How Art Made the World

Alun Science, The Past 9 Comments , , , , , , ,

This is the new Big Archae­olo­gical Series on the BBC. I really wanted to like the pro­gramme, I really did. But it’s incon­sist­ent at best. The cent­ral theme is that much of the mod­ern world rests on Art and the con­cepts which lie at the root of Art were formed thou­sands of years ago. Dr Nigel Spivey presents the series. He’s a clas­sical archae­olo­gist at Cam­bridge and without wish­ing to sound like I’m snip­ing that’s prob­ably the prob­lem. Spivey appears to be a very good clas­sical archae­olo­gist. The series how­ever stretches from the Palaeo­lithic to the clas­sical period.
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If I had a subscription to Focus I’d cancel it

Alun Science No Comments , , , ,

This isn’t an entry I par­tic­u­larly wanted to write, but another sci/tech magazine has bit the dust. I had bought every copy of Focus up till a couple of months ago. It star­ted as an intel­li­gent sci­ence magazine, but after the onslaught of the Loaded era it dumbed down some­what. Sadly it has now skipped out of sens­ible sci­ence altogether.

I can’t com­ment on last month’s issue (cover story the Secrets of UFOs), because I’d decided to skip buy­ing it after they prin­ted a piece that claimed the Mitchell-Hedges Crys­tal Skull was an unsolved mys­tery for Mayan archae­olo­gists. Cer­tainly one unsolved mys­tery is why did Mitchell-Hedges claim to have found the 19th cen­tury Ger­man crys­tal skull in a Mayan city, when he had in fact bought it from Sotheby’s. That took 30 seconds to find on the inter­net. In the same issue the Op-Ed column sagely berated those who spouted junk rather than spend a brief time check­ing the facts first which, they noted, was even easier these days thanks to the internet.

So what per­suaded me to buy it this month? The cover. Amaz­ing New Dis­cov­ery: The Lost Ark of the Cov­en­ant: It van­ished over 2000 years ago but now experts think they’ve found it.
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Astrology — Scientific Poll Results

Alun Politics No Comments , , ,

I’ve found a poll I set up on Mis­ter Poll. The aim was to perm answers to end up with non­sensical con­clu­sions. For instance if a large major­ity of people said that it was unlikely that people were con­nec­ted to Neander­thals and in a later ques­tion a major­ity thought their neigh­bour could be an example of a Neander­thal then you get the res­ult “At least n% per cent of people thought it unlikely that they were des­cen­ded from Neander­thals, but that their neigh­bors prob­ably were”. I thought it would be a way of gen­er­at­ing an easy press release for the i-science course at Leicester. How­ever it hasn’t worked out and I’m too lazy to work out the odder com­bin­a­tions for now.

Nev­er­the­less there are some inter­est­ing res­ults:
11% of people think “The biggest prob­lem with Genet­ic­ally Mod­i­fied food is the ‘Alien’ effect where evil genes leap out of your stom­ach explosively.”

12% of respond­ents agreed that “People only go into sci­ence to pull chicks.”

68% of people think Evol­u­tion is a fact, though only 60% are so cer­tain about Gravity.

19% of people would prefer the Leap Year Day to be on June 31, so we get an extra sunny day.

and finally my favour­ite:
10% of people think the dis­cov­ery of Sedna will make gas­ol­ine prices rise.
Only 2% think it will make horo­scopes even more accurate.

Full res­ults avail­able at: http://www.misterpoll.com/results.mpl?id=683967483
or cast your own vote at: http://www.misterpoll.com/683967483.html

Grey Literature Ahoy!

Alun The Past No Comments , ,

One of the big prob­lems with con­tract archae­ology is find­ing out what the res­ults of an excav­a­tion or watch­ing brief was. The res­ults are rarely fully pub­lished, which would sug­gest that a lot of the work is a bit point­less. Thank­fully the situ­ation is improv­ing. Dave Edwards has passed along a URL for the ADS. At http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/library/greylit/ you’ll find a store of grey lit­er­at­ure for free brows­ing. If you want to find out what it is that Wessex Archae­ology have been doing, now you can.

