More on wireless surfing in class

I wasn't intending to spend much more time on the topic of students playing around online while in class, but this morning's paper brought a letter to the editor that neatly encapsulates some common misapprehensions regarding college education:

If college students are distracted, it is because they are bored. If they are bored, it is because the professors are boring.
If professors are boring, it is because they are trained as researching scholars. They are not trained as teachers.
LOUIS SCHMIER

While it is desirable for lecturers to make their material as interesting and digestible as possible, it is no less desirable for students to learn how to remain engaged with material that is not easily digested. There is more to a college education than the transfer of information; ideally, students should also learn how to learn, building up their capacity to extract and absorb knowledge wherever it may be found. Sometimes essential knowledge, whether in academia or the outside world, simply isn't available in user-friendly form.

This is not to say that professors can do no wrong; I've suffered through more than my share of rambling, badly-organized lectures. But where is the evidence that things would be better if future professors were trained as teachers, rather than as experts in their fields? That approach sounds a little too much like how American public school teachers are trained: heavy on the methodology, light on the concrete knowledge. So give us professors who know their stuff, even if their lectures are hard to follow and delivered in a soporific monotone. Better solid information badly packaged than a pretty box with nothing inside.

Beetle smugglers caught Down Under

News from Oz:

They were rudely wrenched from their hiding places and packed into cereal boxes as part of an elaborate smuggling operation.
But now 600 of Australia's rarest beetles are back in clover again on their island home off the NSW coast.

National Parks and Wildlife Service officers spent yesterday returning scores of stolen stag-beetles to their rotten log homes on Lord Howe Island.

The fragile beetles, which sell for up to $10,000 on the Asian pet market, were part of a shipment of 1000 specimens seized by customs officials at Sydney Airport last Sunday.

About 400 beetles were dead by the time customs officers discovered the haul, which was allegedly being smuggled out of the country by two Japanese men.

With the species under threat, wildlife officials faced a battle against the clock to get the surviving beetles back home to Lord Howe to continue their brief three-month reproduction cycle.

Ohio sites in danger

Every time I visit my wife's relatives in Ohio, the local papers seem to be reporting on some historical site under threat. Now here's an article on how Ohio's only Civil War battlefield may shortly be excavated by a gravel company:

On the morning of July 19, 1863, Union troops waged a four-hour running battle on a foggy Ohio River bend against Confederate Gen. John Morgan, who had cut a swath of destruction through Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio.
Today, the state's only Civil War battlefield is as ghostly as the battle itself, with little to indicate its historic significance.

Farmhouses and trailers dot the rolling southeast-Ohio bottom land that runs up to the river. A four-acre park with a cobblestone monument and green weathered bronze plaque mark the 1,500-acre battlefield known as Buffington Island. Nearby are a shelter, picnic tables, a lone water pump and a few rusting grills and trash cans.

A gravel company is poised to excavate some of the battlefield, named by the Washington-based Civil War Preservation Trust as among the nation's top 25 most endangered in the country. . .

Civil War sites, Underground Railroad stops, pioneer settlements, cemeteries, farmsteads, school buildings and even towns have vanished or are in danger of disappearing as Ohio prepares to celebrate its bicentennial. Neglect, lack of financing and outright disregard have been to blame, historians say. . .

State Sen. Michael Shoemaker, a Bourneville Democrat, said little government money is available to preserve Ohio's historic sites.

The Ohio Bicentennial Commission wants to make the public more aware of sites by placing more markers. When the commission got involved in the program in 1998, there were 250. Now there are 400, with 300 more expected to go up by the end of 2003.

The brown, cast-metal markers describe the historical significance of the sites, from Thomas Edison's birthplace in Erie County to the Alligator Mound in Licking County, a giant earthen sculpture built between 800 and 1200 B.C.

Plague stone receives a plaque

A plaque is to be erected to commemorate an ancient plague stone which saved families from the Black Death.

The listed stone at Birchall, on the outskirts of Leek, marks the spot where provisions were left for the residents of the town during the 14th-century plague, which killed more than 50 million people.

