Archive for August, 2009
The View at Wall
Aug 29th
Wall, ancient Letocetum, in Staffordshire.
Download now or listen on posterous
The View at Wall.m4a (4339 KB)
Fund your project via the web
Aug 26th
Money Shot. Photo (cc) Jessica Smith
I saw an interesting funding opportunity on ReadWriteWeb and, because it’s only open to Americans, I thought to share it. Kickstarter.com looks like it could be useful for funding small-scale academic projects.
The idea is simple enough, you look through the various projects on the website and if you see an idea you like you pledge some money to it. If a project raises all the money it needs in pledges before a deadline then credit cards are charges and the project gets the money. If the project doesn’t get enough money the pledges lapse. The project gets nothing, but this also means there’s no obligation to fulfil targets on a cut budget.
You’re probably not going to fund a large or even medium-sized Hadron collider with this, but for sub-$5000 projects, it might be a possibility. It strikes me as a good match for some archaeological work. The difficulty is working out what you can give back. Ideally you’d want to publish all your findings, so it’s hard to justify keeping back useful information for backers only. You could give priority to backers like subscriber-only updates live from the field. The difficulty I foresee with this is that More >
Religious Accommodation is a Political Issue
Aug 24th
Mooney and Kirshenbaum wordled
I’ve been sat on this post for a couple of weeks. One reason for not putting it up is I’ve been busy and this post might annoy a few people. Kicking off a discussion and then ignoring it is impolite, so it has had to wait. Another reason is that it’s another post on whether (and how) academics should accommodate religious beliefs. There’s been a lot of posts on this elsewhere because of Mooney and Kirshenbaum’s invective-sodden publicity howl for their book Unscientific America. Mooney and Kirshenbaum believe that people should show respect for religious beliefs, and any atheist who disagrees is engaged in acts of violence. There’s a rich vein of irony to be found in the headline of their recent LA Times piece. You may wonder if they’re on a crusade for respect for a specific religious tradition rather than all of them. There’s many people who’ve written many posts about flaws in Mooney and Kirshenbaum’s reasoning. Many of them are good, but I’m not interested in simply adding a ‘me too’. At best it’s boring. At worst its cowardly mob-following – and boring.
Still it’s possible there could be something to debate. By nature I prefer to work More >
Local Archaeology at the river Trent
Aug 22nd
A couple of years ago Martin Rundkvist pulled together a series of blog posts from around the world under the heading The Ever-Present Past: Your Nearest Site. My nearest site is probably an air-raid shelter from the Second World War, but despite three trips I couldn’t find any visible remains. If you live in the UK there’s a very good chance the closest archaeological remains will be some form of civil defence from the 1940s but – until large numbers of the British are willing to accept the war is over – it’s going to be hard to persuade people they’re heritage.
There were two sites I could find and I was equidistant from both of them, so I chose Derby Silk Mill. Not everyone has a World Heritage Site on their doorstep. If I’d gone a couple of miles in the opposite direction this would have been the site posted.
Swarkestone Bridge
This is Swarkestone Bridge, the longest stone bridge in England. It crosses the river Trent and its floodplain. There’s been a crossing here since at least the fourteenth-century, but the current bridge mainly dates from the Georgian period with most of it built at the end of the eighteenth-century. It’s about More >
A tomb is a machine for remembering
Aug 8th
Some blog posts are a long time in the writing, but this sets a new record for me. Around May 2000 I was trying to think of a way of ripping off Le Corbusier’s quote A house is a machine for living in with regard to tombs.
It’s not a position I’d strongly defend. Tombs do other things as well. They mark territory to newcomers who may not know the local land. They’re a way of appropriating resources and position for the individual, if they plan their funeral while they’re alive.
If you want to be poetic, they also could be time machines. Once you have a settlement with a concept of deep roots, then it becomes possible to think about projecting your influence beyond your own lifetime. You can touch the future from a distance, but if that works, it only works in the memories of the living. It’s might seem a fanciful idea, but it’s spelled out in the earliest surviving history.
This is the display of the inquiry of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, so that things done by man not be forgotten in time, and that great and marvelous deeds, some displayed by the Hellenes, some by the barbarians, not lose their More >
Starlight Expressed
Aug 5th
This very briefly introduces the statistical method I used to analyse the Greek temples of Sicily for astronomical alignments. It’ll be the basis for a paper On the Orientations of Greek Temples in Sicily. The whole thesis will be made available later via Open Access some way or another. I would say via the British Library’s EThOS system, but I’ve had no luck with that.
Astronomy and the Oracle of Delphi
Aug 5th
This is (what I hope is) the final version of the Delphi presentation. It briefly covers the ground that formed the basis for Knowing when to consult the oracle at Delphi. There’s more unpublished material, but rather than trying to produce Delphi II, I’m going to make it part of the forthcoming Calendrical Calibration paper.
The 2009 site revision
Aug 4th
I’ve started to consolidate various web presences into one Me Portal as Kimberly Alderman called it. It means moving from WordPress.com because in the end a hosted solution isn’t flexible enough. I’d still highly recommend WordPress.com, especially as a site for new bloggers. Still the little things, like spending an afternoon writing a script to import links, start to annoy. Now Postalicious will read what I’ve marked with a ‘share’ on Google Reader and you can read the latest shares on the home page.
Changes and UpgradesThe entries now fall into six categories: The Past, Science, Politics, Digital Academia and Life. The sixth category, for those who can count, is Featured. That’s the easy way of sticking stories into rotation on the front page.
The reason for doing that is that it should work better for various aggregators. Maia Atlantides doesn’t need to know about a photo of a cute kitten that I’ve seen, so I can provide a Past feed which only sends the relevant stuff. Likewise I’ve been thinking for a which of adding this site to an Atheism aggregator, but a lot of what I write wouldn’t really be relevant for that either. Now I have a Politics feed. I could have called it More >
The Lunt
Aug 2nd
I’m still busy working on re-formatting which is proving to be very slow and tedious. I’ve also found out the version of Photomatix I was using to develop my photos was out-of-date. Here’s some photos I reprocessed to test the new version. They were taken at the Lunt, a recontructed 1st century AD Roman fort near Coventry. It was one of those days it was either about to start raining, or else it was raining or both. If you’re wondering about both, I got to the car while it was raining. Then it really started to rain.
#gallery-1 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-1 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-1 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } These days the granary is used as the small on-site museum. The eastern gate of the Lunt The ditch and bank used to defend the fort.