Boilerplate Archaeology 2

Alun The Past No Comments , ,

I sat down to read New Sci­ent­ist yes­ter­day morn­ing. I’m buy­ing reg­u­larly it now, so I can’t tell if they’ve dumbed down or I’ve matured. Any­how the reviews sec­tion is always worth a read.

This week there’s a review of Big Weather by Mark Sven­vold. Mark Sven­vold is not a pro­fes­sional tornado-chaser him­self, but has been hanging out with them to write his new book. “What rel­ev­ance to Boil­er­plate Archae­ology does this have?” you may ask. Well to quote from the review:

Sven­vold grants the ori­gins of tor­nado watch­ing to ancient Brit­ish pion­eers because “Archae­olo­gists believe that 5000 years ago the inhab­it­ants of Stone­henge hon­oured the storm god by dig­ging ditches par­al­lel to the tracks of tornadoes.”

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A search for meaning

Alun Politics 3 Comments , ,

Around Christ­mas time I found a dic­tion­ary of post­mod­ern terms, which I didn’t buy on the spot. I planned to buy it later as it defined Lin­ear Think­ing as “Unfor­tu­nate, con­trolling, impov­er­ished, male vari­ety of think­ing that’s all hung up on logic, evid­ence, chro­no­logy, caus­a­tion, and pedantic in-the-head stuff like that.” Unfor­tu­nately I for­got the title and couldn’t find it on Amazon. It turns out the authors of the book edit a site I’ve been vis­it­ing every so often for the past few months, But­ter­flies and Wheels, and the book is called “A Dic­tion­ary of Fash­ion­able Nonsense”.

The dic­tion­ary is avail­able on site. The book has over 500 entries but I don’t think that many are avail­able on the web. I don’t know for cer­tain. I could count them to find out, but that would be an appeal to Empir­i­cism (absurd notion that obser­va­tion and meas­ure­ment are use­ful in get­ting to know about things).

I am open to the idea that post­mod­ern­ism might have some­thing use­ful to say if it’s done well. How­ever the appeal to obscur­ity that is tol­er­ated in aca­demia means that there’s no par­tic­u­lar need to do it well. In fact for many, doing it well and mean­ing­fully would be miss­ing the entire point. I was temp­ted to try and prove this, either by adapt­ing the Post­mod­ern­ism Gen­er­ator to pro­duce archae­olo­gical the­ory, or else give a com­puter gen­er­ated con­fer­ence paper. How­ever, I’ve been beaten on this last point by a couple of people who cre­ated a CompSci paper gen­er­ator and got one ran­dom paper accep­ted at WMSCI 2005.

Is it any good? You can try it out for your­self at SCI­Gen.

This could poten­tially have very pos­it­ive uses. I’ve got an exper­i­ment run­ning which I hope to report on in a couple of weeks.

Handshouse Studio

Alun The Past No Comments , , , , ,

Hand­s­house Stu­dio have a site that’s worth look­ing at. They’re the people who designed the sand sys­tem for the NOVA doc­u­ment­ary on Rais­ing the Obelisk / Secrets of Lost Empires. I have to admit I wasn’t impressed by the doc­u­ment­ary. I thought there was far too much faff­ing around and the exper­i­ence of the work­ers seemed to be ignored. Luck­ily for me I saw the sys­tem in oper­a­tion at the AIA con­fer­ence in Janu­ary and I was much more impressed. They had an excel­lent model which gave me much more con­fid­ence of the phys­ics of how the sys­tem worked. Cru­cially, the people demon­strat­ing were the people who designed the sys­tem and they did a much bet­ter job of it than the TV crew.

Their site also shows some of their other work includ­ing the Bush­nell Turtle. It’s an excel­lent way to lose an after­noon when you should be working.

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