del.icio.us have introduced a new tool entitled “tagrolls” which enable you to easily display a tag cloud of your links on your own website. Here are mine:
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Archive for November, 2005
First the renaming of my blog, and now the moving of my RSS URL. Whatever next?! Well, my feed now includes my latest photos on Flickr and my del.icio.us links as a daily digest.
My RSS feed is now http://feeds.feedburner.com/PastThinking, courtesy of FeedBurner. Please update your newsreader!
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The Daily Telegraph report that archaeologists in southern Italy have revealed a fragment of teracotta onto which is engraved a map of Apulia, the region at the heel of Italy’s “boot”. Known as the Soleto Map, it is the earliest known map of anywhere in the western world, dating to about 500BC.
What is particularly interesting about this find is not just early cartographic techniques, but the Greek inscriptions, which tell us something about the links between this part of Italy and Greece. And to make it extra special, many of the towns marked on the map are still about today…
Technorati Tags: apulia, archaeology, cartography, italy, maps, 500BC, soletomap
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Up until now, this weblog has been called simply “goskar.com”. The main reason for this was that I couldn’t think of a good name for it, and I didn’t think that it really mattered.
Since I’m now getting a reasonable amount of traffic (about 3000 sessions per month), I thought that it deserves a more imaginative name. As many people know, I’m an archaeologist, and these posts are my thoughts and opinions - and at the risk of sounding cheesy, the name “Past Thinking” seems rather apt.
I hope that people will continue to enjoy “Past Thinking”!
Cheers,
Tom
[Update] Matt has pointed out that these are called Zubbles, and on the website you can see photos of them. Thanks, Matt!
Clear bubbles will soon be a thing of the past - retro, even. An idea by Tim Kehoe, and perfected by dye chemist Ram Sabnis has become a reality. Read the full story on the Popular Science magazine website.
Continue reading ‘Coloured Bubbles and Disappearing Dyes’
The Victoria and Albert Museum in London, UK, have begun to produce one of the first (if not the first?) museum podcasts as part of their “Every Object Tells a Story” project.
In this first edition, you can hear curators, conservators and researchers share their stories about art in the Paintings Gallery and see images of the paintings at the same time on your iPod, mp3 player or desktop computer.
It is refreshing to see more heritage organisations using podcasting to help reach out to a wider audience, and use the technologies available in an innovative way. Museums and galleries often offer audio tours, so many of them already have a wealth of audio content to podcast.
But what use is an audio tour if you can’t see the objects or paintings? The V&A have used the features normally used for embedding album art in mp3s in a novel way - to display images of the objects being talked about. If you use iTunes, or a colour iPod, you can see what is being discussed (albeit rather small, but this is a limitation of the technology).
The first set of V&A podcasts consist of six episodes, each just over a minute long. The sound quality is not very good, presumably to keep download times short, and minimise bandwidth expenses (they’re about 300Kb each!), but still very listenable.
It will be very interesting to see how they take this idea forward. They could presumably make them longer, and use chapter markers with extra images to make a more immersive listen.
Well done, V&A!
Archaeologists and museums are now podcasting - here’s to more “virtual heritage”…
Technorati Tags: everyobject, galleries, heritage, museum, museums, painting, paintings, v&a, victoriaandalbertmuseum, virtualtour
Tags:Tehmina has now written two books, aimed at young adults (but very readable by any age really!). Her first is entitled “Medieval Feasts and Banquets: Food, Drink, and Celebration in the Middle Ages” which gives a great introduction to the subject, and blows away quite a few myths (bones being chucked over shoulders onto sawdust for the dogs for one!).
Her second is entitled “Charlemagne: The Life and Times of an Early Medieval Emperor” which gives a concise and enjoyable introduction to the infamous Holy Roman Emperor known as ‘Charles the Great’. He is an important historical character who led a complex life, and many books written about him are heavy-going - Tehm’s book is the most lucid introduction to his life that I have come across (and superbly written). Read more about Charlemagne at Wikipedia.
