I was looking through my photo records, and …
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Archaeologist Lynn Gamble of the University of California – Santa Barbara has found traces of the historic Chumash village named Syuxtun located in what is now downtown Santa Barbara. That’s a picture of Lynn holding a whale vertebra recovered from the site. I was just looking up Syuxtun in the Handbook of North American Indians, …
Paisley Caves and Western Stemmed Points
Science News has an interesting article about new discoveries at the important archaeological site of Paisley Caves located in south-central Oregon. Dennis Jenkins of the University of Oregon has been excavating there for a number of years, and the site is already well known for its age, it has a buried component dating between 13 and …
Fireworks
I hope you all had an enjoyable Independence Day. I am in California on business, and was able to catch fireworks at Long Beach Harbor with my daughter and her family. You can see the Queen Mary in the middle of the pic. I know one little girl who enjoyed herself.
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Chinese archaeologists report they have excavated more of the famous life-sized terracotta warriors dating to the Quin dynasty. Another group of Chinese archaeologists has excavated a vessel still containing liquid wine that may be nearly 3,000 years-old. Research into the yak genome is telling biologists quite a bit about high-altitude adaptations. Scribners is publishing a …