So I was looking at the subject profiles for the archaeology course at my university.

Budding archaeologists at my uni are trained at something called the Teaching Archaelogical Research Discipline In Simulation site, which is generally known by its acronym.

Thus I came across this on the uni website:

And of course, this being a top university the TARDIS site is, indeed, peopled with a Doctor or two…

Week Three.

Ancient History

I was reading Livy in research for my essay, when I came across this particular quote.

 Hasdrubal had sent for him by letter, when scarce yet arrived at manhood; and the matter had even been discussed in the senate, the Barcine faction using all their efforts, that Hannibal might be trained to military service and succeed to his father’s command.

Hanno, the leader of the opposite faction, said, “Hasdrubal seems indeed to ask what is reasonable, but I, nevertheless, do not think his request ought to be granted.”  When he had attracted to himself the attention of all, through surprise at this ambiguous opinion, he proceeded:

“Hasdrubal thinks that the flower of youth which he gave to the enjoyment of Hannibal’s father, may justly be expected by himself in return from the son: but it would little become us to accustom our youth, in place of a military education, to the lustful ambition of the generals.”

[Livy Book 21, ch.3, 1-4]

So in other words, according to Livy, the general Hasdrubal offered Hannibal military training because he wanted to shag him, which Hannibal’s father had apparently done to him. The mind boggles.  It’s enough to give you culture shock.

Archaeology.

Our proper lecturer was back this week, from where he’d been. He proved to be enthusiastic about the subject, rambling around it and telling us all kinds of neat things, and making terrible puns. (*displays photograph of a body preserved in a peat bog* “…and here we have Mr Pete Marsh…”)

“Thisis my fourth year lecturing – it feels like it’s about my 14th or 15th year, but I am reliably informed that it is my fourth,” he said after introducing himself.

He went on to show us photographs of some of the stuff he’d been up to in Europe and Turkey.

“Because I’m an archaeologist, that means by nature I’m perverse. I went out into this dusty bit where no one ever wants to go.”

He brought up a photo of a bunch of people in shirts with the uni logo dancing.

“The site’s actually run by some Japanese people, and they’re really into kareoke. There’s not really much point to that, except to show am embarrassing photo.”

Later on, in the actual lecture, he showed us a photo of a pot painstakingly reconstructed from broken shards glued together.

“What can you tell me about this pot?” he asked us.

There was a long silence.

“It’s broken?” a student offered.

And that’s about it for week 3.

I’ve been rather busy lately;  as I type, I am in my second week of university, studying archaeology and ancient history. It’s as awesome as I had hoped.

Anyway, I’ve decided I’m going to post some of the more interesting facts, photographs, and quotes from the lecturers every week. So here we go.

Week One.

Ancient History

My favorite part of my first Ancient Rome lecture was when we briefly heard about the last king of Rome, Tarquinius Superbus. The lecturer said in a sad, pained voice,

“Please do not call him Tarquinius Super-bus. His name is Tarquin the Proud, Tarquinius Superb-us. Tarquinius Super-bus is not his name.”

For the record, this guy was the last king of Rome, and he was actually Etruscan, as the Etruscans ruled the Romans at this point, but the Romans threw him out. They were really touchy about having been ruled by the Etruscans forever afterwards, which is why they had this big thing about never having kings.

Archaeology

The first hour of my Archaeology lecture was all about (a) why archaeology is not studying dinosaurs (for those of you looking clueless, that would be palaeontology, as opposed to archaeology, which involves studying humans of the past and their cultures) and (b) why archaeology is not like Indiana Jones.

(Really. It’s not.)

I just sat there and thought, if you don’t know something as basic as these two facts, why are you studying the subject in the first place? It’s a good idea to actually know what it is…

In my archaeology textbook reading for the first week, I found a neat picture of 4000 year old figures from a place called Ain Ghazal in Jordan. I think they look like aliens. 

Illustratory photo of Ain Ghazal figures

See? Totally look like aliens. Or maybe Voldemort’s long-lost cousins… (just look at that pale hairless skin and those snake-like eyes…!)

Also, I found a dude with a really interesting skull.

Incan dude with the interesting skull from the Puruchuco-Huaquerones cemetery in Peru

Look at those cheekbones…

That’s it for my first post.

I was looking at birthday card when I came across Edward Monkton’s range.

These are weird, but funny. Some examples:

and my  favorite…

You can also download some iGoogle themes.

Dear male Asian student,

You looked surprised to see the expression on my face the other day. I admit that I looked startled. I didn’t expect you to come out of a cubicle.

This is because the word ‘WOMEN’ across the door means that these toilets are female-only, and men aren’t allowed in there. I feel that you should learn this as soon as possible, as it is considered an important piece of information. Learning to read English would be good too.

Sincerely,

Ace

So I was reading Isis the Scientist’s blog, as I quite often do. (I’ve become a semi-regular over there, getting involved in discussions mostly involving forms of discrimination, usually based on sex and gender, discussions which end up getting quite heated, and philosophical, and eerily similar) And I read this post, which talks about a post (I’m getting involved here - a post about a post about a post, ad infinitum…) by PhysioProf which basically says that religious people are out of touch with reality, etcetera, that they do not care about science, etc etc. 

I replied to Isis’s post thusly:

What ever happened to tolerance?

