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Artifacts from the Labyrinth

Guedelon Historial Worksite

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86p1N-Jm-AQ

blurb-

Deep in secluded woodland, an abandoned quarry reveals a landscape seemingly untouched since the dawn of the last millennium.
Out of this wood and stone, using 13th century building techniques, a castle is being created. In the heart of Puisaye,
in Yonne, Burgundy, a team of fifty people have taken on an extraordinary feat:to build a castle using the very same techniques,
and materials used in the Middle Ages.
 
February 3, 2010

Tell Brak

Tell Brak is situated in the Upper Khabur plain of northeastern Syria. It is one of the largest ancient tells in northern Mesopotamia, over 40 m high, 800 x 600 m in area, with an extensive outer town including a corona of smaller tells surrounding the main tell. As a ‘Gateway City’, Brak controlled one of the major roads leading from the Tigris Valley north to the metal sources in Anatolia and west to the Euphrates and the Mediterranean. The tell itself was occupied from at least as early as 6000 BC to the end of the Late Bronze Age (Middle Assyrian), with settlement of ‘Ubaid to early Islamic date also attested in the outer town. Excavated areas of the site up to now date from the mid-fifth to the end of the second millennium BC.

One of the most dramatic discoveries at Tell Brak is a large building with massive redbrick walls and ovens nearly 10 feet across. The types of pottery found, along with radiocarbon analysis of ash deposits, date the building to about 3800 B.C. By contrast, few large structures have been found from a time before 3500 B.C. in southern Iraq. Scattered across the building’s floor was a varied collection of objects, from large piles of raw flint and obsidian from Turkey to finished blades. All about lay an array of beautiful stones collected and stored for making beads: jasper, marble, serpentine, diorite. The site also contained a large chunk of bitumen, a valuable tarlike substance used to bind stone or wood, which had to have been imported from eastern Iraq or Turkey. Mother-of-pearl inlays lay cut and ready to be placed in jewelry. The remains of sheep and goats abounded, as did spindle whorls, probably used to make yarn, and simple looms—all clear signs of weaving activity.

“Everywhere we looked, there were human bones,” one recalls. “There were an enormous number of dead people.”

More than 100, it turned out, and their remains had rested there undisturbed for nearly six millennia. What Oates’s team found that hot autumn day in 2006 were the remnants of a ferocious battle or a brutal mass murder on a scale unprecedented for such an early date. And the inadvertent discovery lay within sight of what is currently our best and oldest evidence of early urban life. Digging just a few hundred yards away on the main mound of what today is called Tell Brak, the archaeologists recently uncovered large buildings and extensive workshops from the same period—around 3800 B.C.—as well as imported material and fancy tableware.

Soltysiak leans toward the theory that this event at what locals call Tell Majnuna was a massacre, noting that some of the bones are from people not of warrior age. If so, it could have been an inside job. Others think the dead might have been locals who rebelled or otherwise offended the city’s elite, were put to death, and then were denied decent burial. But Augusta McMahon, who is the Brak dig’s field director, argues that the scene more closely resembles an attack. “The age profile, the piles of bodies, and the rubbish context says battlefield cleanup,” she tells me as we trudge through green wheat fields from the high mound to Majnuna. “And the corpse abuse—the way they were haphazardly piled up, the way femurs were made into tools—says the victims were enemies of whoever buried them.” One possible scenario, she says, is that Brak’s enemies attacked from the outside and managed to kill some civilians in the melee before being routed.

This attack may have been more than an incursion by marauders looking for food or goods. At that time, the southern city of Uruk began to expand its influence, and Uruk-style pottery appears throughout the Middle East. Possibly those southerners ran into opposition from the formidable northern settlements of Hamoukar and Brak, whose inhabitants may have resented the growing power of Uruk and its allies. Brak and Hamoukar were burned around the same time, but “evidence of both northern and southern material suggests a peaceful coexistence afterward,” Oates says. “The ‘destroyers’ could well have come from Anatolia or anywhere else.” By 3400 B.C., pottery typical of Uruk predominated, and Brak’s Eye Temple had been renovated in a southern Mesopotamian style. When Brak appears in the historical record in the third millennium, it is as the important city of Nagar. Overwhelmed by superior technology, better military organization, or a persuasive new ideology, the pioneering civilization at Brak and its environs became an adjunct of the south, which went on to create even grander city-states, bureaucracies, and empires.