I'd never heard of plague stones before; the English Heritage site gives a slightly different definition, however: "A stone on which plague victims placed vinegar-disinfected money to pay for food left for them by the townspeople." A quick search found further references here, here, and here. Plague stones continued in use as long as there was epidemic disease, so many may be considerably post-medieval in origin. Quite a haunting landmark to have in one's town, regardless.

Bristol and the museum of the British Empire

A few years ago I visited Bristol for the first time. The city had only recently begun treating its past more openly (much of its wealth came from the slave trade and Caribbean sugar plantations), and it was interesting to see the new historical displays in the city's museums.
This openness to self-examination makes Bristol a particularly appropriate site for the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum, which opened in November. Tellingly, the museum was a private venture; it would seem that British officialdom prefers to let sleeping dogs lie, promoting a present-day multiculturalism conveniently stripped of context. As the New York Times reports:

"As far as this institution is concerned, it is enough that we don't step back from the most uncomfortable periods of our national history and don't hide and duck the realities of history," Gareth Griffiths, the museum's director, said. "We're here as an institution that is collecting a history that was forgotten and was disappearing and, in the future, as a forum for presenting this history and encouraging debate."

With little of this history being taught in British schools today, the museum's first task may well be educational. Writing in The Times of London, Michael Binyon recalled that when Queen Elizabeth II was crowned, in 1953, Britain still ruled a quarter of the globe. "Not only has this imperial order vanished almost overnight, but it has disappeared entirely from public memory," he noted. "The British Empire is now a black hole in history, and few dare look into its depths."

There seems to be a broad consensus that the new museum does an excellent job of presenting its story in a balanced and judicious manner. Comments from those who have visited it are welcome. . . .

NPR self-spoof

I've got to find out if this will be aired locally:

Holiday recipes that explore the "interesting and symbiotic" relationship between Jewish and Chinese cultures.

A sudden rise in Native American voter turnout in North Dakota.

Forgotten artifacts from Vermont's vaudeville era.

These offerings on National Public Radio are probing, offbeat and unassailably well meaning, but to paraphrase Oscar Wilde's observation on the death of Little Nell, one must have a heart of stone to hear an NPR pledge drive without laughing.

A parody of public radio, therefore, might seem unnecessary. But WNYC, the principal public radio station in New York and NPR's largest affiliate, has crafted "Pledge This!," a radio comedy about a local station, WACLU ("87.1 — All the way to the left on your radio dial"), which broadcasts a news-and-dulcimer-music format out of cramped studios in the fictional Blandon Park Mall. . .

The half-hour special serves up outré left-wing pieties and public radio stereotypes in the deadpan manner of Elaine May and Mike Nichols. "WACLU, all the way to the left, underwritten this hour by Dr. Tom Richards's Lipo Depot, pleased to support WACLU's continuing commitment to broadcasting excellence and all of your cosmetic surgery needs; and by Funeral Shak, the last word in the last purchase you'll ever make". . .

WACLU employees eat takeout Ethiopian kik alecha. The sound effects on their news programs include baby seals crying, the Chinese national anthem and the hum of an electric wheelchair.

Imperial tomb excavations in Japan

From Asahi Shimbun:

Unlike the ancient pyramids in Egypt which gave up many of their secrets long ago, imperial burial mounds in Japan for the most part remain a closed chapter in history. The Imperial Household Agency rarely gives permission to excavate. Thus, many tombs are shrouded in mystery.

So it was unusual that the Imperial Household Agency decided to divulge details of a dig in Ibaraki, Osaka Prefecture, that was presumed to hold the remains of Emperor Keitai, who was enthroned early in the 6th century. The keyhole-shaped burial mound called Ota-Chausuyama-kofun is 226 meters long, squared off at the front and protruding in a sort of circular shape. So-called kofun tombs, massive earth constructions for their time, were built mainly for the ruling elite from the fourth to seventh centuries.

Historians have long speculated who was buried there. Unlike the pyramids, where authorities are keen to open the tombs to study, the 240 burial mounds nationwide are almost never excavated.

The contents for the most part are kept secret except in the case of natural disasters when sections are exposed or because the structure has collapsed.

The Two Towers: stinky siegecraft

Finally got around to seeing the latest installment of The Lord of the Rings last night. I'm not about to review the whole film; the various divergences from the books have been widely discussed, and by and large I concur with the opinions expressed here.

