NASA poured cold water on claims by Hindu news services that the US agency's spaceborne cameras had discovered the remains of the mythical bridge built by Rama across the Palk Strait.

John Hardy was a desp’rate little man
He carried two guns everyday
He shot down a man on the West Virginia line
You oughta seen John Hardy gettin’ away
You oughta seen John Hardy gettin’ away

John Hardy stood at the gamblin’ table
Didn’t have no int’rest in the game
Up stepped a yellow gal and threw a dollar down
Said: Deal John Hardy in the game...

John Hardy took that yellow gal’s money
An’ then he began to play
Said: The man that wins my yellow gal’s dollar
I’ll lay him in his lonesome grave

John Hardy drew to a 4-card straight
An’ the Chinaman drew to a pair
John failed to catch and the Chinaman won
And he left him sittin’ dead in his chair

John started to catch that East-bound train
So dark he could not see
Up stepped the police and took him by the arm
Said: Johnny, come and go with me

John Hardy's father came to him
Come for to go his bail
No bail was allowed for a murderin’ man
So they shoved John Hardy back in jail

They took John Hardy to his hangin’ ground
They hung him there to die
And the very last word I heard him say:
My 40-gun never told a lie

I’ve been to the East, I’ve been to the West
I’ve traveled this wide world around
I’ve been to the river, I’ve been baptized
And now I’m on my hangin’ ground

John Hardy had a lovin’ little wife
And children she had three
But he cared no more for his wife and his child
Than he did for the rocks in the sea

An international team of scientists said Thursday they have used a mathematical algorithm to detect recurring patterns in the networks making up everything from food webs to the Internet to gene regulation in cells.

Here's a map of the world during the peak of the last ice age about 18,000 years ago when sea level was 110 meters below its present level. Click the image for an extremely high resolution version (3 arc-minute per pixel).

Some observations:

• North America is connected by land to Eurasia although blocked by impenetrable glaciers. Human settlement of the Americas is thought to have begun 12,000 years ago when these glaciers had begun to recede although theories and evidence for an earlier arrival, particularly via a coastal route, continue to be hotly debated.
• Sri Lanka is connected to India (well there's Rama's Bridge for you).
• Australia and New Guinea are connected but separated from Asia. A series of short hops are needed to reach it by boat. This is the earliest evidence we have for the invention of boats and sea navigation because settlement was achieved between 40,000 and 60,000 years ago.
• Tasmania is connected to the Australian land mass. Aborigines walk there only later to be stranded and forget how to make boats (or how to start a fire, make a boomerang, an axe or even catch a fish...).
• Japan is an arc of land ringing an inland sea, people walk there too. The first pottery in the world is developed there 7,000 years later.
• Britain is connected to Europe and its first inhabitants walk there as well.
• The Mediterranean, the Red and Black Seas are all inland freshwater lakes.
• South East Asia, both insular and mainland form one enormous peninsula.

This image came from the Satellite and Information Service at the US National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration.

The 'Visibility Range' map (with the grey buffer zones) shows that all islands in this region were within sight or detection range of each other. While some islands might not be directly visible from adjacent islands both would have been visible (or detectable) from mid-journey. [link]

But of course Swift knew damned well that La Puta really meant "The Whore" in Spanish. Not that he let this stop him from proposing a suitably Laputan etymology:

The word, which I interpret the Flying or Floating Island, is in the original Laputa, whereof I could never learn the true etymology. Lap in the old obsolete language signifies high, and untuh, a governor, from which they say by corruption was derived Laputa, from Lapuntuh. But I do not approve of this derivation, which seems to be a little strained. I ventured to offer to the learned among them a conjecture of my own, that Laputa was quasi lap outed; lap signifying properly the dancing of the sunbeams in the sea, and outed, a wing, which however I shall not obtrude, but submit to the judicious reader.

In 1729, the Englishman Robert Drury published an account of his captivity on Madagascar. For years it was dismissed as fiction but archaeology has now shown that it was true after all.

Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii was a chemist turned photographer ahead of his time who undertook an ambitious photographic survey of the Russian Empire for Tsar Nicholas II.

Between 1909 and 1915, he completed tours of eleven regions, traveling in a specially equipped train carriage which had been provided by the Ministry of Transportation.

What made this project remarkable was his use of an innovative technique for taking photographs in full and extremely vivid colour.

Kuratsa (kooh-RAH-chah)
A dance originating from Bohol, Visayas, it is popular at Ilokano and Visayan festivals. This dance commands a sense of improvisation which mimics a young playful couple's attempt to get each other's attention. It is performed in a moderate waltz style.

Remember to turn the volume up to max for this one.

from Noel's Pilipino Folkdance Glossary

Chinese archaeologists have unearthed 196 terra-cotta warriors dating back to the Han Dynasty 206 BC-AD220) in Xuzhou City of east China's Jiangsu Province.

"This is the largest discovery since 1984," said an archaeologist who took part in the excavation.

A lot of recent progress in paleontology has been based on analysis of DNA taken from ancient bones. As an example, sequencing of mitochondrial DNA taken from Neanderthal bones has been helpful in confirming the dominant theory that the Neanderthals were a completely different branch of homo sapiens from modern humans.

But DNA has one problem, it is an extremely complex and fragile molecule and it deteriorates rapidly over time. Estimates of the maximum useful for age for DNA range from 50,000 to 100,000 years. However, a new approach which focuses on sequencing proteins instead of DNA promises to open a window in to species development over millions of years.

In between my Donald Duck comic phase and my Mad Magazine phase, I was a huge reader of super-hero comics. The plots were thin, often to breaking point, but the artwork was always great. Big favorites included the new Flash and Green Lantern as well as the Justice League of America. Actually, pretty much anything DC Comics, I never had much time for Marvel.