Both books are published by the Rosen Publishing Group and are available to buy at Amazon.
Technorati Tags: banquet, book, books, charlemagne, feast, food, history, medieval, drink, tehm
Tags:By A. Carty (Archaeoptics Ltd) and Thomas A. Goskar (Wessex Archaeology)
[UPDATE] If you would like a PDF of this article, hop on over to Archaeoptics to download a copy.
Abstract
The use of terrestrial 3D laser scanning devices is increasing in all surveying areas including topographic surveys and building recording. However, a dichotomy exists in that the deliverables produced by such surface-rich acquisition devices generally tend to be surface-less clouds of points.
This article discusses the use of a Callidus 3D laser scanner on a multi-phase site at Knowlton, Dorset. This site originally featured a Neolithic henge earthwork (circular bank and ditch) with two causeways crossing the ditch. Later, in mediaeval times, a church was built in the centre of the henge to effectively Christianise the pagan monument.
The purpose of the exercise was to acquire not only a complete dataset of the earthwork for topographical analysis, but also a high-resolution scan of the church fabric itself.
Figure 1: Knowlton Church and Henge. The Callidus 3D laser scanner can be seen to the left edge of the photograph
Continue reading ‘Surveying Knowlton Church and Henge using 3D Laser Scanning’
I have just finished reading Terry Pratchett’s latest Discworld novel “Thud!”. I have been reading the Pratchett for about 17 years now, and whilst I’m a big fan, some of the more recent offerings, such as “Monstrous Regiment” have been a little lacklustre (why did it have such a predictable ending?!).
“Going Postal” was much better, a cracking read. But “Thud!”, on the other hand, is simply superb. It is one of the most intelligent and enjoyable social commentary novels that I’ve ever read. We find ourselves once again in Ankh Morpork, with Commander Sam Vimes of the city Watch, who is trying to stop the impending conflict between the dwarfs and the trolls. The ancient animosity between them was sparked by an event known as “Koom Valley” where the dwarfs ambushed the trolls. Or, on the other hand, the trolls ambushed the dwarfs. The anniversary of this event is fast approaching, and dwarf extremists (”deep-downers”) descend upon Ankh Morpork, stirring up anti-troll feelings amongst the city’s large dwarf population.
And then one of the “grags” (dwarf spiritual figureheads) is murdered. And a troll’s club is found at the scene of the murder. And Koom Valley day approaches… Ankh Morpork is reaching boiling point…
There are spies, drugs, excessive shiny armour (”clang”!), caves, vampires, troll godfathers, corrosive alcoholic drinks, and of course…
Terry Pratchett is on top form in this novel. He writes exceptionally well, weaving the storylines together into an addictive and highly entertaining read. If you haven’t read Pratchett for a few years because of a disappointing Discworld book - I urge you to reconsider!
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A number of Apple Mac wikis appear to be cropping up. The first one that I came across is Wikitosh which hopes to be a repository for everything you ever wanted to know about the Apple Mac platform, from todays Macs and OSX, back to information about machines from days gone by (computer archaeology?!).
Wikitosh has information of varying quality. One fantastic example is the section on Apple’s industrial design - “Jonathan Ive RULES at industrial Design!!” - is the sole entry. For some reason they have some odd conventions. Software is named SoftWare. Hardware is HardWare. I don’t like that one bit. Wikitosh has a long way to go before it becomes a mature source of information - and that, of course, is up to (literate) people contributing to and self-moderating it.
The second Mac Wiki is Mac Guides, which was recently set up by Mac Rumors, the popular Mac news and rumours website. Rather than being over-ambitious, Mac Guides aims to “provide an organized outlet for the vast amounts of knowledge that are provided in the forums“. That means tutorials, solutions to common problems etc. This could help with the problem of repetition, and useful information becoming buried in their burgeoning (but extremely useful) forums.
Keep your eyes on both - and remember to contribute something useful to help build a resource which benfits all Mac users.
Technorati Tags: apple, Mac, macguides, osx, guides, wiki, wikitosh
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