One thing that bothered this pedant were the absurdly shabby defenses of Helm's Deep. Where was the moat or ditch? Dry ditches were a feature of the earliest earthwork defenses, so no excuses there. And water ran right through the fortress, so why not a proper moat? And what about the lack of a drawbridge? Even early fortifications had removable spans so as to deny access to entrance gates. Here there was a nice stone bridge instead. Then there was the single gate blocking the entrance. By the time European castles were made of stone, there were invariably multiple barriers, turning the space in between into a killing zone (arrow loops in the walls, murdering-holes overhead). Then there was the ridiculously small gap between the inner and outer curtain walls, both of which were on a level. Inner walls should overlook the outer walls, in case the latter are taken, and they should not be so close that a scaling ladder can be used to bridge them. And though I'm sure the bare-stone aesthetic would have won out regardless, it's worth noting that fortifications were never all masonry: wood and leather defenses invariably gave additional cover and concealment for defenders atop walls and towers.

Not that the defenders in the movie were doing a very good job. In preparing for the attack, why didn't they pile up stones to drop on their assailants, and forked sticks to push off scaling ladders? What about preparing cauldrons of hot water, oil, pitch, or lead? Piling earth and straw in front of weak points likely to be targeted by battering rams? OK, maybe I'm expecting too much from a bunch of pseudo-Anglo-Saxon horsemen, but if they've got a famously impregnable fortress, you'd figure they'd have at least some idea how to use it.

Movie archery also gets my goat, and this film is no exception. Dramatic convention or no, having a mass of archers holding their bows at full draw while awaiting a signal just ain't how it was done. Nor is there any reason to have archers shoot in volleys -- that practice came in with firearms, which were slow to load and produced blinding clouds of smoke ("fire!" meaning "shoot!" also postdates firearms -- and is a usage still avoided by many archery purists). And what was going on placing archers behind the curtain wall, shooting blindly up and (it is to be hoped) over the heads of the defenders? A more ineffectual practice is hard to imagine, but then, there did seem to be a general shortage of arrow loops at Helm's Deep.

Corpses, too, were in short supply. Hard-fought medieval battles over narrow fronts inevitably produced piles of bodies so high as to be serious obstacles to remaining combatants. Perhaps a little too disgusting for the silver screen, however -- though it might just have been a matter of too much work for the CGI crews. My wife independently commented that the battlefield looked mighty tidy after the siege was broken. Perhaps the movie should have stuck closer to the book, where the trees of Fangorn swept through and presumably composted any orcs in their way.

Finally, I cringed at the scene where Aragorn literally cuts in on Eowyn's sword drill. Sure, it gives Eowyn a little extra blade time plus a dramatic face-to-face with Aragorn, but for anyone habituated to arms it was as if Legolas had been shown picking his nose. Every armigerous society in the history of the world has maintained a strict etiquette of weaponry. The precise details may have varied, but one thing is always the same: you just don't mess with someone else's weapon. Similarly, you don't draw a weapon against someone without intending to use it, and you never preemptorily cross blades without thereby signalling lethal intent (in premodern Japan, merely knocking scabbards was a mortal challenge).

Château of Luneville gutted by fire

Just in from Reuters:

A fire has ripped through a historic French chateau modelled on the famed court of Versailles, ravaging its 18th-century interior and wrecking most of its precious china collection, officials said on Friday.

Some 150 firemen rushed to control the blaze, which started on Thursday night and destroyed the southern wing of Luneville chateau, including the royal chambers, local authorities said. No one was hurt.

The cause of the fire at the chateau known as the Versailles of Lorraine, a region in northeastern France, has not been determined although officials suggested it was probably an electrical fault.

There is more at the BBC, including pictures. Apparently this is the seventh fire at the château.

UPDATE: Further details on the terrible losses in Le Monde (in French).

UK's top 10 treasure finds

A little silly, this, but a good excuse for a documentary:

East Anglia has provided many of the finest treasures found in the UK - but Northumberland takes the top spot, according to experts.

A top ten of treasures of the British Museum includes three found in Suffolk and one found in Norfolk.

