Lawrence of Arabia relics: obvious fakes?

Followup on a story reported here a few weeks back:

It was described as the pocket compass used by Lawrence of Arabia during his First World War desert adventures when it was sold by Christie's for more than £250,000.

But now the auction house is facing embarrassing claims from experts that it has been duped - and the successful bidder walked away with a £50 fake. . .

Christie's claimed the three items were given by Lawrence to Corporal Albert "Taffy' Evans, who they said was his unofficial chauffeur at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919.

An inscription on the cigarette case reads: "I leave to my dear friend Taffy my compass which saw me safely across a wilderness so that he may occasionally know where he is going!'

But Lawrence's authorised biographer Jeremy Wilson says that during more than 30 years research on the British hero he has never come across any reference to a "Taffy' Evans working for Lawrence at the conference - or indeed any other driver.

And that's not the only problem with the pieces. Full article here.

Paris is (still) burning

Off the front pages, but France is still a mess:

Before next week’s anniversary of the Clichy riots, the violence and despair on the estates are again to the fore. Despite a promised renaissance, little has changed, and the lid could blow at any moment.

The figures are stark. An average of 112 cars a day have been torched across France so far this year and there have been 15 attacks a day on police and emergency services. Nearly 3,000 police officers have been injured in clashes this year. Officers have been badly injured in four ambushes in the Paris outskirts since September. Some police talk of open war with youths who are bent on more than vandalism.

“The thing that has changed over the past month is that they now want to kill us,” said Bruno Beschizza, the leader of Synergie, a union to which 40 per cent of officers belong. . .

Car-burning has become so routine on the estates that it has been eclipsed in news coverage by the violence against police.

From the Times of London.

Walk like an emu

Comparative studies of other, living animals have done much to elucidate how dinosaurs moved, behaved, and functioned. Here's a report on yet another such study:

The mysterious moves of two-footed Jurassic dinosaurs traveling along a long-lost beach have been brought to life with emus.

Unlike computer models that have been developed to simulate the gait, and therefore the possible trackways of specific dinosaurs, live emus allow for direct comparisons of complex tracks to specific behaviors, say researchers looking at the thousands of tracks left behind 165 million years ago by dinosaurs at Red Gulch in northern Wyoming.

Among the surprises they’ve found is that tracks once interpreted as steady walking may actually be created by the animals stopping at mid-stride.

Another enigmatic type of trackway that now makes sense is where the dinos appear to have crossed one leg over the other. The motion is a seemingly weird thing to do, until you watch an emu making the same sort of track, explains Brent Breithaupt, director and curator of the University of Wyoming’s Geological Museum.

"Sky holes"

Can you imagine? Sinkholes deep enough to hold skyscrapers, set in a scenic, mountainous wilderness:

The secrets to the steepest, deepest, most bizarre sinkholes in the world have been worked out by geologists who recently visited the "tiankeng," or "sky holes" in China's Guangxi and Chongquing provinces. . .

"You could fit a couple of Empire State Buildings in and they’d disappear," said [geologist William] White of the more than 2,000-foot-deep wonders.

Yet until recently, no one outside China had even heard of them. "Even the Chinese didn’t know about these until about 15 years ago," said White.

That’s because the tiankeng are in the boonies. Until recently there were no roads to them, just footpaths through the other-worldly conical hills of China's scenic Guilin region.

Read about how they were formed here, with pictures. More here and here.

Battling mastodons

attle scars on male mastodon tusks reveal that the Ice Age giants fought in brutal combat each year during seasonal phases of heightened sexual activity and aggression, according to new findings that will be announced at this week's Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting in Ontario.

The discovery counters the view that now-extinct mastodons were peaceful, passive creatures that rarely engaged in battles.

It also strengthens the link between mastodon and modern elephant behavior, since male bull elephants also fight seasonal, hormonally-charged battles to show their dominance and win desired mates.

These weren't just shoving matches, either:

"For example, we have evidence of tusks stabbing into the vertebral column, penetrating the space traversed by the spinal cord, from a direction that implies the victim was already lying on his side on the ground; in other words, the violence went on, even after one animal was down," Fisher said.

Read the rest at Discovery News.

Rediscovered Zachary Taylor gold medal to auction

When Zachary Taylor became president in 1849, he was a genuine war hero, thanks to his exploits during the Mexican War.

The country said "thanks" three times, with Congressional Gold Medals.

The last, made from some of the first gold sent east from the California gold fields, was presented after Taylor became president, but it disappeared when Taylor died a year later. Over the years, experts doubted it would ever be seen again, and some even speculated it had been melted down.

It turned out the medal, double the size of a silver dollar, had been kept quietly by Taylor's descendants in Lousiana, until now.

