cafecuriosity

Mighty Oak Falls

Is this an echo of the UK finance sector? A 250-year-old Lucombe oak toppled over last weekend and died of old age. First planted in the 1760's by William Lucombe, the oak was the centerpiece of Phear Park in Exmouth. With a mighty girth of 26ft (rivalling some banker's expense accounts), it was the biggest of its kind in the world. The echoes of the finance sector do not end there, East Devon district gardeners now have to clean up the mess and decide what to do with the shattered trunk! Like the banking foiasco, the size of the problem dwarfs the human scale! All is not lost however acorns from the oak were collected last year. One of the oak's germinated protegy may yet replace it. If only the banking sector proves to be as easy to revive! Image: APEX, www.exmouthjournal.co.uk

Great Boot, Shame About the Grill!

OK, time for a confession. I'm one of those sad creatures who anthropomorphize their cars (and motor bikes for that matter). My much-loved Ducati SSD900 was the 'Beast'. He (it was definitely a he) was big, black, fast and bad! My Jaguar (The Boy) was a refined old gentleman, all refined leather and wood, while the Alfa Spider (The Toy) was all flash (and limited go). My current car a Chrysler 300C is all squat power - a 5.7l V8 will do that for you. I love its angry growl when i turn the ignition and the way it snaps my head back when I put my foot down on Sheik Z Road. I get when Now a team Florida State have established that car design imbues our vehicles with a discernible personality all of their own and in the process, proved once and for all that academics really do need to get out more. Now researchers have long asserted that we gain 90% of our information from faces. It seems evolution has configured our brains to examine faces to detect threats, assess social relationships and intuit emotions and personality traits. This explains why I always thought my Alfa Spider was 'hot'!   http://www.fsu.com/pages/2008/11/26/cars_have_personality.html   Image: 1. Alfa Spider, author, 2. Chrysler 300C, www.autoexpress.co.uk

Not So Virgin

There's a charming ad currently playing on what passes for cable television in Dubai featuring Isabelle Allende . The author talks about our love of storytelling, opining that we are hardwired for storytelling. One of the most powerful stories is the notion of the pristine wilderness, untouched by human hands, with all its romantic connotations. Few tracts of wilderness evoke this as provocatively as the Amazon. Ever since reading Charles C. Mann's '1491', I've been watching the evidence for pre-Columbian Amazonian occupation pile up. The latest contribution comes from the Universities of Florida and Brazil by way of the Kuikuro an indigenous Amazonian tribe. Their paper suggests that what was once mistaken for virgin tropical forest is in fact the creation of human hands - lots of them! The plan of these settlements took the form of a tapestry of walled villages, smaller hamlets, all clustered around a main plaza and date from 1250 through to 1650, when European diseases caused the local population numbers to crash. Fish farms lie dotted about the hamlets some of which are built on the 'black earth' fields built up by the early Indian inhabitants. Each settlement was dominated by a road running northeast to southeast, connecting to the central plaza and surrounded by defensive earthworks. It's a twist in a story that turning out to be more fairytale than reality TV. Plus, it's a bit of a bugger for conservationists trying to model unblemished biodiversity!   http://news.ufl.edu/2008/08/28/urban-amazon/   Image: 1. Aerial photo of a Kuikuro village in the Amazon, 2 - 4 Excavating an Amazonian settlement site, University of Florida

History's Fingerprints

I finished reading 'Now Is Gone' by Geoff Livingston while I was enjoying a couple of days holiday in Brittany. On reflecting on the rise of new media, it occurred to me that much of the online commentariate is very much anchored in the here and now. I wonder how well it will perform over time. Time is one thing you get a feeling for in places like Brittany. My friends' stone cottage came complete with a 300 year old stone tower once used by the Knights Templar as a way station for pilgrims. On the coast, you can still see coastal gun emplacements dating back to WWII complete with communication trenches and underground ammunition bunkers. One gun battery was an old Napoleonic emplacement which had simply been reinforced and updated by the Germans - an alternate sense of continuity to the pretty coastal villages and manicured fields. The sense of past informing the present was reinforced by a news snippet I read about the discovery of the body of an Australian soldier from the First World War in Belgium. The long-lost soldier still held his rifle in his hands and is thought to be one of twenty soldiers from the 3rd Division who went missing during the Battle of Messines on June 7th, 1917. I wonder how well the emerging online news and commentary industry will view its links with its own long tail of history?