But the Anglo-Saxon hoard found at Sutton Hoo, near Woodbridge, Suffolk, was beaten into second place by the Roman Vindolanda tablets found in Northumberland.

Experts voted on their favourite treasure in a special edition of BBC Two's Meet the Ancestors programme.

The final standings?

1. Vindolanda Tablets, Northumberland
2. Sutton Hoo ship burial, Suffolk
3. Hoxne Hoard, Suffolk
4. Snettisham Hoard, Norfolk
5. Lewis Chessmen
6. Mold Gold Cape, North Wales
7. Mildenhall Treasure, Suffolk
8. Fishpool Hoard, Lancashire
9. Cuerdale Hoard, Lancashire
10. The Ringlemere and Rillaton Cups, Kent

Of course, if you are the BM, you get to collect 'em all!

UPDATE: And now there's a list for Scotland.

Scottish cultural center for New England

Who would have thought of it? Straight from Concord, New Hampshire, the story is here.

The Monitor turret artifacts

The turret of the USS Monitor was raised this summer, and archeologists have now largely finished sorting through its contents. One surprise was the quantity of silverware found there, including many monogrammed pieces that could be linked to specific crewmen. This article discusses what all the tableware was doing there.

15th-century Welsh ship update

Excavation of the medieval ship found during construction work in Newport is now complete. Although this sounds like a bit of publicity-driven puffery, it is nonetheless thought-provoking:

Archaeologists have finally finished excavating the remains and in the New Year will reconstruct the 65ft ocean-going vessel so that it can eventually be put on public display.

Charles Ferris, from pressure group Save Our Ship, which successfully campaigned to get the vessel preserved, says it is possible the boat was one of the first to travel to America. . .
"When you consider that the world thinks that Columbus discovered America in 1492, people now know that merchants from the Severn area were fishing off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland as early as 1480.

"Perhaps this ship could have been there for the first trans-Atlantic crossings."

Roman watchtower found

From the Netherlands, via Australia (they are a day ahead, after all):

Dutch archaeologists have discovered the foundations of a wooden watchtower, built by Roman soldiers on the banks of the Rhine almost 2000 years ago.

They say the watchtower was part of a chain of observation posts guarding the river, which marked the border of the Roman empire at its greatest extent.

Chief archaeologist on the project, Erik Graafstal, believes the towers were used to monitor shipping on the river and to sound the alarm if hostile Germanic tribes threatened to attack. . .

The towers were built at intervals of 500 to 1500 metres, close enough that guards would have been able to signal each other and alert soldiers stationed at nearby bases to any trouble on the river.

Graafstal said the find rivals in importance the wreck of a fully loaded Roman freight ship that was found in the same area in 1997, which will be excavated this spring.

UPDATE: A bit more detail here.

Ancient Japanese lacquer lost

Misfortune strikes an excavation site in Hokkaido:

Priceless early examples of Japanese lacquer-ware, pottery, and other ancient artefacts have been destroyed in a fire at an excavation site.
The fire gutted a storage building where the items were being kept for protection during the winter.

Officials say the destroyed artefacts included examples of 9,000-year-old lacquer-ware which were believed to be the oldest in the world.

American cultural hegemony on the wane?

Another NY Times cover story this morning reports that American TV shows are no longer the automatic international blockbusters they used to be.
This really shouldn't be such a surprise, in that many of the past US exports were not necessarily the best cultural fit worldwide. What they did offer, however, were production values vastly higher than the norm for television in most of the world, developed and developing alike.

But we live in a competitive age, and it was only a matter of time before television producers worldwide upgraded their products. We'll see how it all turns out, but I wouldn't be surprised if the much-feared American pop-culture juggernaut turned out to be something far more ephemeral.

Wireless surfing in class

I was going to post something about this morning's NY Times article on the pros and cons (mostly cons, it would seem) of networked lecture halls, where instead of paying full attention to the professor, many laptop-equipped students channel-surf as if on a sofa at home.

Glenn Reynolds and Co. were already on this last night, however, so take a look for the law professor's point of view (and see the continuation with readers' comments here and here).