Violence and cultural sophistication may in fact have gone hand in hand in creating the first urban societies. “Tell Brak is not just another archaeological site but a place where new aspects of humanity emerged, and our work has the potential to explain them,” Ur says. Finding answers in Iraq may not be possible for a very long time, given the political troubles there. This gives the exploratory digs in Syria a special urgency.
 
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“We are deliberately not doing as much analysis as we could,” Dr. Westphal said. “Our great-grandchildren would curse us if we ruin these things.
We’re immensely aware if we drop one on the floor, it would cost $300 million” — roughly the cost of the Stardust mission — “to get another.”

The primary objective of the Discovery class Stardust mission is to fly by the comet P/Wild 2 and collect samples (at least 1000 analyzable particles of diameter >15 microns) of dust and volatiles from the coma of the comet. It will then return these samples to Earth for detailed study.

http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraftDisplay.do?id=1999-003A

Stardust

August 2, 2010

Three specks of matter captured by the NASA spacecraft Stardust may be stardust that has just entered our solar system.

“They have all the hallmarks of interstellar dust,” said Andrew Westphal of the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley.

Dr. Westphal reported the first speck in March, and he described the second and third on Friday at a meeting of the Meteoritical Society in Manhattan. Each speck is about one-25,000th of an inch across.

The third is particularly intriguing. It is rich in carbon, raising the possibility that it is full of the molecules that could serve as the building blocks for life.

The Stardust’s primary mission was to bring The Stardust’s primary mission was to bring back bits of a comet that it passed in 2004, but scientists also hoped that it would also trap some interstellar particles within a wispy concoction known as aerogel that served as a cosmic dust collector.

The spacecraft completed its seven-year ride through the solar system in 2006 and, as it swung past Earth, detached a capsule containing the collected particles, which parachuted down.
 
Ashanti carved box

Mawu, the female principle, is fertility,
motherhood, gentleness, forgiveness;
while Lisa is power,
war-like or otherwise,
strength and toughness.
Moreover, they assure the rhythm
of day and night.
Mawu is the night, the moon,
freshness, rest, joy;
Lisa is the day, the sun,
heat, labour, all hard things.
By presenting their two natures
alternately to men,
the divine pair impress on man
the rhythm of life and the two series
of complementary elements
of which its fabric is woven.
The notion of twin beings . . .
expresses the equilibrium between opposites,
which is the very nature of the world.

Dahomean Mawu-Lisa cult.
 
It is now the moment when by common consent we pause to become conscious
of our national life and to rejoice in it, to recall what our country has done
for each of us, and to ask ourselves what we can do for our country
in return.

Ah! So, that is where it came from.
Better, a good source and a good speech....
 
December 21, 2010
The original Pooh stuffed animals, who first belonged to Christopher Milne, the son of Alan Alexander Milne-
Pooh, Tigger, Kanga, Piglet and Eeyore — which were kept in a glass case in the Dutton lobby on 2 Park Avenue.

1985, the Pooh animals became the private property of the company’s former owner,
John Dyson, the chairman of the New York State Power Authority. The case remained empty.

September 12, 1987
Pooh, Eeyore, Kanga, even little Piglet, in a case at the Schwarzman building, in the Children’s Book Room.
The Dysons family had donated them to the New York Public Library.

Edward Bear, who got his start in life at Harrods in London?

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/22/opinion/22boylan.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4045/4284488774_fea8e41a64.jpg
 
Dr. Shravanthi Reddy, director of research for Sharklet, said the medical community has for a long time been focused on killing as much existing bacteria as possible.

"Now, the interesting thing about bacteria is that you can't kill them all," Dr. Reddy said. "You can kill 99 percent of them, but that 1 percent that you leave alive is the strongest 1 percent."

Already, there's one bacteria type, called MRSA, that is EXTREMELY resistant to almost all antibiotics. It kills more Americans than AIDS.

