Chinese vase at auction

A vase thought to have belonged to an 18th Century Chinese emperor turned up an auction in rural Ireland earlier this month and sold for more than 70 times its asking price.

The 12-inch tall blue and white porcelain vase had an asking price of just $200, but caught the attention of two top international antique collectors from China and England. Both saw it online and, recognizing it as an authentic vase from Imperial China, flew in especially for the auction in Durrow, a small town in the Irish midlands with a population of just over 1,000 people.

After an opening bid of just $70, dealers Rong Chen and Richard Peters got into a bidding war to the astonishment of those present. Bids jumped in an intense frenzy of hundreds and thousands of euro at a time. Peters, who was seated, bid by nodding discreetly, while Chen stood as she took instructions on a mobile phone from her husband.

Peters, above, won the auction at a final price of $150,000 over Chen, who later said she had been told by her husband to drop out at $135,000. Afterwards, 48-year-old Peters insisted: “I got a bargain.”

And if the item is right, it will likely be resold at auction in Hong Kong for several times what it went for in Ireland. Full article here.

Are terrorist cells really so hard to infiltrate?

For nearly a year, a middle-aged woman from suburban Philadelphia used her computer to fashion a new, frightening identity, federal court documents say.

The stream of Internet messages in which she sought assistance to wage violent jihad in Asia and Europe literally transformed her, the documents allege, from 46-year-old Colleen LaRose to "Jihad Jane."

Let's get this straight: in less than a year, this woman, with no special background, training, or qualifications, (allegedly) managed to convince real terrorists that she was one of them -- all from the comfort (and anonymity) of her own suburban home.

I sincerely hope our counterterrorism agents are no less efficient and intrepid.

From USA Today.

Italy embraces library digitization

The Italian government has signed a deal with Google to put the contents of two national libraries on the internet.

Up to one million antiquarian books - including works by Dante, Machiavelli and Galileo - will be scanned and made available free on Google Books.

There is no copyright issue as all the works were published before 1868.

The Italian authorities welcomed the scheme as budget pressures have cut the amount that can be spent on preserving the collections in Rome and Florence.

From the BBC.

iSlave

Researchers have produced a mobile phone that could be a boon for prying bosses wanting to keep tabs on the movements of their staff.

Japanese phone giant KDDI Corporation has developed technology that tracks even the tiniest movement of the user and beams the information back to HQ.

It works by analysing the movement of accelerometers, found in many handsets.

Activities such as walking, climbing stairs or even cleaning can be identified, the researchers say.

Not clear if it's the phone or the software that's the key technology here. Some form of this could work with any phone with iPhone-type motion sensors -- though it sounds as if something even more intrusive is intended:

. . . the KDDI mobile phone strapped to a cleaning worker's waist can tell the difference between actions performed such as scrubbing, sweeping, walking an even emptying a rubbish bin

But assuming that the company monitoring its employees so closely would then have to require them to wear the phones, why bother with the phone at all, and just have done with it and have them wear electronic slave collars?

It is not the first time remote spying technology has been enlisted by employers to keep an eye on their workforce in Japan or elsewhere.

Lorry drivers are regularly monitored through mobile phones in Japan, while salespeople have been regularly tracked by their employers using GPS since it was introduced to Japanese mobiles in 2002.

Full article here.

Baltic shipwrecks

A dozen centuries-old shipwrecks — some of them unusually well-preserved — have been found in the Baltic Sea by a gas company building an underwater pipeline between Russia and Germany.

The oldest wreck probably dates back to medieval times and could be up to 800 years old, while the others are likely from the 17th to 19th centuries, Peter Norman of Sweden's National Heritage Board said Tuesday.

"They could be interesting, but we have only seen pictures of their exterior. Many of them are considered to be fully intact. They look very well-preserved," Norman told The Associated Press.

Thousands of wrecks — from medieval ships to warships sunk during the world wars of the 20th century — have been found in the Baltic Sea, which doesn't have the ship worm that destroys wooden wrecks in saltier oceans.

From the Associated Press. Also noted:

The Nord Stream project, in which Russia's OAO Gazprom holds a 51 percent stake, has uncovered scores of other objects during seabed searches of the route, including about 80 sea mines and a washing machine, she said.

DNA from ancient eggshells

Researchers have found that eggshells of extinct bird species are a rich source of preserved DNA.

An international team isolated the delicate DNA molecules of species including the massive "elephant birds" of the genus Aepyorni. . .

"Researchers have tried unsuccessfully to isolate DNA from a fossil eggshell for years," said Charlotte Oskam at Murdoch University in Western Australia, who authored the research.

"It just turned out that they were using a method designed for bone that was not suitable for a fossil eggshell."

From the BBC.