Leaving aside the issue of using laptops in class for purposes unrelated to the class, I do wonder about taking notes on a keyboard. It certainly is advantageous in allowing one to search one's notes afterwards, and it makes sharing and comparing notes much simpler. Nonetheless, when I take notes with pen and paper, I can (and do) make extensive use of connecting arrows, diagrams, and sketches -- none of which is easily done with most laptops. And though I am a good touch typist, I know that when typing I cannot focus on what I am hearing to the same degree that I can when scribbling with a pen.

AND NOW William Allison at Ideofact weighs in on pen vs keyboard, pointing out how the very act of writing is a form of mnemonics in a way that typing is not. Indeed, there is something about writing with a pen or pencil that is quantitatively different; tracing out one's own letters is tactile and direct: analog, if you will, not the serial switch-tapping digital of the keyboard. I think this goes beyond the fact that one first learns to write with some form of stylus -- we (or at least most of us) are wired analog, and with multiple forms of memory. The degree to which visual memory, aural memory, and fine motor memory overlap is often underappreciated.

Museum traffic up with free admission

The BBC reports that museum attendance in the UK has soared since the abolition of admission fees a year ago:

The number of people going to attractions which used to charge rose from less than eight million in 2001 to more than 13 million in 2002 - a rise of 70% records show.

The most startling increases were at London's main museums, but museums in other major cities have also fared well.

Visitor numbers doubled at London's Victoria and Albert and the Science Museum - and are up by more than 80% at the Natural History Museum.

Outside the capital, the success has been repeated.

I have always found it deeply objectionable when museum admission charges are justified as being in line with the cost of attending a movie. Most museums are either publicly funded or benefit from substantial public subsidies. These monies have been allocated not because museums entertain, but because they educate. Should we charge for public education? I think not.
Some might bring up public universities as a counterexample, most of which charge tuition. Unlike museums, however, universities are not open to anyone who wishes to walk in, while tuition at educational facilities that do offer open admission is typically modest indeed. Furthermore, all of this tuition is subject to being waived in case of need, and one can generally choose to save money by taking fewer courses.
Many museums do have a sliding scale of admissions, but all too often it is not adequately disclosed. In New York, many private museums that accept public subsidies (the Metropolitan being the most prominent of the bunch) have long worked under a voluntary donation system. Nonetheless, the "suggested donation" amounts as posted look so authoritative that few think to pay less, thus dissuading those who might want to pop in for a quick visit to see a favorite painting -- or those who've never been inside, and want to check things out.
The discouraging of casual visits substantially alters the way a museum serves its community, yet this has drawn surprisingly little comment. Perhaps I have been more sensitized to the issue, having spent many years as an art history grad student, and now having become the father of two young girls. Being charged to enter museums as an art historian is akin to charging other students to enter a library, while many parents will not pay full admission for visits squeezed into child-sized attention spans. Yet quick visits are increasingly the ones busy working people are able to make, children or no. As a matter of public policy, museums should accommodate.

Guggenheim in retreat

The wildly ambitious expansion plans of New York's Guggenheim Museum are being curtailed left and right as financial reality reasserts itself. Today's NY Times reports on the abandonment of the planned museum complex south of the Brooklyn Bridge, and the imminent shutdown of the Las Vegas satellite operation.

NYC gang's heavy artillery

For all the scare talk about how well armed present day criminals are, the old-timers were no slouches. The gangsters in the era of Prohibition used Tommy guns and BARs, and on at least one occasion resorted to aerial bombardment. And going back to the Draft Riots of 1863, one of the Irish gangs depicted in the film "Gangs of New York" had artillery -- a short barreled naval gun, now on display at the New York State Military Museum in Saratoga Springs.

Artillery pieces also figured in the Vigilance Committee's takeover of San Francisco in 1856.

First Neanderthal skeleton assembled

Surprising, but apparently no one had put together a complete reconstruction of a Neanderthal skeleton before (at least, not one based on actual fossils). The skeleton now assembled at the American Museum of Natural History in New York will be on public display starting Jan 11; it is a composite, consisting of casts from fossil elements from all around the world.
As the New York Times reports:

Examining the upright skeleton, Dr. [Ian] Tattersall [a tall Homo sapiens] disputed the notion, once current even among some scientists, that Neanderthals may have been so humanlike that if dressed in contemporary clothing, they could have passed unrecognized on the subway. This impression has been characterized in popular cartoon figures of a heavy-browed Neanderthal in a jaunty fedora.