In one test, she's going to see if Sharklet can repel bacteria the way shark skin repels algae and barnacles.

Two pieces of plastic - one smooth, one patterned with Sharklet - are subjected to bacteria and incubated for 24 hours.

The electron microscope reveals the astounding results. The plain plastic is covered with a bacteria film - "Just these big clumps of bacteria all piled up on one another," Dr. Reddy said.

And on the Sharklet surface? "You might see one or two cells, but you don't see that big clumping the way you see it on the smooth surface," said Dr. Reddy. "What's really interesting is that there are no chemical differences between the surfaces. It's the same material. No differences, other than the physical shape."

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/02/06/sunday/main7323802.shtml

http://www.stripes.com/polopoly_fs/..._gen/derivatives/landscape_490/3607475261.jpg
 
fantasy and fact

http://1000awesomethings.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/han-solo-frozen-in-carbonite_3.jpg

han-solo-frozen-in-carbonite
Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back

21 May 2011

The material graphene was touted as "the next big thing" even before its pioneers were handed the Nobel Prize last year.
Many believe it could spell the end for silicon and change the future of computers and other devices forever.

July 21, 2008
Graphene holds great promise for the development of nano-scale devices and equipment. It consists of a single layer of graphite atoms
arranged in a hexagonal lattice, similar to a honeycomb. As a two-dimensional material, every atom is exposed to the surface.
It forms the basis of graphite fibers used in tennis racquets and other durable products.
When rolled, very useful tiny tubes called nanotubes can be fabricated.

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/news/08/07/graphene.html

2010 Nobel Prize
Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov (Physics)

About 200 companies and start-ups are now involved in research around graphene. In 2010, it was the subject of about 3,000 research papers.
 
Come spend a day with Louis the XIVth, Jean De La Fontaine, Madame de Sévigné or even the owner of the place himself, Nicolas Fouquet. You will relive some key moments of his life and of the History of France through reconstructions as close to reality as possible, with wax characters that come to life and talk, holograms and the projection of a filmed ball. This show gives the impression to have come back four centuries ago. The staging aims to show Nicolas Fouquet’s investment and his repercussion in the art world and in the artists’ conditions in France.

http://seine-et-foret.eu/WordPress/...chateau-de-vaux-le-vicomte-seine-et-marne-77/

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2778/4386490541_8738e826bd.jpg
 
No one is ever going to be able to explain why he is gone. RIP

http://www.sfexaminer.com/files/imagecache/large_scaled/blog_images/610Eric_Stecyk_Fausto_.jpg

June 25, 201

SAN FRANCISCO — Skateboard business star Eric Swenson, the cofounder of the magazine Thrasher who reinvigorated the sidewalk surfing craze
in the late 1970s with his Independent Trucks equipment firm, has died in San Francisco.

http://www.boston.com/partners/greader/ipad/images/obit25swenson__960x600.jpg

http://articles.boston.com/2011-06-25/bostonglobe/29703628_1_skateboard-thrasher-police-station
 
Meanwhile, Philoctetes, with slow pace, and holding the arrows of Hercules in his had,
endeavors to come up to the relief of Nestor. Andrastus, not being able to reach the
divine old man, had landed his darts on several Pylians, and made them bite the dust.

Pous? Pulvis? That is a long way to go, for a joke.
 
13.7-Foot Crocodile Captured Alive In Philippines, Suspected Of Killing Fisherman

MANILA, Philippines -- A 13.7-foot (4.2 meter) saltwater crocodile was captured alive in the Philippines on Monday and will be examined to determine if it killed a fisherman last month.

July 11 2011

The male crocodile had to be tied, blindfolded and carried by more than 10 men. It was estimated to weigh up to 770 pounds (350 kilos).

The giant was captured in a trap set up along the Rio Tuba river to hunt for the crocodile that ate the fisherman's legs, said Alex Marcaida,
a spokesman for an environment council in Palawan province.

The crocodile was caught near where the man's partial remains were found in Bataraza township of western Palawan province.

