I’m a hypocrite (of sorts)

Alun Politics, Science, The Past 2 Comments , ,

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.
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You can never have too many dinosaurs

Alun Science No Comments , ,

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 and Raquel Welch, could fairly be said to have touched all bases.
read it all

He also has other entries online includ­ing some fas­cin­at­ing dis­cus­sions of Time and Geo­logy. For other excel­lent columns visit the the Palae­on­to­logy Asso­ci­ation and click on ‘cor­res­pond­ance’ on the left.

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy film in cheap publicity bid

Alun Digital Academia, Life No Comments , ,

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Guide entryBlog­ging

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

Alun Digital Academia, Science No Comments , , , , , ,

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.
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What is the Guardian up to?

Alun Politics 2 Comments , ,

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.
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Bizarre Request

Alun Life 1 Comment ,

We con­tac­ted you because we believe your accom­plish­ments to be of sig­ni­fic­ant ref­er­ence value

Mar­quis Who’s Who

I’m a post-grad in the second year of his PhD with no pub­lic­a­tions yet. Obvi­ously they must know this. A pub­lic­a­tion this pres­ti­gi­ous isn’t the res­ult of just any­one being invited is it? I assume my role is to be the baseline.

For those of you who don’t want to pay $500 for a copy, here’s my entry. I’m not sure if it’ll make the final cut. Obvi­ously with iden­tity theft being such a prob­lem one or two entries aren’t entirely accurate.

[Name] Salt, Alun Danger;
[Occu­pa­tion] Stu­dent;
[Retired] Not Retired;
[Gender] Male;
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Problems with Marsala

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

A picture of the Via Maggio XI, MarsalaI’ve said else­where it looks as though Marsala’s (ancient Lilibeo) street grid is aligned so that the Decu­manus Max­imus faces the winter sol­stice sun­rise. After look­ing through George Scheidt’s plans pub­lished in Kokalos and my own data I’ll revise that. It looks as though Marsala’s (ancient Lilibeo) street grid might be aligned so that the Decu­manus Max­imus faces the winter sol­stice sun­rise. If I went straight off the plans then I’d say I was wrong, the street points to 128 degrees, and the sun­rise would be around 120~121 degrees. Seven degrees might not sound a lot, but it is com­fort­ably meas­ur­able. If hold out your hand at arms length and look at your little fin­ger­nail, that’s about half a degree, so ima­gine four­teen of those in a line and there’s your error.

How­ever, it’s not that simple. The north ori­ent­a­tion on the pho­to­graphs on which the plan is based has the street aligned at 120 degrees. My own data has it at 121 degrees. The art­icle does have one city plan expli­citly meas­ured from north. Unfor­tu­nately it’s a plan of Carthage. At the moment I think it prob­ably faces the winter sol­stice sun­rise, but it is pos­sible there’s an error some­where that I haven’t found. As the dis­crep­ancy is so large I’m try­ing to track down bet­ter plans of Marsala.

On the whole the Carthaginian cit­ies in Sicily do broadly share a sim­ilar pat­tern of ori­ent­a­tion. Palermo devi­ates, but in a pecu­liar but pre­dict­able way given its land­scape. I’ll need more data to see whether the pat­tern is mean­ing­ful or in the eye of the beholder.

If we demolished the Pyramids would anyone notice?

Alun Science, The Past 2 Comments , , , ,

Orbis Quin­tus noted that the Voy­ager pro­gramme was under threat on April 13. At the time of writ­ing the decision had not been announced, but the fact that the issue was raised at all got me won­der­ing how blind we are to the cre­ation of what will be, to future gen­er­a­tions, monu­ments as mag­ni­fi­cent as the Pyr­am­ids. The twen­ti­eth cen­tury has pro­duced sites that will stand in human memory for all time. Pre­ser­va­tion of mater­ial on the Moon means that Tran­quil­ity Base will sur­pass Bot­any Bay or Ply­mouth Rock as her­it­age site in the future. As I write the probes will cross / are cross­ing / have crossed the helio­pause (no-one’s entirely sure – there’s not enough data) mak­ing them the first arte­facts to enter inter­stel­lar space. There is a sci­entific sig­ni­fic­ance in this, but is there social sig­ni­fic­ance in the space pro­gramme that we’re missing?

Voyager 1

Voy­ager Probe. Image cour­tesy NASA/JPL-Caltech

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Turning back the tide at Dover

Alun Politics, Science 3 Comments , , ,

I’ve got a Google News Alert set for “dover evol­u­tion”, fol­low­ing the accept­ance of cre­ation­ism (known in Amer­ica by some people as Intel­li­gent Design) onto the cur­riculum of a school in Pennsylvania. The plan is/was to write up a short piece on event for TUP, along with the car­toon below from a site which offers hours of juven­ile fun. The art­icle hasn’t been writ­ten yet because it is a con­tro­ver­sial sub­ject and I thought it a good idea to read a little around it on both sides of the sub­ject. I still haven’t writ­ten it a few months on because there’s a lot to read. It seems the big issue most people con­cen­trate on is whether an altern­at­ive to Dar­win­ism should be taught at high school. In fact it could be much more serious.

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The Scale of Likelihood

Alun Science, The Past No Comments , , ,

I thought it might be use­ful to define what I mean when I use words like ‘prob­able’ or ‘pos­sible’, so I’ve cre­ated my own scale to define how likely I think some­thing is to be sig­ni­fic­ant. It’s meant for whether or not an astro­nom­ical cor­rel­a­tion is mean­ing­ful to archae­olo­gical mater­ial, but it prob­ably has gen­eral applic­a­tions.
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