Call home cheap by Wi-Fi

I took glancing note of the recent national rollout of T-Mobile's HotSpot@Home service (unlimited Wifi calling using special phones that switch off seamlessly between GSM and Wi-Fi), but only just realized that it offers much more than just free calling in the vicinity of your home wireless network. More, even, than free calling though other wireless networks.

What finally caught my attention was the ability of these UMA phones to call any USA phone number though any open wireless network worldwide, for free if you subscribe to T-Mobile's HotSpot@Home service (currently $10/month, $20 for family plans), and using regular plan minutes if you don't subscribe. When in Paris last month, I was impressed with the ease with which one of my friends was connecting all over the place with his small notebook. He travels within Europe a lot, and used to make extensive use of Internet cafes for keeping up with email, eBay, and the like -- so it was significant to see him relying on Wi-Fi now instead.

So while I'm not giving up on my various European SIM cards quite yet, I am planning on getting one of the T-Mobile UMA phones. I'm due for an upgrade, and I'm also planning on adding another line to our family plan -- so it shouldn't cost more than $50. I'll hold off on paying extra for the free Wi-Fi calling plan, but will use my regular airtime allowance to make calls back home when I'm traveling abroad. It will also be handy to make and receive calls within the States from more remote locations where regular cellular service is spotty, yet where there may be public wireless networks. When abroad, however, I will have to be a bit careful, since if I receive any calls when not connected to a Wi-Fi network, I'll get charged the international roaming rate. A quick fix would be to reset the phone's operating frequency option to US-only.

For more on the HotSpot@Home service, take a look at the discussions over at HowardForums . NY Times article on the service is also a useful concise summary.

10th-century Viking hoard found in Yorkshire

The most important Viking treasure find in Britain for 150 years has been unearthed by a father and son while metal detecting in Yorkshire.

David and Andrew Whelan uncovered the hoard, which dates back to the 10th Century, in Harrogate in January.

The pair kept their find intact and it was transferred to the British Museum to be examined by experts, who said the discovery was "phenomenal".

The find sounds spectacular, rich in historical information as well:

The ancient objects come from as far afield as Afghanistan in the East and Ireland in the West, as well as Russia, Scandinavia and continental Europe.

The hoard contains 617 silver coins and 65 other objects, including a gold arm-ring and a gilt silver vessel. . .

Most of the smaller objects were extremely well preserved as they had been hidden inside the vessel, which was protected by a lead container.

The British Museum said the coins included several new or rare types, which provide valuable new information about the history of England in the early 10th Century, as well as Yorkshire's wider cultural contacts in the period.

From the BBC. Pictures here.

ADDENDUM: This article adds some good details -- props to the Cranky Professor who spotted this story this morning as well.

Google Antiques?

Not exactly, but pretty close:

Antique hunters and collectors now have a way to locate fairs, centres, dealers' shops and private sellers around the UK using a new online Collectables Map that pinpoints different locations.

David Fletcher of CollectFair has created the detailed online street map using the Google Maps system, and it is easy to use, but best of all: it's free.

Interested parties can either add their own "marker pin" to the map after registering their email, or they can ask CollectFair to place the marker pin for them. All of the pins are colour-coded according to the nature of the business (shop, auctioneer, dealer, etc), and each has an attached "information bubble" that allows space for an exact street address, brief description and a link to the company�s website.

From the Antiques Trade Gazette. The CollectFair map may be found here.

Nanosculpture

Just noted: a recent article in the Telegraph on the amazing Willard Wigan:

'It was one of the worst things that has ever happened to me," says Willard Wigan, a 50-year-old sculptor from Birmingham who will next week be awarded an MBE for services to art. "I was sculpting the whole cast of Alice in Wonderland and I was really looking forward to finishing it because it was that good, it would probably have been my best piece so far. . .