From Boston.com; the medal will be sold in November by Stack's. Read more about the medal here; the scale and detail of the thing is stunning, as is the condition. There will surely be some fireworks once bidding starts -- look for the very conservative estimate to be eclipsed in short order.

Colchester circus finds

FURTHER well-preserved remains of Colchester's Roman chariot racetrack have been discovered by archaeologists working on the town's garrison redevelopment. . .

The curving section forms part of the semicircular eastern end of the stadium, which would have been opposite the gates near where the chariots started their races.

The first of the remains of the Roman Circus - the name given to chariot racetracks of the time - were discovered on late 2004, when archaeologists were carrying out exploratory digs before the undeveloped Abbey Field site was built on.

Full article here.

No more Michel Van Rijn to kick around any more?

Although many will dispute who has been doing the most kicking . . .
In any event, professional loose cannon Michel Van Rijn appears to have taken down his website, claiming fears for his children's safety. This has duly been reported by the Register (and to date no one else), whose primary beat is tech news rather than art, but which has a decided leaning towards the iconoclastic and antiestablishment. If the following is an accurate quote, however, one wonders what is really up:

Van Rijn, whose own life has been threatened in the past, says his children are his ultimate treasure, and he couldn't continue his website if it posed any danger to them. He is, however, determined to continue to work to repatriate looted artefacts.

If Van Rijn is being threatened, will shutting down the website really be enough to get him off the hook? Or has the cost of defending against repeated libel suits finally proven unsupportable?

Shunning the better mousetrap

In 1999, Stephen Gass, a patent lawyer and woodworking hobbyist, invented a device to make power saws safer. It was designed to prevent, or at least minimize, the gruesome injuries that result when someone's flesh hits the blade of a table saw spinning at 4,000 revolutions per minute. . .

Gass called his invention SawStop and was so convinced of its value that he quit his job at a law firm, raised capital, and with two partners, started his own company in Wilsonville, Oregon. He demonstrated the technology, which can stop a saw blade in 3/1000 of a second, to anyone who would watch.

Now, seven years later, Gass says he was unprepared for the buzz saw of opposition he ran into from companies such as Black & Decker Corp., Robert Bosch Tool Corp. and Ryobi Technologies Inc. ``Our thought was the manufacturers would license it,'' he said. ``We thought it was inevitable.''

Instead, not a single manufacturer has signed a contract with him. An Underwriters Laboratories Inc. subcommittee, with some of the saw manufacturers on the panel, voted in early 2003 not to approve his invention.

Full article here. The sawmakers are claiming that Gass is asking too much in the way of royalties, but their other complaints about his invention don't ring true -- in fact, they sound all too familiar, like the grumblings of those who insist on removing the simple mechanical safety guards from existing saws, or meatpacking plant operators who maintain that everything is already as safe as things can be made.

Tag-free zone in Attleboro

Officials at the Willett Elementary School in Attleboro have banned playground tag, touch football and any other unsupervised chasing games over concerns about the risk of injury and liability for the school.

"It's a time when accidents can happen," Principal Gaylene Heppe said.

Name me a time when accidents can't happen.

Elementary schools in Cheyenne, Wyo., and Spokane, Wash., banned tag at recess this year. A suburban Charleston, S.C., school outlawed all unsupervised contact sports.

Great -- the idiocy is contagious.

"I think that it's unfortunate that kids' lives are micromanaged and there are social skills they'll never develop on their own," said Debbie Laferriere, who has two children at Willett. "Playing tag is just part of being a kid."

However, Celeste D'Elia, another Willett parent, said her son feels safer because of the rule.

"I've witnessed enough near collisions" in the playground area, D'Elia said. "I support anything that makes the playground safer and helps teacher to keep track of them."

How about manacles?

Attleboro is just up the road from here, but this article spotted via Joanne Jacobs.

The bank that couldn't spell straight

Kazakhstan's central bank is to issue new banknotes despite a spelling error.

The notes bear Kazakh writing in Cyrillic letters, but the word "bank" is misspelt using an alternative Kazakh form of the letter K.

MPs wrote to President Nursultan Nazarbayev urging him to tell the bank not to circulate the notes.

From the BBC.

Books we thought we had read

Have you ever picked up a book you had last read years before, only to find it nothing like what you remembered?

You don't step into the same book twice.
Bit by bit, I'm trying to revisit all those great works that I haven't read since high school or college -- books which, if asked, I can no longer honestly claim without qualification to have read.

This would be an excellent theme for a book club: classics, revisited. I've been discussing what works would be the most suitable, but I suppose it would depend heavily on the readers -- what they read in school, what they read (or didn't read) since. And though in many cases the passage of time will allow for a deeper appreciation of a masterwork, it would be equally interesting to see how many works held up as canonical in decades past fail to retain their resonance today.