Cycling Nazis

Summer 1937. What could be more fitting in the cool afternoon of an English country lane than a group of cycling tourists steadily pedalling their way from one historic site to another, stopping to camp overnight in fields along the way.

The only problem was, that summer, some of those groups of teenage boys were Hitler Youth.

In an era without satellite photography, when detailed ordnance survey maps could be hard to come by and when tension in Europe was rising, MI5 were worried that this innocent cyclo-tourism was a cover for spying.

Full article here.

Stupid security questions

It was bad enough in phone-banking days when banks and credit card companies asked for one's mother's maiden name as a so-called security measure, but why re-embrace such easily-guessed queries nowadays -- where a simple genealogical search can find most people's family members in an instant, and Facebook is likely to reveal many of the other "secrets" the online gatekeepers are relying upon?

The BBC has an article today on yet another study demonstrating this obvious security hole, the focus in this case on webmail:

A study has shown how easy it is to guess the answer to common questions, such as someone's mother's maiden name.

It found attackers will be able to break into 1 in 80 accounts if they get three chances to guess answers. . .

In the case of many e-mail providers, they can be used to overwrite an existing password without knowing what it is. . .

One study by researchers from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon looked at how easy it was for friends and family members to guess answers to security questions. They found that 17% of the answers could be guessed by those who knew a target.

A good strong password should be all you need. The problem is in providing a convenient backdoor for those who forget their passwords. What ticks me off is that this backdoor has been so generally adopted, and with no opt-out option. So instead of having to store one strong password (securely, mind you -- using the absolutely free Password Safe, and keeping encrypted backups), I effectively have to manage four: one for each inane "secret" -- first pet, favorite teacher, school mascot -- each of which is necessarily a long, random string of letters (and numbers and characters, where accepted).

Great White sharks vs giant squid?

If not Giant Squid, at least very big squid:

In what could be the ultimate marine smack-down, great white sharks off the California coast may be migrating 1,600 miles west to do battle with creatures that rival their star power: giant squids.

A series of studies tracking this mysterious migration has scientists rethinking not just what the big shark does with its time but also what sort of creature it is. . .

For more reserved scientists, the possible link between sharks and squid, suggested by marine ecologist Michael Domeier of the Marine Conservation Science Institute in Fallbrook, is just one part of emerging research that has altered their understanding of the great whites. . .

Domeier said he believes the animals "are not a coastal shark that comes out to the middle of the ocean. They are an ocean shark that comes to the coast. It is a complete flip-flop."

Picture them not as a dorsal fin off the beach but rather as an unseen leviathan swimming through black depths where the oxygen thins and fish glow in the dark, and maybe pouncing on a 30-foot squid.

Full article here.

Stolen Descartes letter rediscovered

It was the Great Train Robbery of French intellectual life: thousands of treasured documents that vanished from the Institut de France in the mid-1800s, stolen by an Italian mathematician. Among them were 72 letters by René Descartes, the founding genius of modern philosophy and analytic geometry.

Now one of those purloined letters has turned up at a small private college in eastern Pennsylvania, providing scholars with another keyhole into one of the Western world’s greatest minds. . .

As soon as Haverford’s president, Stephen G. Emerson, understood the letter’s history, he contacted the Institut de France (coincidentally on Feb. 11, the anniversary of Descartes’ death in 1650) and offered to return the item. “I was frankly shocked because I didn’t know we had the letter at all,” said Mr. Emerson, who was a philosophy major in college. “But it’s really not ours.”

An honorable but, sadly, exceptional response.

Gabriel de Broglie, chancellor of the Institut de France . . . awarded Haverford a prize of 15,000 euros (slightly more than $20,000), writing to Mr. Emerson that the offer “honors you and exemplifies the depth of moral values that you instill in your students.”

France has recovered only 45 of the 72 stolen Descartes letters, Mr. de Broglie explained. One was offered at an auction in Switzerland in 2006 and 2009. “After I protested vociferously and publicly on both occasions in the name of the Institut, the letter didn’t find a buyer,” Mr. de Broglie wrote, “but it proved impossible for us to raise the very large sum that the seller demanded, and even though it can’t be sold, this 1638 letter remains in private hands.”

From the NY Times.

Jewish tribes of Africa

This has been written up before, but here's yet another article:

In many ways, the Lemba tribe of Zimbabwe and South Africa are just like their neighbours.

But in other ways their customs are remarkably similar to Jewish ones.

They do not eat pork, they practise male circumcision, they ritually slaughter their animals, some of their men wear skull caps and they put the Star of David on their gravestones.

Their oral traditions claim that their ancestors were Jews who fled the Holy Land about 2,500 years ago.

It may sound like another myth of a lost tribe of Israel, but British scientists have carried out DNA tests which confirm their Semitic origin.

From the BBC.