"But just as I was about to put Alice in place alongside the other characters," he pauses to compose himself - this big Brummie with conspicuous tattoos and diamond-encrusted watch, sucking in his bottom lip to stop it trembling - "I inhaled her. I breathed in at the wrong moment, and she was gone. In my panic, I accidentally wiped out some of the other characters too."

Inadvertent inhalation of artworks is not an occupational hazard that one normally associates with sculpture: Rodin famously indulged in fits of heavy breathing while shaping his erotic masterpieces, without inflicting any damage upon the final work. But Willard Wigan is no ordinary sculptor. He describes himself as a "micro-miniaturist", and all of his most significant pieces - over 40 years' worth of painstaking carving and chipping and painting - could fit comfortably together inside a single matchbox.

To the naked eye, each of Wigan's works is all but invisible; an unidentifiable speck that reveals its true form, in mind-boggling detail, only when placed under the microscope and magnified 500 times. In one piece, Henry VIII and his six wives stand side by side within the eye of a needle. In another, a startled cat, eyes wide, back arched, clings to an eyelash taken from Wigan's ex-girlfriend ("I hope she never asks for it back," he says). And his latest work, shown here for the first time, is a startlingly accurate reproduction of the Lloyd's building in London, perched on the tip of a needle.

Wigan's website is here; there is also going to be an exhibition and charity auction of the Lloyd's building (the one on the tip of the needle, that is) at the David Lloyd Gallery in London on July 24th.

He's not dead yet

A species of egg-laying mammal, named after TV naturalist Sir David Attenborough, is not extinct as was previously thought, say scientists.

On a recent visit to Papua's Cyclops Mountains, researchers uncovered burrows and tracks made by the Attenborough's long-beaked echidna.

The species is only known to biologists through a specimen from 1961, which is housed in a museum in the Netherlands.

Full article here.

Time to sell the old grapefruit patch

A study of 50,000 post-menopausal women found eating just a quarter of a grapefruit daily raised the risk by up to 30%.

The fruit is thought to boost levels of oestrogen - the hormone associated with a higher risk of the disease, the British Journal of Cancer reported.

From the BBC. Even though it might turn out that there is no effect on women prior to menopause and no effect on men, I expect demand for grapefruit to plummet. Strange fruit -- here's an article on how grapefruit increases absorption of certain drugs, sometimes to the point of danger.

Big mummy

When mummy experts piece together what an ancient person looked like in real life, one key to body type that's a dead giveaway is the size of the mummy's breasts.

Paleopathologists who have been trying to reconstruct the appearance of Hatshepsut — whose mummy is the subject of a Discovery Channel documentary on Sunday, July 15 — say they know that Egypt's greatest female pharaoh was obese in part because her breasts were so very large, even after 3,000 years.

Full article here.

Automating the detection of stolen art

From Discovery News:

A cell phone picture could be worth a million dollars — particularly if it's a snapshot of a piece of stolen art.

A new software tool plays detective by automatically comparing cell phone photos with images in a database of stolen art. The technology could help restore stolen goods to their rightful owners and solve the hundreds of art theft cases opened each year in the United States alone.

It could also give art detectives as well as dealers, collectors and auction houses another tool to verify the authenticity of artworks for sale.

Sounds like a pretty simple and practicable idea, patching together well-established technologies. Take a database of images of stolen artworks, and search it using other images and a pattern-matching application. You'll end up with some false positives, of course, but as long as the matching algorithm is reasonably sophisticated, you should still have a useful tool for flagging possible problem paintings for further investigation. I'm not sure about the claimed potential for authentication, however. Matching two images of the same item is trivial in comparison.

For now, the system works on paintings, carpets and coins, but the researchers already have plans to go beyond those.

"Extensions are on the way to make the system suitable for thee-dimensional objects. These extensions will cover sculptures as well as three-dimensional objects in general," said Bertram Nickolay, head of the department Security Technology at the Fraunhofer Institute in Berlin, Germany.