Archive for April, 2005
British Archaeology 80
Apr 30th
British Archaeology issue 80 is online now at the website of the Council for British Archaeology‘s website. Features this month are Silbury Hill, Sutton Hoo ship and the Brougham Amazons. Thanks to the ADS you can check the archive data and see if the interpretation in British Archaeology matches yours.
Moff to Newcastle
Apr 29th
I’m off to Newcastle-upon-Tyne today for their Postgraduate Forum conference. I went last year and was slightly shocked to discover that I was the only person giving a talk who didn’t have some sort of Newcastle connection. I’m hoping this year that there’s a bit more enthusiasm from outside. The reason I’m returning is that I enjoyed last year’s event hugely. It’s a very friendly department. As a bonus there were no bad talks. (more…)
Fac et Spera
Apr 28th
Like any society, when you join the Classical Association you get a lot of other material than the receipt. Amongst the book offers etc were two thin black booklets I overlooked. I’ve only recently returned to them after hearing Brian Sparkes’s presidential address at the CA conference. The booklets weren’t opportunities to send more money to the CA, but the past two published presidential addresses. I thought Brian Sparkes made a good address. I’ve just finished Fac et Spera by Peter Jones from two years ago and that’s thought provoking too. (more…)
Isn’t Dr Tatiana’s Sex Guide to All Creation Wonderful?
Apr 27th
I think in many ways the evolution / creationist debate (if you can call one side’s habit of sticking their fingers in their collective ears and yelling “I can’t hear you!” a debate) is symbolic of life. Sometimes you don’t want to choose the least worst option. You want a reason to be excited about something. Creationism will never be viable because it offers no explanations for existence. Personally for me it’s not enough that Creationism is awful. The reason why I do get excited about, rather than merely tolerate, the theory of evolution through natural selection is that it’s a beautiful concept. I recently finished re-reading Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice To All Creation and it remains awe-inspiring. (more…)
How to reliably display ancient Greek text in PowerPoint
Apr 26th
I’ve seen that displaying ancient Greek in PowerPoint is proving to be a problem for some people at recent conferences. Text that worked find on their computer becomes a mangles mess of boxes. Most of this time this is discovered about a minutes before the talk is due to start. It doesn’t have to be like this. One way to ensure the correct display of text is to convert it into an image and insert it into the slide, but this is fiddly and difficult to edit. There is, however, an easy way which treats the text as text but is also rather reliable. PowerPoint can display Unicode. (more…)
I’m a hypocrite (of sorts)
Apr 25th
Having praised the Physicists for the use of arXiv. I’m now going to out myself as a hypocrite. I recently heard confirmation that my first paper, ‘Knowing when to consult the oracle of Delphi’ (co-authored with Efrosyni Boutsikas) will be published. It’s not in an open access journal, nor will the offprint appear in an open archive. It’s certainly a problem, or at least half a problem. In my defence, apart from AJA there are no suitable open access journals to publish in. The DOAJ lists the Stanford Journal of Archaeology, but with the last volume online being volume II, 2003, I think it’s dormant. Now I have a paper I’d like people to read it. I’m trying to come up with some options disseminate the paper as widely as possible without miffing the publishers mightily but I’m open to suggestions. (more…)
You can never have too many dinosaurs
Apr 24th
I’ve been pointed to Jan Zalasiewicz’s column in the Palaeontology Newsletter. The most recent entry is PalaeoBioSuperstar
All the world’s a stage, especially when gazed at widescreen. And the silver screen, complete with all-round surround sound and images that can scramble a passing retina at 500 paces, might just be the ideal medium to portray the drama of life’s longest tapestry, and carry it on wings of celluloid to the widest possible audience.
That thought struck me when, long after the hype had passed, I finally got to see the striking ecostratigraphic predictions of The Day after Tomorrow. Now, here’s where the long sweep of earth history collides with the short attention span of Hollywood, and most informed scientific input, one has been forewarned, has wound up on the cutting room floor…
…It’s a shame that, somehow, no narrative device could be found to engineer a dinosaur or two into The Day after Tomorrow. The saurians have always been great cinematic crowd-pleasers. As a child I was deeply impressed by the shamelessly eclectic One Million Years B.C. (to which I have already paid stumbling hommage) which didn’t quite manage to mix dinosaurs and mammoths, but, in throwing in Stone Age people, giant spiders More >
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy film in cheap publicity bid
Apr 23rd
Blogging
Blogging is the act of regularly updating your website with some humdrum information about your life or a link to something you’ve just read on the internet in the mistaken belief that anyone actually cares. It is the 21st century equivalent of hanging around railway stations writing down pithy but erudite descriptions of the passing trains.
Disney have released a few entries from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy via iTunes to promote the film which opens next week. Clearly with the entry on ‘Blogging’ they’re trying to get a reaction and gain some cheap publicity by appealing to bloggers’ egos and provoke them into making a response. Hah! Well I’m not falling for that. It’ll take more than that to get me to link to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy film site.
Archaeology through the Keyhole
Apr 22nd
Google have the magic touch. What other company could say in their Terms and Conditions that they reserve the right not to delete your personal emails so they can build a better customer profile, and still have people queuing up for invites to the service? Like Microsoft and Yahoo! they’re collecting smaller technology companies but so far haven’t yet suffered a public-relations backlash. Blogger woes may yet trigger one, but one possible reason for their PR success is that when it comes to search they know what they’re doing. Keyhole, their most recent acquisition, is a case in point. (more…)
What is the Guardian up to?
Apr 21st
ARLT and NTGateway note the new Guardian league tables are out (see Archaeology and Classics). I saw the old ones and thought they were utter pants, but didn’t bother writing on them because they old. I have applause for this new batch though. In Archaeology they’ve moved from inaccuracy to surrealism. Kent comes in at 28, behind Glamorgan and Lincoln. It must be doubly galling for them because not only is it an undeservedly low score, but Lincoln and Glamorgan don’t even offer archaeology. You could argue that Heritage Investigation counts but if you’re opening the field that wide then why doesn’t Leicester appear in the Classics tables?
The overall score is the sum of individual marks in several categories, which seems plausible, but the methodology for getting the figures is baffling. (more…)