Update re Marvel: this much has changed, my young daughter just adores Spiderman so I've been reading some of the earlier ones to her (she also likes Winnie the Pooh). I can see why the Marvel format (and Stan Lee's style) irritated me as a kid, too much emphasis on the mental anguish side of being a superhero, and then there's the human relationships, the incessant serialisation and crossovers. It all reads like soap opera.

(I also never liked the blocky style of Jack Kirby's art.)

Nevertheless, the incredible Spiderman has me suckered in at the moment.

Sharpest ever view of the Sun

The first images from the Swedish 1-m Solar Telescope on the Canary Island of La Palma are presented in Nature on November 14. The images are the most detailed ever obtained of the Sun - among the new solar features uncovered are hitherto unknown phenomenae in sunspots.

A memento mori is a form of image that urged a European person of the late Middle Ages to "remember thy death." To do this, a memento mori might represent death as a human skeleton--perhaps as the Grim Reaper gathering his harvest--or it might depict human bodies in an advanced state of decay. Its purpose is to remind the viewer that death is an unavoidable part of life, something to be prepared for at all times. Memento mori images are graphic demonstrations of the fact that death was not only a more frequent, but a far more familiar occurrence in medieval Europe than it is today. They express a concept of death that is characteristic of a specific time and place. The subject of this essay is an imagery of death characteristic of another time and place: nineteenth century America. Although the nineteenth century is much closer to our own era, these photographs and other images represent a concept of death that is in many ways as different from ours as that of the Europe of the Middle Ages.

The British sociologist Geoffrey Gorer makes some interesting observations on the difference between cultural attitudes toward death in the Victorian era and our own. In his 1955 article, "The Pornography of Death," Gorer points out that death is treated in twentieth century society much like sex was treated in the nineteenth century. The subject is avoided, especially with children, or spoken of in euphemisms if it cannot be avoided. Death now, like sex then, is hidden, an event which takes place behind closed doors. The opposite is also true: in the nineteenth century, death was discussed as freely and openly as sex is today. If, as Freud has postulated, society is founded upon--and defined by--its repressions, our society has undergone a psychological about-face since the nineteenth century.

Memento Mori: Death and Photography in Nineteenth Century America

This site has simply the most exquisite colour maps of the Roman Empire I have been able to find anywhere on the net. If you thought the Empire ended when the Goths sacked Rome in 476, then think again. Technically, the Roman Empire ended in 1453 with the fall of Constantinople to the Turks. These maps cover everything in between including the rise of the Carolingian Holy Roman Empire.

I actually found these maps some years ago, but then lost track of the link. Thankfully, I was able to use Google's image search to relocate them. Each map is about 250 KB.

Here they are for your viewing convenience:
1 AD 100 AD 200 AD 300 AD 400 AD 500 AD
600 AD 700 AD 800 AD 900 AD 1000 AD
1100 AD 1200 AD 1300 AD 1400 AD 1500 AD

reposted from the Collaboratory

In an interesting essay, George Leonard discusses the problems of transliterating Asian languages into the English. In the process he discusses the more noteworthy features of each of these languages and their various writing systems.

In an ironic twist of translation, this essay has been so poorly OCR'ed on to the website that a lot of it ended up being unreadable. I've included a cleaned up version of the section on Chinese here.

From the FAQ

Where are the balls found?

They were originally found in the delta of the Térraba River, also known as the Sierpe, Diquís, and General River, near the towns of Palmar Sur and Palmar Norte. Balls are known from as far north as the Estrella Valley and as far south as the mouth of the Coto Colorado River. They have been found near Golfito and on the Isla del Caño. Since the time of their discovery in the 1940s, these objects have been prized as lawn ornaments. They were transported, primarily by rail, all over Costa Rica. They are now found throughout the country. There are two balls on display to the public in the U.S. One is in the museum of the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C. The other is in a courtyard near the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnography, at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

How were they made?

The balls were most likely made by reducing round boulders to a spherical shape through a combination of controlled fracture, pecking, and grinding. The granodiorite from which they are made has been shown to exfoliate in layers when subjected to rapid changes in temperature. The balls could have been roughed out through the application of heat (hot coals) and cold (chilled water). When they were close to spherical in shape, they were further reduced by pecking and hammering with stones made of the same hard material. Finally, they were ground and polished to a high luster. This process, which was similar to that used for making polished stone axes, elaborate carved metates, and stone statues, was accomplished without the help of metal tools, laser beams, or alien life forms.

Who made them?

The balls were most likely made by the ancestors of native peoples who lived in the region at the time of the Spanish conquest. These people spoke Chibchan languages, related to those of indigenous peoples from eastern Honduras to northern Colombia. Their modern descendants include the Boruca, Téribe, and Guaymí. These cultures lived in dispersed settlements, few of which were larger than about 2000 people. These people lived off of fishing and hunting, as well as agriculture. They cultivated maize, manioc, beans, squash, pejibaye palm, papaya, pineapple, avocado, chile peppers, cacao, and many other fruits, root crops, and medicinal plants. They lived in houses that were typically round in shape, with foundations made of rounded river cobbles.

How old are they?

Stone balls are known from archaeological sites and buried strata hat have only pottery characteristic of the Aguas Buenas culture, whose dates range from ca. 200 BC to AD 800. Stone balls have reportedly been found in burials with gold ornaments whose style dates from after about AD 1000. They have also been found in strata containing sherds of Buenos Aires Polychrome, a pottery type of the Chiriquí Period that was made beginning around AD 800. This type of pottery has reportedly been found in association with iron tools of the Colonial period, suggesting it was manufactured up until the 16th century. So, the balls could have been made anytime during an 1800-year period. The first balls that were made probably lasted for several generations, during which time they could have been moved and modified.

More pictures of the stone balls of Costa Rica