4.2 metre crocodile captured alive in Philippines

The male crocodile, weighing 350kgs, had to be tied, blindfolded and carried by more than 10 men.

http://gulfnews.com/news/world/phil...codile-captured-alive-in-philippines-1.836958

Alex Marcaida, and the ongoing works of PCSD

http://www.visitpuertoprincesa.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=164&Itemid=203
 
Dushanbe Tea House

Made by human hands and traditional tools.
Forty artisans from Tajikistan hand made the teahouse over a period of two years.
Inside the teahouse there are uniquely designed hand-carved cedar pillars, handmade traditional Tajikistan furniture, a fountain with seven bronze statues of women based on a 12th century poem, "The Seven Beauties," original oil paintings done onsite by a Tajik artist, and traditional geometric plaster carvings. The outside decorative elements include eight ceramic tiles, which display the patterns of a "Tree of life."

Dushanbe Tea House

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyYVwOvTSDA


Boulder-Dushanbe Sister Cities fostered the project until members helped form the Boulder-Dushanbe Teahouse Trust with other community leaders. After nearly a decade during which the teahouse remained unassembled in storage crates, many members of the community supported erecting the teahouse by donating thousands of dollars in private donations, but it was not enough. Finally, the Teahouse Trust was able to negotiate an arrangement with the City of Boulder that allowed lease revenues generated by a restaurant operator to pay for a substantial portion of the million-plus dollar funds needed to erect the structure in accordance with Boulder building code. This arrangement was in keeping with city government sentiment that taxpayer funds should not be used for the endeavor. The teahouse was erected on city property and opened to the public in 1998.
 
GUEST:
This is the eight ball that was presented to President Truman in 1948 by the Los Angeles Press Club. Its significance is that the press club had meetings, and when you went to the meeting, they had a giant eight ball that they would put on the table in front of you, and when you spoke behind the eight ball, technically your comments were off the record. So President Truman, being notorious for being outspoken, enjoyed that, and because of that, I think, he was given acknowledgment by the press club.

APPRAISER: And you know the significance of the term "behind the eight ball" generally means when you're in the precarious situation where you can't escape from it.

APPRAISER: And in 1948, Truman was behind the eight ball. If you remember the history about that election, he was never supposed to win that. You're behind the eight ball. If you remember the famous photo of "Dewey Defeats Truman!", he didn't have a prayer and he wound up winning.

APPRAISER: When Truman was given this as a gift from the press club, he made a comment that said "The president seems to be behind the eight ball a lot these days, but I manage to get out of it."

APPRAISER: It's very possible. The best provenance and the best proof of him owning this piece was the photograph of him holding it up after it was given to him at the Los Angeles Press Club.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/roadshow/archive/200804A39.html

The original Magic 8 Ball ?
Albert Carter was inspired by another device- a "spirit writing" device used by his mother, Mary, a Cincinnati clairvoyant.

(Is this Mary Ellen Carter? The woman who wrote a series of books?)-

My years with Edgar Cayce; the personal story of Gladys Davis Turner.
Author- Mary Ellen Carter

February 15, 1986

GLADYS DAVIS TURNER, 81, who spent 22 years recording the psychic readings of Edgar Cayce, died Wednesday night.
She was Cayce's secretary from 1923 until his death in 1945 and was the subject of a biography, My Years with Edgar Cayce, by Mary Ellen Carter.

http://articles.orlandosentinel.com...gar-cayce-readings-of-edgar-mary-ellen-carter

Albert Carter created the Syco-Seer, which, according to its label, was the "Miracle Home Fortune Teller." The Syco-Seer wasn't a ball, it was a cylinder, but it still operated under the same basic principles that would be incorporated into the Magic 8 Ball. (1944)

Carter took his Syco-Seer to a Cincinnati store owner, Max Levinson, who liked the Syco-Seer so much he wanted to mass produce them. Levinson asked his brother-in-law, Abe Bookman, to figure out a way to efficiently make the novelty. In 1946, Albert Carter and Abe Bookman formed the Alabe Crafts Company to make and market the device. Before the patent was assigned, in 1948, Carter died, and Bookman forged ahead on his own.

http://www.*****************.com/article/414334/behind_the_magic_8_ball_a_history_of_pg2.html
 
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