Dinosaur ancestry discovery

Scientists have discovered a dinosaur-like creature 10 million years older than the earliest known dinosaurs.

Asilisaurus kongwe is a newly discovered herbivore that lived during the middle Triassic period - about 245 million years ago.

The scientists say that its age suggests that dinosaurs were also on the Earth earlier than previously thought.

From the BBC.

It was a snake-eats-dinosaur world back then

Scientists say they have identified the fossilised remains of a snake that dined on dinosaur eggs.

The 67-million-year-old skeleton was found in a dinosaur nest.

The study, published in the journal Plos One, is said to show the first direct evidence of feeding behaviour in a fossilised primitive snake.

This 3.5m fossil snake is believed to have fed on the hatchlings of sauropods, as it was found wrapped around a baby titanosaur.

Full article here.

Comic books crack $1 million

A comic showing the debut of superhero Batman has been sold for more than $1m (£655,000) at an auction in Dallas.

The rare 1939 copy of Detective Comic No 27 was bought by an anonymous bidder from a seller who also wished to keep their identity secret.

The sale comes just days after an early edition of a Superman comic sold for $1m - only to be outdone by Batman.

The seller apparently bought the record-breaking copy for $100 in the 1960s. From the BBC.

Giant Cretaceous sharks, and more

The fossilised remains of a gigantic 10m-long predatory shark have been unearthed in Kansas, US.

Scientists dug up a gigantic jawbone, teeth and scales belonging to the shark which lived 89 million years ago.

The bottom-dwelling predator had huge tooth plates, which it likely used to crush large shelled animals such as giant clams.

Palaeontologists already knew about the shark, but the new specimen suggests it was far bigger than previously thought.

The scientists who made the discovery, published in the journal Cretaceous Research, last week also released details of other newly discovered giant plankton-eating fish that swam in prehistoric seas for more than 100 million years.

Full article here.

The "Chemist's War"

A horrifying episode from Prohibition, yet virtually forgotten:

Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

Although mostly forgotten today, the "chemist's war of Prohibition" remains one of the strangest and most deadly decisions in American law-enforcement history. As one of its most outspoken opponents, Charles Norris, the chief medical examiner of New York City during the 1920s, liked to say, it was "our national experiment in extermination."

From Slate.

As a side note, I was recently studying up on denatured alcohol. Interestingly enough, the "denaturing" process is quite different in the USA and other countries, such as the UK. In the USA, color isn't added, which would seem to increase the danger of unintended ingestion. Nor, apparently, anything that gives the stuff an awful taste -- another safety measure. What I was actually looking for, however, was any exemption for industrial or workshop applications where the addition of the usual denaturing ingredients -- methanol, in particular -- might be problematical. Couldn't find any, so it appears any craftsman wanting to use pure ethanol has to pay the Federal booze excise tax on the stuff (and I do know several fine woodworkers who do just that).

The credulity of historians

A new book about the atomic destruction of Hiroshima has won critical acclaim with its heartbreaking portrayals of the bomb’s survivors and is set to be made into a movie by James Cameron.

“The Last Train from Hiroshima,” published in January by Henry Holt, also claims to reveal a secret accident with the atom bomb that killed one American and irradiated others and greatly reduced the weapon’s destructive power.

There is just one problem. That section of the book and other technical details of the mission are based on the recollections of Joseph Fuoco, who is described as a last-minute substitute on one of the two observation planes that escorted the Enola Gay.

But Mr. Fuoco, who died in 2008 at age 84 and lived in Westbury, N.Y., never flew on the bombing run, and he never substituted for James R. Corliss, the plane’s regular flight engineer, Mr. Corliss’s family says. They, along with angry ranks of scientists, historians and veterans, are denouncing the book and calling Mr. Fuoco an impostor.

Facing a national outcry and the Corliss family’s evidence, the author, Charles Pellegrino, now concedes that he was probably duped.

Corrections have been promised, yet once bad history is widely broadcast, it can take years to undo the damage. At least here action is being taken promptly; the author appears to be conscientious, and genuinely taken aback. Another illustration of the maxim that extraordinary claims demand extraordinary proofs. From the NY Times.

Distracted walking

On the day of the collision last month, visibility was good. The sidewalk was not under repair. As she walked, Tiffany Briggs, 25, was talking to her grandmother on her cellphone, lost in conversation.

Very lost.

“I ran into a truck,” Ms. Briggs said.

It was parked in a driveway.

Distracted driving has gained much attention lately because of the inflated crash risk posed by drivers using cellphones to talk and text.

But there is another growing problem caused by lower-stakes multitasking — distracted walking — which combines a pedestrian, an electronic device and an unseen crack in the sidewalk, the pole of a stop sign, a toy left on the living room floor or a parked (or sometimes moving) car.

