The Los Angeles Times notes as does the New York Times, the discovery of a wall unearthed in construction near Battery Park in New York City. It was found 10 feet under the present ground surface and artifacts associated with it seem to indicate its construction in the late 17th and early 18th Centuries. It …
Category: Uncategorized
“On The Road” Manuscript Displayed
The San Francisco Public Library is going to display the manuscript of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” this spring – at least a portion of it. This book has always been a sort of literary legend as it was written on a continuous 120 foot-long roll of paper fed through a typewriter in a three-week …
Mysterious Hot Spots
This picture comes from a piece in the Santa Barbara News-Press about some mysterious heat sources revealed by a landslide in the mountains northeast of here. I apologise, this may be a subscribers-only link. This hit the news here early in the summer when a small forest fire that was caused by these “hot spots” …
Steve’s Whereabouts
Just passing on news I got from Libby: Steve and his party were in Ankara yesterday and are traveling back to the US today. Steve will likely be home tomorrow night. As Libby said, “I’m sure he’ll be full of tales.” We’re looking forward to hearing some of them starting later this week.
War in the Middle East
This piece in the LA Times describes the excavation of the site of Tell Hamoukar in Syria, that has uncovered evidence that 5500 years ago the city there was sacked by an invasion from Mesopotamia. It is one of the earliest examples of large-scale warfare, and as the article says, “The discovery of the devastated …
A Real and Present Danger
Reader Matt Miller of Boise sends this report from the Vancouver Sun: Group pays to end killing on central coast. The introductory paragraph in this story by Nicholas Read, reads: “For the first time in B.C. history, an anti-hunting group has bought theguide-outfitting rights to a prime piece of the province’s wilderness with aview to …
Art and Science, Part 1.5
More to illustrate the respective limits of art and science, researchers in the Netherlands (what’s with the Dutch, lately?) have determined that Mona Lisa’s smile is “83% happy.” From the text by Toby Sterling: “…the researchers scanned a reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece and subjected it to cutting-edge ’emotion recognition’ software, developed in collaboration …
More Wind Energy Follies
I talked about this before, but now Congress seems to agree with the Kennedys (and Gov. Mitt Romney to be fair) that Nantucket Sound is far too tony a place for wind turbines.
Some More Very Old Rock Art
I have posted before here about the scarcity of prehistoric North American rock art that portrays extinct Pleistocene megafauna. I showed a couple of examples that could possibly be mammoths or mastodons. During my visit to Little Petroglyph Canyon last month looking for more examples was high on my agenda. One of the examples I …
Earliest Known Mayan Painting
Whatever it may say about Pre-Classic Mayan culture – namely that these people were more sophisticated at an earlier time than previously thought – this 2,100 year old painting from Guatemala is a dazzling work of art. This leads me to reflect on how art is so intrinsically woven into us as a species. We …