Adding Sparkle To the Lords of Copan

One of the images that remain with me to this day was the procession of intricately carved stele celebrating the accomplishments of the Lords of Copan. The stele are to be found at Copan at the end of the Mayan trail just inside the Honduran border with Guatemala.. The ruins are majestic and I don't think I missed a single excavated stone. However, the Lords of Copan have hid one of their greatest treasures, a Rosalila inside one of the great pyramids. The blood red Rosalila was a majestic temple built at the height of the Mayan civilisation around AD 400 - 800. The Rosalila was later concealed inside a larger pyramid and only discovered late last century. There is a replica Rosalila to be seen in the heart of the Copan museum. The reconstructed Rolalila is embellished with a collection of exotic masks and intricate designs. Now a Queensland University of Technology researcher has established that the Mayans covered their temples with over 15 coats of red and white paint and layers stucco before coating it with mica. The Maya temples would have glittered in the bright tropical sunlight. Naturally, being Mayan, nothing was simple. The discovery was a love child of an infrared analysis technique known as FTIR-ATR spectral imaging which had never before been used in an archaeological context. Another example of a wonderful technology at the command of an inventive mind!

http://www.news.qut.edu.au/cgi-bin/WebObjects/News.woa/wa/goNewsPage?newsEventID=15353   Image: 1. 18 Rabbit stele, www.ultimatejourney.com, 2. Location map of Copan, Wikipedia, 3. Reconstruction of the Rosalila in the Copan museum, Dr. Jay Hall

When Salad Goes Bad!

Carnivores around the world were heartened last week when new stats emerged that the rate of food poisoning from salad greens is greatly outstripping increases in consumption. Three large outbreaks that affected 300 people were traced to shoddily prepared green stuff. Between 1986 and 1995, Americans ate 17% more leafy greens yet food poisoning case spiked by 60%! The figures for 1996 to 2005 are 9% and 39%. Researchers are baffled but carnivors are not - meat good, greens bad!. There's a lesson in that for all of us me thinks.  Image; Deadly salad greens, US Centre for Disease Control http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-03/asfm-fof031408.php 

A Matter of Perspective

We're often called upon to assess organizational cultures. All too often however, our view depends on our point of observation. Its a matter of perspective.  For years, the popular view of archaeology centers on mysterious objects from our past being wrenched from the soil. Putting those individual finds in context is harder than its looks. Think about the challenge of piecing together an understanding of our major cities 2000 year hence. Even in Egypt, surely one of the worlds most excavated regions; whole cities lurk underground, waiting to be uncovered. Archaeologists have been experimenting with alternative approaches to perspective. The Regional Settlement Pattern Survey involves walking the landscape systematically looking for traces of past occupation. Applied effectively, it holds out the prospect of an integrated view of drifts in patterns of settlement over the centuries. Piloted in Shandong province, China, the methodology led to a significant shift in how the Yellow Valley culture developed. Maybe we all need to do more 'walking the fields' when it comes to understanding organizational culture.

