Alun
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Posts by Alun
You too can have an ass like Cleopatra
Sep 5th
@Simon_Perry on Twitter has pointed out a website of someone who’s a rather aggressive salesman. I’ve had to hand in my Pedantry badge that I earned in the cub scouts because my first reaction was that the champagne vinegar in this facecream isn’t likely to be natural. This is missing the point because as far as I can tell nothing sold by Totally Natural Skincare is totally natural. But there is a gem among the junk.
Cleopatras bath milk Used by Cleopatra, except she used asses milk! A beautiful soothing and relaxing bath milk which nourishes the skin and releases its floral oils and cocoa butter in the warmth of the bath leaving you smooth as silk. This Bath milk also contains our own rose petal soap. thus cleanses as well as moisturising.
As sales pitches go “Used by Cleopatra, except she used asses milk!“ is a classic – and not just because the product includes cocoa (from the Americas). You need to think about what bathing in asses milk means.
Amanda Barrie gives the definitive performance of Cleopatra in Carry on Cleo
To be honest, I don’t know where the idea that Cleopatra bathed in asses’ milk came from. There’s no contemporary source that I know More >
How I published a book, thanks to The Open Laboratory
Sep 1st
Available at Scribd & Lulu
I’ve been busy in August, and one of the things I’ve been working on has been out for a couple of weeks and I forgot to blog it. I’ve published a book.
I haven’t written a book, or edited it or anything requiring any academic input. I just worked on the publishing. The book is the first volume of the Proceedings from the GIREP-EPEC and PHEC 2009 conference. In English, it was a Physics Education conference. I had nothing to do with the conference, but my Head of Department mentioned to a colleague at McMaster University that he was going to publish a proceedings volume and she remembered I’d worked on the cover for the first Open Laboratory book, and so must be an expert in publishing.
I’m not, but as Shawn Graham has shown, the actual process of publishing a book via Lulu is easy and pain-free if you’re willing to make some compromises. The drawbacks are things like a lack of professional typesetting, but these days publishers often insist on camera-ready copy anyway. There’s also no marketing. For some conference volumes this will be a line in a catalogue and an email and, possibly a display at More >
This could be optimistic, I’m very inventive at getting things wrong.
I’ve sent across another press release to OUP, with a stunning photograph to go with it. Or so I thought. The photograph seems to have gone missing.
Re-thinking Mendeley
Aug 16th
I’ve got a blog post I’d like to finish here, but it needs time for me to sit down and write it properly. One of the things that has eaten my time instead is looking over Mendeley. In the past I haven’t used it because I haven’t had a need for it. I already have accounts on Zotero, CiteULike and I have a copy of Papers for my PDFs. I think this could change as I’ve been working with Mendeley accounts for AoBBlog.
If you visit AoBBlog you’ll see a Bibliographies option on the menu bar, and dropping down from that four options. Three of these are shared collections and Pollination is curated by David Frost, the managing editor of the Annals of Botany. These are all administered at Mendeley. I’ve set up Arabidopsis, Ecology and Nutrition as shared collections so that when people who know more about Arabidopsis etc. than me sign up, they can keep the bibliography up-to-date. The reason you can see it on the website and not have to guess which AoB staff member is keeping the collection on Mendeley is that Mendeley now has an API, allowing me to pull data out of the site. There’s also a WordPress More >
Carnival of Space 146 is live at Cumbrian Sky
Astronomy and Space blogging from the past week is gathered at Cumbrian Sky. Bring your 3D glasses.
4SH98 – Two weeks of anthroblogging
The best of archaeology and anthropology blogging has been gathered at the Prancing Papio in the latest edition of Four Stone Hearth.
Debunking Scooby-Doo – Carnivorous plants need plenty of light
I’m sure there’s an episode of Scooby-Doo where Scooby finds a man/dog-eating plant in a dark deserted mansion. I think it’s in the episode where Scooby gets so scared that he jumps, quaking, into Shaggy’s arms. Anyway it turns out that tales of the giant talking dog are not 100% scientifically accurate – carnivorous plants need plenty of light.
Past lives caught in the dust of trees
Jul 28th
I’m currently working at the Annals of Botany to help out with their social media side. There’s a bit more to it than subtly dropping links to their site, like this one. At the moment I’m struggling with the Facebook integration, but there’s a fun side too. I wouldn’t have browsed AoB if I’d not been hired, and that means I would have missed out on papers like Phytoliths in woody plants from the Miombo woodlands of Mozambique by Julio Mercader and his team at Calgary. I’ll admit the article title doesn’t say much to the layman, but it’s actually something deeply cool that I didn’t find out about till my MPhil.
If megaliths are big stones and microliths are small stones like arrowheads, then phytoliths are clearly phyto-stones. Phyto- in this case meaning plant.
Phytoliths are microscopic stones formed in some plants. When a plant’s roots draw up water they also draw up the minerals dissolved within it. In the case of the silica this gets pulled out of the water and deposited either in the cells or between the cells. The exact shape of the phytoliths varies on the part of the plant the silica is deposited in, the availability of More >
Do we need an Industrial Archaeology?
Jul 24th
Cromford Canal. Click for larger image.
It’s easy to take a World Heritage Site for granted when it’s on your doorstep. I had thought of shooting a short portfolio of Cromford for a competition. They required ten photos. After looking into the project I’ve decided that the competition isn’t going to happen for me, but a short photo essay on Cromford, or possibly the Derwent Valley Mills, remains an interesting idea.
Industrial Archaeology can get short shrift from other archaeologists. Often there’s written records, plans and for some places oral accounts of work at a site. Is Archaeology necessary? Mark Henshaw, the Archaeology Dude, makes a good argument that Archaeology can draw multiple lines of evidence to inform histories of the past. I wouldn’t discount that, and I think his point, Archaeology isn’t just about digging, is very important from an American perspective because there Archaeology is seen as a branch of Anthropology. In the UK you’re more likely to see Archaeology paired with History or Classics. So do we really need Industrial Archaeologists when there so many Early Modern Historians.
I think another factor Archaeology brings is spatial thinking. Looking at the early days of the professionalisation of Archaeology in Britain, one of the More >
More carbon dioxide isn’t necessarily good news for plants
I was also blogging at AoB Blog yesterday on why more carbon dioxide isn’t necessarily good news for plants.