From the NY Times.

Stone Age sailors?

Early humans, possibly even prehuman ancestors, appear to have been going to sea much longer than anyone had ever suspected.

That is the startling implication of discoveries made the last two summers on the Greek island of Crete. Stone tools found there, archaeologists say, are at least 130,000 years old, which is considered strong evidence for the earliest known seafaring in the Mediterranean and cause for rethinking the maritime capabilities of prehuman cultures.

From the NY Times. What is not entirely clear here, however, is if there is definitive evidence of ongoing travel between Crete and the mainland, or if it is possible that the finds can be explained by a one-time settlement by castaways carried to Crete by some storm.

Peanut allergy treatment test

It seems so simple -- can the results be replicated on a large scale?

The largest ever trial to find a treatment for potentially fatal peanut allergies is to give sufferers tiny amounts daily to build up tolerance.

Cambridge University researchers will give increasing doses of peanut flour to 104 British children, up to the equivalent of five nuts a day.

Twenty out of 23 sufferers in an earlier study became able to eat more than 30 peanuts safely.

From the BBC.

Minaret collapse in Morocco

At least 41 people have been killed and 80 more injured after a minaret collapsed at a mosque in northern Morocco.

The Lalla Khenata mosque minaret in the Bab el Bardiyine neighbourhood of Meknes collapsed during Friday's prayers, burying most of the 300 worshippers gathered there.

Interior ministry officials blamed the incident on heavy rain that had weakened the minaret. . .

Angry residents accused authorities of ignoring warnings about the dilapidated state of the mosque.

"We told them many times before that there were widening cracks on the walls and that its minaret had begun tipping over but they ignored the warning," one man, who gave his name only as Mohammed, was quoted by the Reuters news agency as saying.

From Aljazeera.net. News reports indicate the minaret was around 400 years old.

Bringing back the aurochs?

Scientists have analysed the DNA of ancient giant European wild cattle that died out almost 400 years ago.

They have determined the first mitochondrial genome sequence from aurochs (Bos primigenius) from bone found in a cave in England. . .

Dr Edwards said a project was now under way to sequence and assemble a complete aurochs nuclear genome by the end of the year. . .

The species became extinct when a female animal died in a forest in Poland in 1627.

From the BBC. Wikipedia entry on aurochs here, with more on attempts to bring back the aurochs here.

Big dinosaur footprint find in China

Scientists in China say they have discovered more than 3,000 dinosaur footprints, all facing the same way.

The footprints - thought to belong to at least six dinosaur types - were found in eastern Shandong province, state news agency Xinhua reports.

Experts believe the prints are more than 100 million years old and say they could represent a migration or a panicked attempt to escape predators.

From the BBC.

Crash Blossoms

In their quest for concision, writers of newspaper headlines are, like Robert Browning, inveterate sweepers away of little words, and the dust they kick up can lead to some amusing ambiguities. Legendary headlines from years past (some of which verge on the mythical) include “Giant Waves Down Queen Mary’s Funnel,” “MacArthur Flies Back to Front” and “Eighth Army Push Bottles Up Germans.” The Columbia Journalism Review even published two anthologies of ambiguous headlinese in the 1980s, with the classic titles “Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim” and “Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge.”

From the NY Times. Gotta get those anthologies, but it looks as if they are out of print and not cheap!

Two other classics from the article: “McDonald’s Fries the Holy Grail for Potato Farmers" and "British Left Waffles on Falklands".

Copyright madness infects Australia

The CNN writeup is more balanced, but the BBC's better highlights the outrageousness of the underlying issues:

The Australian band Men at Work are facing a big legal bill after a court ruled it had plagiarised a Girl Guides' song in its 1983 hit, Down Under.

Larrikin Music had claimed the flute riff from was stolen from Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree, written by Marion Sinclair in 1934.

"Stolen" and "plagiarized" clearly do not apply here. What has the world come to, when you are not allowed to make a quick bow to an iconic and now-traditional Australian melody in a song about being Australian? This was just a quick riff, an allusion and tribute of the sort that has enriched music since time immemorial. But now that tip of the hat is being repaid with lawsuits, leaving everyone the poorer.

The federal court in Sydney ordered compensation to be paid.

That amount has yet to be determined but Larrikin's lawyer said it could reach 60% of income from the song.

The decision is bad enough, but 60% would be an outrage. This isn't a case involving the central melody, or any lyrics.

"It's a big win for the underdog," said Larrikin's lawyer Adam Simpson after the judgment.

That's pretty rich.

Sinclair, who died in 1988, wrote the song for performance at a Girl Guides Jamboree in 1935.

Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree has since been sung by generations of Australian schoolchildren.

And American, as well. Wonder if they'll be trying to collect royalties from the kids next.