"This definitely is its own species," Dr. Tattersall affirmed, glancing first to the Neanderthal and then to a modern human skeleton next to it. "If people didn't believe that before, by all rights they should now."

And as another lesson on how much what we "know" consists of supposition:

. . . not a single remotely complete skeleton of a Neanderthal has turned up. The many artistic recreations, though commonplace and more lifelike than skeletons, invite scientific criticism as being projections of particular interpretations of Neanderthal appearances and behavior. A less subjective study, scientists say, starts with anatomy — with the skeleton.

Dr. Erik Trinkaus, a Neanderthal specialist (presumably a specialist in Neanderthals, and not a Neanderthal himself -- D.) at Washington University in St. Louis, who was not involved in the project, said the skeleton reconstructions were especially important for computer models of Neanderthal biomechanics, the way they stood, walked and ran.

Apparently the plan is to make similar reconstructions of some 20 hominid species.

Historic Brighton pier collapses

From the Guardian:

For more than 130 years Britain's "Queen of Piers" has withstood the ravages of the English Channel, buffeted by gales.
It has coped with having its walkway tactically blown up in the second world war, with the storms of 1987, and, since its 1975 closure, with increasing dilapidation.

But yesterday the seemingly inevitable happened when the West Pier at Brighton gave up its battle and a large section collapsed into the waves.

Restoration of the landmark pier has been in the planning for some time, but reinforcement work had been held up by legal challenges. Another picture is here.

Hacking the Times of London

Some time ago the Times and Sunday Times of London decided to close off online access to nonpaying readers from outside the UK. It never made much sense, as the only option offered was an annual subscription at £39.99 (about $64) -- a bit much for looking up the odd article, when so much else is available online for free (or by paying as you go).

It didn't take long, however, before someone realized that the Times' barriers to foreign readers were more show than substance. This Register article explains.

For further info on proxy servers, see UK-based The Scream.

UPDATE: The Times' restrictions have been altered as of spring 2003. Registration for UK readers no longer is required -- but that means that those outside the UK must either pay the subscription fee, or use a UK-based proxy server (high anonymity) or ISP node. A list of proxy servers organized by country may be found here.

Castle closes to public

Tomorrow evening the great 13th-century door will thump shut, and the oldest inhabited castle in Wales will again become - as it was for nearly 1,000 years - a very private house, heavily fortified to keep out uninvited guests.

Penhow Castle, near the Severn bridge, between Newport and Chepstow, has only been open to visitors for the last 30 years, since a 23-year-old film maker looking for a weekend cottage fell in love with it, and sold his London house to buy it.

After decades spending every hour he could spare and every penny he earned on Penhow, Stephen Weeks is now leaving Wales, and what has meanwhile become an award-winning visitor attraction, to start all over again with a chain of 25 derelict castles in the Czech Republic. . .

Penhow was built as one of a circle of small Norman strongholds around their great fortress at Chepstow. By the time Mr Weeks bought it the building was a roofless ruin. He opened it, to help pay for restoration work, as soon as he had put down enough floor boards to prevent visitors plunging into the cellars, and introduced the world's first stereo headphone tour guide to compensate for his lack of staff. . .

Tomorrow will be the last general opening day, though school groups are still booked for a few weeks. Then Mr Weeks hopes to cross his draw bridge for the last time.

He will leave the mutton bones, excavated from below the unglazed windows through which they were slung after some 14th century dinner, but take the naturally mummified rat found behind the Tudor panelling.

The rat was voted the single most popular exhibit by school children. "I think he'll have to come, we've been together a long time - he's a bit of a good luck charm."

From today's Guardian.

Learn how to make flint tools

For any of you who will be in Tucson between now and March, flintknapping workshops will be available as space permits. More info here.

Complete giant plesiosaur skeleton found

A complete skeleton of the biggest reptile that ever existed has been unearthed in Mexico. The fossilised bones have been identified as those of Liopleurodon ferox, a fierce predator that ruled the oceans about 150 million years ago.

The creature, which measures 20 metres (65 ft) from nose to tail, was discovered by German and Mexican palaeontologists.

