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From an AP article (probably behind the Salon firewall)--not sure if the bolded statement is wry humor, fear of the Christian right, or both:
Previously hidden writings of the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes are being uncovered with powerful X-ray beams nearly 800 years after a Christian monk scrubbed off the text and wrote over it with prayers.What's wrong with "...during the Middle Ages, when superstition largely replaced science"?
Over the past week, researchers at Stanford University's Linear Accelerator Center in Menlo Park have been using X-rays to decipher a fragile 10th century manuscript that contains the only copies of some of Archimedes' most important works.
[...]
Born in the 3rd century B.C., Archimedes is considered one of ancient Greece's greatest mathematicians, perhaps best known for discovering the principle of buoyancy while taking a bath.
The 174-page manuscript, known as the Archimedes Palimpsest, contains the only copies of treatises on flotation, gravity and mathematics. Scholars believe a scribe copied them onto the goatskin parchment from the original Greek scrolls.
Three centuries later, a monk scrubbed off the Archimedes text and used the parchment to write prayers at a time when the Greek mathematician's work was less appreciated. In the early 20th century, forgers tried to boost the manuscript's value by painting religious imagery on some of the pages.
Paul Pfeiffer does Paris Hilton...
Animated GIF sketchbook, Return of the
I'm in a show next month dealing with the theme of place, including virtual places (more specifics to follow). I'm proposing an artwork that has no "center," in the sense that it is located in several media without any clear hierarchy. I'm going to use the two pieces that were done for my show at And/Or Gallery earlier this year (above--photo courtesy the gallery) and exist as framed works on paper made with a home computer (the old MSPaintbrush program, with multiple passes through the printer). Those pieces are an "incarnation" of the work. They were documented step by step on my blog, so another "incarnation" would be a list of URLs in the title card indicating the ongoing Web presence of the works. Lastly, there would be time-lapse videos of the original documentation photos, continously looping DVDs playing on TVs or monitors in the gallery. Here's a "sketch" of the animated GIF that would become one of the vids (a sketch because it will change somewhat): [2.6 MB .GIF]
I'll update with the other "sketch" once it's completed.
dude gets whupped - artist unknown
GIF of a kitten struggling to stay awake. If everybody would just look at this every minute of every day, there'd be no more war.
"Hey" [mp3 removed]
The sample of a guy saying "Hey!" was snipped from a song on the Grime Time website. Most of the percussion is apparently echolocation sounds made by bats, from a Native Instruments Battery kit crafted by Plaid. So, lots of vocals here--a first. The rest of it is semi-familiar club stabs.
Haven't read all of this Vanity Fair article yet, but apparently the gist of it is that the 9/11 hijackers did have help from the US government--not in the form of a conspiratorial green light but a Keystone Kops leadership vacuum. According to a "complete" set of tapes listened to by the VF reporter, the air defense agency NORAD was scrambling jets late, and to the wrong places, as it followed up on rumors of 10 possible hijackings the morning of 9/11. By 9/12 it had 300 jets aloft over various US cities but when its efforts mattered most, all the hijackers slipped through our air defenses.
Fortunately, Americans knew that the biggest problem of 9/11 was not a "worldwide terrorist network based in Afghanistan" but our own government's incompetence in the face of a spectacular, tragic one-off incident. The people rose up as one, and pressured Congress to impeach Bush and "shut down the government" through the power of the purse, until more competent leadership could be put in key Executive Branch positions. A triumph for our democratic system: It would have been doubly tragic if the US had gone off half cocked and invaded sovereign nations, weakening our military even further.