Sevso treasure response

An interesting letter to the Times of London from archeologist-patriarch Lord Renfrew of Kaimsthorn, regarding Bonhams' exhibition of the Sevso hoard. What can one say about the following?

It is an affront to public decency that a commercial dealer should [put the Sevso hoard on display] — even if many archaeologists, such as myself, will take the opportunity of going to inspect it.

Evacuation on foot

If walking to safety hasn't been given enough consideration in emergency planning, it isn't for want of evidence. Yes, walking was the main evacuation method for lower Manhattan on 9/11, but it had previously become the Manhattan worker's standby through transit strikes and blackouts in previous decades. Where do you think the practice of wearing athletic shoes with business dress for the trip to the office came from? (Dress shoes to be put on upon arrival). In fact, one might argue that a city like New York is an ongoing low-level disaster -- ongoing weekend construction disruptions to the subways being but one case in point -- which is why having a pair of good walking shoes comes in handy day to day.

Personally, I've never looked at shoes quite the same way after reading Primo Levi's accounts of his time in Auschwitz and wanderings upon release. In that purgatory, shoes were a matter of life and death, and had to be guarded accordingly. Yet how many of those taken to the camps thought to pack, of all things, shoes and socks? Preparing for the worst, start with the simplest.

Paypal tip of the day

If you ever have occasion to send money back to someone who has recently sent you a Paypal payment (most commonly, to send a refund), read this!

Paypal takes a cut from nearly all money transfers, running approximately between 3 and 4%. If you initiate a new transfer to return a payment, you will get hit with that percentage coming and going. Ouch.

If you initiate your transfer as a refund, however, you will not only pay no percentage, but you will receive a refund of the percentage of the portion of the original transfer being reversed. How is it done? When you log in to Paypal and look up the original transfer, click on the Details link; on the next screen, scroll to the bottom and click on the Refund Payment link. The next screen will allow you to reverse that original payment in whole or in part. You have 60 days after a transfer to initiate such a reversal.

Bode Museum reopens

The imposing domed building, which straddles an island in [Berlin's] river Spree like the bow of a ship, was formally opened after a €152m (£102m) renovation which has restored the museum to its original, immaculate condition. It had been slowly decaying for 67 years.

Shattered by Allied bombs during the Second World War and neglected during East Berlin's communist era, the museum has not only been structurally revamped.

Hundreds of works that were removed during the war and stored on opposite sides of the city's infamous Wall during the Cold War were finally reunited under one roof. . .

Yesterday, the museum's complete collection, which includes lavishly ornate door-frames from Venetian palaces, 15th-century Dutch, Flemish and German masterpieces and Baroque and Byzantine sculptures and murals, was open to view for the first time since 1939.

Full article here.

I'm long overdue for a Berlin visit. Last time I was there the Museuminsel was still open and not yet under renovation; the Wall had been down for years, but the island museums were still stuck in postwar limbo.

India hemorrhaging antiquities

More than 3,600 Buddhist antiques have been smuggled out of the eastern Indian state of Bihar in the past one year, forcing police to set up a special force to tackle the menace, officials said on Tuesday. . .

Rare and priceless Buddhist idols and other relics have also gone missing from the neighbouring states of Jharkhand and Orissa in the past year, police and archaeologists said. . .

Impoverished Bihar, which is dotted with Buddhist monuments, is also one of India's most lawless states where killing, kidnapping and extortion is rampant.

From the Scotsman.

Ancient Peruvians loved their dogs

Archaeologists in Peru have uncovered the mummified remains of more than 40 dogs buried with blankets and food alongside their human masters.

The discovery was made during the excavation of two of the ancient Chiribaya people who lived in southern Peru between AD 900 and AD 1350. . .

The Chiribaya dog looked rather like a small golden retriever with a medium-sized snout, beige colouring, and long hair.

From the BBC. Scientific American has much the same writeup, with the addition of this:

Researchers at the Mallqui Center of biological archeology, who have led the excavations, teamed up with the country's Kennel Club to study these ancient dogs' traits, noting their type of paw or the color of their fur.

Ultimately, their goal is to convince the Belgium-based World Canine Organization that the dogs buried in Peru's Ilo valley represent a new and distinct breed, indigenous to South America.

32,000-foot-high roller coaster

Not for me: I've got a delicate stomach. NASA didn't call theirs the "Vomit Comet" for nothing:

Zero gravity, once an exclusive playground for astronauts and select scientists, is no longer out of reach to everyday people. Millionaires, doctors, and teachers are feeling the fleeting freedom of weightlessness. The price is under $4,000 for nearly five minutes in zero-G. . .