It has been nicknamed the "Monster of Aramberri" after the site in northeastern Mexico where it was dug up.

Although many Liopleurodon remains have been unearthed before, none have been as complete as the Mexico discovery.

The bones are to be shipped to Germany for reconstruction at the Natural History Museum in Karlsruhe.

Liopleurodon was the largest of the plesiosaurs.
From the BBC.

Radioactive Christmas trees

The BBC reports that Ukrainian authorities have seized a number of radioactive Christmas trees said to have been cut in the area contaminated by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986. Attempts are being made to trace trees already sold.

Home-made cheesecake

The improbably beautiful pin-ups who dominate Italy’s crop of calendars are up against competition from an unexpected quarter this year. Fed up with their men’s ogling of airbrushed photographs of models every month, Italian wives and girlfriends are hitting back with nude calendars of their own. Women are paying photographers to reinvent them in streamlined, soft-focus formats, unblemished by cellulite or excess pounds. Shooting 12 poses and printing out a master copy of a calendar costs more than £650, but photographic studios in Rome and Milan say the business is booming.

From the Sunday Times.

Unpublished Tolkein manuscripts

NOTE: As Michael Drout hastened to inform me, pretty much everything in this article from the Sunday Times of London is wrong or at least unrecognizably distorted. For clarification, see his added comment below; he also has his own blog, where he discusses this and much else:

A yellowing manuscript by JRR Tolkien discovered in an Oxford library could become one of the publishing sensations of 2003. It could also provide clues to the extraordinary success of the film adaptations of The Lord of the Rings.
The 2,000 handwritten pages include Tolkien’s translation and appraisal of Beowulf, the epic Anglo-Saxon poem about bravery, friendship and monster-slaying that is thought to have been one of the inspirations for his own tome. . .

An American academic, Michael Drout, found some of the material, notes bound in board covers, by accident in a box of papers at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. . .

In 1936, a year before he published his first fantasy novel, The Hobbit, the precursor to The Lord of the Rings, he spoke on Beowulf at the university urging people to read it as a great poem rather than as a historical document. . .

Drout, assistant professor of English at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, had travelled to Oxford by train while on a family visit to London. A self-confessed Tolkien “nut”, Drout, 34, had grown up with a map of Middle-earth over his bed.

He was researching Anglo-Saxon scholarship and after looking through the catalogue of the library’s Tolkien collection, he asked to see an entry file entitled “Carbon typescripts of Beowulf, the Monsters and the Critics”, the title of Tolkien’s 1936 lecture. It was brought to him in the reading room in large box file.

Drout, who reads Anglo-Saxon prose to his two-year-old daughter at bedtime, said last week: “I was sitting there going through the transcripts when I saw these four bound volumes at the bottom of the box.

“I started looking through and realised I had found an entire book of material that had never seen the light of day. As I turned the page, there was Tolkien’s fingerprint in a smudge of ink.

“My heart was racing as I was writing things down. It was only when I went out to meet my wife that I was running down Catte Street going, ‘Oh my God, I have found an unpublished Tolkien manuscript’.

After obtaining permission from the Tolkien estate, Drout published Beowulf and the Critics, an extended version of Tolkien’s 1936 lecture, in America earlier this month.

Even more exciting will be Tolkien’s translation of the poem and his line-by-line interpretation of its meaning, which will be published next summer.

This weekend scholars hailed the forthcoming publication of the translation as an important addition to Tolkien’s canon.

John Carey, the former Merton professor of English literature at Oxford, said: “Beowulf is enormously hard to translate into alliterative verse, but it sounds remarkable. Tolkien is much closer to the Anglo-Saxon form than Heaney.”

Kevin Crossley-Holland, a poet, broadcaster and Anglo-Saxon expert who has published his own translation, said: “It captures the sound of big waves crashing on a shingle beach and the lines die away like water running up a beach.”

He added: “Tolkien’s work breathes the same world as the Anglo-Saxon poems and the Norse myths. It is umbilically linked.”

The politicization of medicine

Or, if you prefer, the medicalization of politics. In any case, Medpundit talks about why such convergence is a bad idea (if the direct link doesn't work, click here and scroll).