Boilerplate Archaeology

Alun Science, The Past 1 Comment , , , ,

The editor of Sci­entific Amer­ican is tak­ing an interest in The Onion and Boil­er­plate Sci­ence (via Keat’s Tele­scope). It’s a look at gen­eric sci­ence stor­ies that you know are com­ing up in the next few months, like a gene for ________ being iden­ti­fied in mice com­plete with a pic­ture of a nor­mal white mouse to illus­trate what a mouse looks like. Here’s my attempt at a story which you’ll see some­time in the next month and a half.

For more than 4000 years Stone­henge has remained shrouded in mys­tery. Some research­ers have Stone­henge was the site of a solar temple. Oth­ers say it was an astro­nom­ical com­puter. Some have even argued it was alien spaceport.

Now a Uni­ver­sity of some­where not near Stone­henge researcher claims to have solved the puzzle.
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Britain BC by Francis Pryor

Alun The Past No Comments , , , , , , ,

There is a prob­lem in archae­ology, which Fran­cis Pryor neatly encap­su­lates in at the start of his book Bri­tain BC:

Stor­ies have plots and themes, and I have fash­ioned this book around what I think are the most import­ant. But inev­it­ably I have had to omit an enorm­ous amount of sig­ni­fic­ant mater­ial, simply because it fell out­side the imme­di­ate scope of the story. How­ever Bri­tain BC is not inten­ded to be a text­book, nor is it in any way com­pre­hens­ive. It’s essen­tially a nar­rat­ive – and a per­sonal one at that.

(Pryor 2004:xxvi)

It’s a prob­lem referred to by Camp­bell (1996), idea that pop­u­lar and schol­arly are polar oppos­ites. Ulti­mately it leads to the belief that if a text is writ­ten so as to be inac­cess­ible then by logic it must be highly schol­arly. If (by avoid­ing writ­ing a text­book) Pryor aimed to pro­duce an unschol­arly work he has, thank­fully, failed spec­tac­u­larly.
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The ‘Celtic Calendar’ and the Solstices

Alun The Past No Comments , , , , , , , ,

Celtic Calendar logoIf you visit www.archaeoastronomy.com between now and May 5 and look at their very cool graphic of the Earth’s orbit, you’ll notice that the fest­ival of Beltane is on its way. Beltane is the ori­gin of what are now the May Day cel­eb­ra­tions and part of what is often referred to as the ‘Celtic Cal­en­dar’. This is the idea that the year can be divided into eight parts. Between them the sol­stices and the equi­noxes divide the year into four parts and four addi­tional mid-quarter days placed between a sol­stice and an equi­nox divide the year into eight. Con­tro­ver­sially many people hold that the cal­en­dar isn’t merely Celtic, but has roots deep in the Stone Age which can be seen in the align­ments of stone rows in the Brit­ish Isles. The evid­ence is ambigu­ous but intriguing. Some of the events as clearly observ­able and some rely on abstract geometry.

Addi­tion­ally some people claim that these days are shared by the world. This is abso­lutely true. So are days like July 14th, but July 14th is really only sig­ni­fic­ant to the French. Were the days of this eight-fold cal­en­dar sig­ni­fic­ant across the world? Cer­tainly the easi­est event to see is the sol­stice and there is evid­ence that this is some­thing noted by cul­tures across the planet.
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Mback from Newcastle

Alun Life, The Past No Comments , , ,

I man­aged to do the New­castle con­fer­ence in as a day-trip. It involved a 3:30 depar­ture and I didn’t get back till 1:30 the fol­low­ing day, so tech­nic­ally it was only a 22 hour trip. Like last year it was a good event. Not one of the papers gave me the urge to yell “For Gods­sake step away from the lectern and stop steal­ing the oxy­gen!” Which is always a good thing. The hosts were as friendly as ever. I can’t recall any­where that I’ve been to where I’ve thought the hosts unfriendly, but New­castle strikes me as a depart­ment sited on a nat­ural spring of hos­pit­al­ity. It’s prob­ably right next to the other two springs which must provide the end­less sup­ply of red and white wine that they seem to have. The only dis­ap­point­ment was the rel­at­ive absence of clas­si­cists giv­ing papers this year. For­tu­nately the archae­olo­gists and his­tor­i­ans made up the short­fall without a notice­able drop in qual­ity.
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Moff to Newcastle

Alun Digital Academia, Life No Comments ,

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.
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Fac et Spera

Alun The Past No Comments

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.
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Isn’t Dr Tatiana’s Sex Guide to All Creation Wonderful?

Alun Science No Comments , , ,

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.
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How to reliably display ancient Greek text in PowerPoint

Alun Life, Science, The Past 5 Comments , , ,

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.
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