Five planes create zero-G conditions. NASA has one. The European Space Agency has one. The Russians have one. Two are commercially operated in the United States by Zero Gravity Corp. of Dania Beach, Fla.

Besides Zero Gravity Corp., there are at least three other companies that sell zero-G flights to tourists, including Novespace of France, Space Adventures Ltd. of Virginia, and Incredible Adventures Inc. of Florida. Those companies must arrange for a jet either from Zero Gravity Corp. or the European or Russian space agencies. . .

The planes soar to 32,000 feet at a sharp angle and then plunge 8,000 feet so passengers can experience 25-second snippets of zero gravity during the descent. As the plane climbs, passengers experience 25 seconds of being pushed down hard, as they feel 1.8 times the normal pull of the Earth.

From Discovery News.

Excavating meteorite fields

Scientists were excited when they pulled a 154-pound (70-kilogram) meteorite from deep below a wheat field in Kansas, but what got them most electrified was the way they unearthed it.

The team on Monday uncovered the find 4 feet, or just over 1 meter, under a meteorite-strewn field using new ground-penetrating radar technology that someday might be used on Mars.

And it's not just the meteorite that's an exciting find: just as with the archeology of artifacts, the context is as important as the objects found.

The dig was likely the most documented excavation yet of a meteorite find, with researchers painstakingly using brushes and hand tools to preserve evidence of the impact trail and to date the event of the meteorite strike. Soil samples also were bagged and tagged and organic material preserved for dating purposes. . .

Even before they had the pallasite meteorite out of the ground, the scientific experts at the site were able to debunk prevailing wisdom that the spectacular Brenham meteorite fall occurred 20,000 years ago. Its location in the Pleistocene epoch soil layer puts that date closer to 10,000 years ago.

"We know it is recent," said Carolyn Sumners, director of Astronomy at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, as she surveyed progress on the dig. "Native Americans could have seen it."

Though there were certainly enough objects found, too:

The site was largely forgotten in recent decades until Arnold and Mani leased eight square miles, or 20 square kilometers, of it and began looking deep below the surface. More than 15,000 pounds (6,800 kilograms) of meteorites have been recovered from the area.

The article mentions that the Houston Museum of Natural Science will be paying about $50,000 for the large meteorite, which implies that the other finds will also make their way to market. I wonder what the impact will be on pallasite meteorite prices? Full story here.

Sevso treasure resurfaces

One of the most beautiful and infamous treasure hoards of the 20th century, 14 pieces of Roman-era silver of staggering quality, will resurface today on display in London, to the consternation of leading archaeologists who regard it as archaeological loot.

Although Bonhams auction house, which will display the Sevso Hoard, insists no sale is planned, the Marquess of Northampton who bought the silver for an undisclosed sum in the 1980s recently said he "hopes" the silver will be sold, and that it has "cursed" his family. . .

It was last seen in public in 1990, when a planned Sotheby's auction was abandoned after Hungary, Yugoslavia and Lebanon all claimed but failed to prove ownership through the US courts, which found that the marquess was the legal owner.

From the Guardian.

ANOTHER article at the BBC.

De-royalizing Scottish museums

THE Royal Museum in Edinburgh is Royal no more.

Buckingham Palace has agreed to a name change that will see the stately 19th-century institution lose the royal title it has carried since Queen Victoria died.

The museum, built in 1861, is to merge with its eight-year-old Chambers Street neighbour, the Museum of Scotland, to become the National Museum of Scotland.

From the Scotsman, which also notes:

Catherine Holden, the NMS's director of marketing and development, said . . . "There was a lot of confusion. We had people thinking it [the Royal Museum] was about the Royal family and the history of kings and queens". . .

The overhaul includes the Museum of Scottish Country Life, near East Kilbride, which becomes the National Museum of Rural Life - as some visitors confused it with Country Life magazine and assumed it was about stately homes.

I hate to think what else will be done if that is the population being catered to.

Paradise comes to America

Ghiberti's "Gates of Paradise", that is:

The early-Renaissance sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti spent 27 years creating the monumental gilded bronze doors for the eastern portal of the Baptistery in the Piazza del Duomo in Florence. And it has taken teams of conservators just about as long to restore them. . .

Now three of the newly restored panels are scheduled to tour North America for the first time, traveling to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta in April, and then to the Art Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. . .

The three panels on the North American tour are from the left door. They depict the stories of Adam and Eve, Jacob and Esau, and Saul and David. There will also be four sculpture relief elements — two prophets’ heads and two standing figures — from the original frame of the left door.

Full article in the NY Times. Note that if you search for pictures online under "Gates of Paradise", more often than not you will get pictures of the copies that have now been in place on the Baptistery for some decades -- long enough to show their own share of dirt and damage from atmospheric pollution.