Category Archives: History

Time for pyramids?

Imagine walking along one day along a barren hill in Peru and stumbling upon 10-metre high pyramid. What would you think?

A) A perfect setting for an Indiana Jones themepark. Time to call someone in Hollywood.
B) What a fine reference for aerial surveillance and counterinsurgency efforts. Whisper a secret prayer/signal softly into the crack between the stones and wait for reinforcements.
C) Wow, those ancient Peruvians sure had big clocks. Stand back in awe, hands raised.
D) What a waste of stone. Walls or a house would have been a better choice, since nobody seems to have survived because of the pyramid.

If you chose C, you would have made a fine priest 4,000 years ago, according to the Sunday Times:

The oldest astronomical observatory in the Americas, it told farmers exactly when to sow their crops. Its discovery has provided startling clues to the way in which early man learnt to cultivate his fields.

“I was staring up at a statue on a ridge above the temple and realised it all aligned with the stars — it was an amazing moment,� the bearded scientist said last week.

“This alignment meant that at dawn at every winter solstice 4,200 years ago, key stars would appear in line with the temple and alert priests that river flooding was due and it was time to start planting crops. It was laid out as a wake-up call to the community.�

Bearded? Anyone else wonder what that has to do with anything?

I like the concept of priests as people who advance scientific knowledge and push the use of technology for “better” living. I also like the story about how police managed to recover a stolen Bronze Age relic, which eventually enabled a modern astronomer to decipher its meaning:

Since police tracked down the thieves in Switzerland in 2002, archaeologists and astronomers have been trying to puzzle out the disc’s function. Ralph Hansen, an astronomer in Hamburg, found that the disc was an attempt to co-ordinate the solar and lunar calendars. It was almost certainly a highly accurate timekeeper that told Bronze Age Man when to plant seeds and when to make trades, giving him an almost modern sense of time.

Wikipedia has an interesting review of how the relic was recovered and whether it is genuine.

Shiver me timbers

Remember that old joke about the octogenarian pirate? You know, the one who goes around saying “Aye-matey” (I’m eighty). Sorry, it’s not every day I get to put a pirate joke in a log entry. Speaking of log entries I was reading the ship log over at the 826 Valencia Store, and noticed a fascinating take on the risk of being a buccaneer versus the modern workman:

Compensation schedule

Arrgh, being a pirate was obviously risky, but not too risky a business.

It paid to be a southpaw, it would seem. And loss of one eye is listed, but what about two? I can see “capable one-eyed buccaneers” (pun intended) as a plausible explanation for the lower rate for pirate compensation, but what was the payout for being blinded?

And what would be the modern equivalent of the “favorite or lucky leader”?

Physics of terrorism patterns

Some clever scientists have reviewed current events to try and find a universal pattern to terrorism and published a paper with their results:

We report a remarkable universality in the patterns of violence arising in three high-profile ongoing wars, and in global terrorism. Our results suggest that these quite different conflict arenas currently feature a common type of enemy, i.e. the various insurgent forces are beginning to operate in a similar way regardless of their underlying ideologies, motivations and the terrain in which they operate. We provide a microscopic theory to explain our main observations. This theory treats the insurgent force as a generic, self-organizing system which is dynamically evolving through the continual coalescence and fragmentation of its constituent groups.

It looks like they were trying to prove the old adage that ideologies, motives and terrain do not impact methods used by insurgent forces. I think that would be useful as an elimination of factors that are often mistakenly assumed to influence method, rather than proof of universality. In other words, does the universality of a hammer as a tool for hammering surprise anyone? Does it matter if the people who use hammers for hammering spend their money on different causes?

More flyingpenguins

Whew. I just mowed through hundreds of spam comments.

I used to enjoy reading these crazy things as a sort of stream-of-conscious Kerouac-like review of our modern tendencies for consumption.

Call me crazy, but maybe someone should make this into performance art — read a spam filter to music and do an artistic interpretation of the messages:

stricken golf servicemen entrusting pads
oat sycophantic mortgages apprehensions
Teletext Jackie Seabrook contrition whacked pills
intoxicating geyser sandpaper Germania Amoco coriander treatise mortgages
home equity loan

Yeah, say it out loud man! Cool, daddy-o. Home equity loan…oh, home equity loan.

I admit it, I can sometimes really get into this stuff. I suppose I should dismiss everything but the sensible comments, yet there’s something oddly poetic and security-related in thinking about the hundreds of spam entries I get every day.

For example, remember the origins of public-key cryptography?

We know that secret communication still uses blind-drops and even steganography (someone posts a jpg on a free public site like flickr and then anyone else can download and decrypt), so there’s clearly intent out there. And we know that some serious time and money is spent listening to the noise from space. Wonder what would happen if we ran spam through some of the same analytics and filters. Would there be a hidden message? The meaning of life? Does it all add up to a magic number?

Maybe I’m just having too much fun thinking about it, when I could be out getting some sun like this little fellow:

Evil Penguineval

Ok, enough spam. I’m going to think about putting in some new controls.