PS. China lovers and supporters of contact theory will be intrigued by a report from the University of Haifa on the discovery of Chinese pottery in Acre  the gateway for European pilgrims to the Holy Land.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-03/fm-ias030308.php   http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-03/uoh-eoc030408.php   Image: 1. Scientists walk through tea fields in southeast Shandong, The Field Museum, 2. A pit dating to the Western Zhou period 1046-771BC 3. Objects being recovered dating to the Longshan period 2600-1900BC 4. Pottery from Acre, Howard Smithline, Israel Antiquities Authority

The Symmetry of History

Historical events have an odd way of coming together in an act of seeming symmetry. My ex-wife's cousin March 2008 saw the 70th anniversary of Austria's 'Anschluss' with Hitler's Germany. While many commentators focused on the willing role of Austrians in Hitler's 'Final Solution', fittingly, the final word came from Austrian archaeologists from the University of Vienna who announced their discovery of the earliest evidence of Jewish habitation in Austria. Poignantly, the evidence proved to be a child's amulet inscribed with a Jewish prayer in a Roman burial dating to the 3rd Century CE. The prayer, written in Greek reads, 'Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one.' Somehow that seems more touching than the torrent of media coverage.   http://public.univie.ac.at/index.php?id=6576&no_cache=1&tx_ttnews[tt_news]=5294&tx_ttnews[backPid]=6088&cHash=7ae2ec5731  Image: 1. Jews are forced to scrub anti-German fascit slogans from a Vienn footpath, 2. A 2.2 centimeter gold scroll dating to 3rd Century CE.University of Vienna, Institute of Prehistory and Early History

Pirates of the Caribean Pt 4

Who needs Johnny Depp? News this week that the wreck of one of the pirate Captain Kidd's richest prizes has been discovered 70 feet down in the crystal clear waters off the Dominican Republic's Catalina Island. The 400 ton Quedah Merchant was loaded with gold, silver, satin and silks when Kidd captured her over 300 years ago in 1699. Ironically, he left her and her cargo to his crew and sailed for New York to plead his innocence to charges of piracy and murder. A bad strategy as it turned out, as Kidd was convicted at his trial in London, hanged and his body left to rot for two years over the River Thames as a warning to other pirates while his crew looted the Quedah Merchant, set it ablaze and adrift. No lure of gold then for the marine archaeologists, just the satisfaction of comparing historical documentation against the wreck's archaeological evidence. Doesn't sound very swashbuckling? Maybe we need Johnny Depp after all! Still, did I mention there are cannons?   http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/6997.html   Image: 1. Charles Beeker examines the shipwreck, tentatively identified as the Quedaght Merchant, 2. Fritz Hanselmann & one of the great guns, Indiana University 3. Popular image of Captain Kidd, Howard Pyle for 'Book of Pirates'

Flying Under An (Almost) Green Sky

A lot of claims for "green this" or "green that" are surfacing lately to justify research funding. CafeCuriosity a little unsure about one "green" claim coming from the Delft University of Technology. Delft's mavens have developed a unique aluminium fibre material fetchingly called CentrAl. Stronger than the carbon fibre reinforced plastic composites used on the latest generation Boeing and Airbus passenger jets, CentrAl weighs in 20% lighter, meaning less fuel burned in flight and sharply reduced maintenance costs - hence the claimed green credentials. Projected savings of $100 billion on fuel and maintenance costs also help get the airlines' attention. CentrAl is also claimed to be nearly immune to metal fatigue, the bane of commercial airliners with high repetition take offs and landing cycles which stress metal airframes. At the heart of CentrAl lies a central layer of fibre metal laminate sandwiched between multiple layers of aerospace quality aluminium. Being aluminium, it's supposedly less sensitive to damage caused by hail storms, collisions with ground vehicles and corrosion. Sounds like a conventional composites break-through wrapped in green marketing! Aluminium remains a highly energy intensive industrial process and guess where that energy comes from? Skeptical observers would also note Alcoa was one of the sponsors of the conference where CentrAl was unveiled!   http://www.tudelft.nl/live/pagina.jsp?id=8c1d7d3e-175c-4c49-8820-8ead3bb86329&lang=en   Image: Detailed section of CentrAl sandwich, TU Delft, GTM