I have strong religious beliefs. At the same time, science and facts are what make my world go round. To me, they don’t clash at all. Science is facts, the here-and-now I can lay my hands on and work my mind around. Religion is faith, my emotions and belief. It’s the transcendal, the incorporeal, the things we can’t prove and don’t need to, because it’s not about what factual or ‘real’ or measurable, but about what I believe in my heart.
It’s abstract concepts, not hard data. Condemn religion for this reason, and you might as well condemn ethics or philosophy or anything else that is purely conceptual.
I don’t understand why some people are so virulently opposed to religion and religious views. When fundamentalists ignore or attack science because they believe it conflicts with their religion, I can understand opposing that… but just normal, more-or-less rational people with faith in the ethereal? I don’t get it. It just seems so emphatically closed-minded to me… not only because it’s so inflexible to religion itself, but because it dismisses and discards those people who are religious as lesser in some way because of their faith.
And that’s bigoted and prejudiced on a very strong level.

I understand some of the atheists claims – that religious people believe things that directly contradict science, that they obstruct scientific progress, blah blah, that they are morons.

Having met some really stupid fundamentalists, I can sympathise with the last part, although I think that sticking all people with some form of religious belief in the ‘moron to be dismissed’ box is discriminatory in the extreme.

But the problem is not religion. The problem is ideology, and the fantatical pursuit of its goals and dedication to its precepts while disregarding everyone else’s point of view and right to them.

Your standard, normal person with religious leanings isn’t a fanatical fundamentalist. They believe in science, but they also believe in something beyong the realms of science.  They might not have all their facts right, but then most of them haven’t studied science in much detail.  They’re more or less sensible, reasonable people. Just like everyone else. They use religion as a moral and ethical guide, mostly. They don’t oppose scientific fact, because it’s a fact – right? Religion doesn’t really dictate their scientific beliefs, just as their scientific beliefs don’t particularly affect their religious ones.

Then there are those few who are True Believers. They believe, all right. They know that they are Right and not only that, everyone else is Wrong. This wrongness is dangerous and harmful and needs to be utterly anihilated for the good of all humanity. They’re relentless in their pursuit of their beliefs and no amount of logic or reason will stop them, because thye don’t want to hear it. They already know what they answer is.

The thing is, this description can apply to atheists just as much as it can the religious.

Whether people are religious or atheist, whether they can’t decide if there’s a god, or whether they’re devoted to the Flying Spaghetti Monster, they shouldn’t be told that their belief in something ethereal and transcendent automatically makes them a lesser person, that they’re intellectually inferior, that they aren’t ‘truly’ interested in science and that they’re deluded people who aren’t in touch with reality.

Because that makes them as bad as the rigid, narrow-minded people on the other side that they really oppose.

 Article copied directly from the ABC Science website. Written by Nicky Philips. Check out the original article here.

Banjo the Australovenator

 Palaeontologists have unveiled three new Australian dinosaur skeletons in outback Queensland today.

The two herbivores and one carnivore, excavated from the Winton formation, roamed our land during the Cretaceous period – 98 million years ago.

The research, published in the current edition of PloS One, puts Australian back on the palaeontology map and describes Australia’s fauna before it separated from the supercontinent Gondwana.

Palaeontologist and lead author Dr Scott Hocknull, of the Queensland Museum, says in the past dinosaur discoveries in Australia haven’t been considered important because there were so few of them.

“We’ve been able to prove that [view] completely wrong.”

Hocknull says all three skeletons are new genera of dinosaur, which show evolutionary links with dinosaurs from the northern hemisphere.

“Dinosaurs diversified and spread all over the world but Australia, being a very isolated place at the end of the world, developed its own unique fauna.”

Australia’s biggest meat eater

The new genera of carnivore, named Australovenator by the researchers, is the most complete meat-eating dinosaur skeleton ever found in Australia.

Hocknull says Australovenator, nicknamed Banjo, was the cheetah of its time.

“It was two metres from the hip, six metres long and built for speed,” he says.

The plant-eaters, Clancy and Matilda, were both titanosaur sauropods.

Hocknull says while Clancy was built like a hippo, Matilda was more like a giraffe.

“It was 16 metres high with a long neck and small head,” he says.

The skeletons of Matilda and Banjo were found together at the bottom of an ancient billabong.

Whatever killed Matilda probably killed Banjo, says Hocknull.

“Whether Banjo was trying to eat Matilda’s carcass or they both got stuck in the mud together we don’t really know.”

Hocknull says the dinosaurs were named after Australian poet Banjo Patterson and his characters.

“It’s kind of quirky that we have a national song about a man dying at the bottom of a billabong and we’ve got the same scenario playing out here 100 million years ago with a couple of dinosaurs,” he says.

Significant finding

Palaeontologist and Head of Sciences at Museum Victoria Dr John Long says Hocknull and his team’s paper is the most significant paper ever published on Australian dinosaurs to date.

“It not only presents us with two new amazing long-necked giants of the ancient Australian continent, but also announces our first really big predator – Australovenator,” says Long.

Hocknull says there are many more dinosaurs in the Winton site and they hope to find Australia’s oldest mammals among them.

“There are at least 50 other sites we know that are yet to be excavated so the next 20 to 30 years in Australian dinosaur science will be very exciting.”

Clancy, Matilda and Banjo are now part of an exhibition in the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum, which opens today in Winton.

Hocknull says the exhibition wouldn’t have got off the ground without the local community.

Thousands of volunteer hours have gone into prepping the bones so they can be studied and now available for the public, he says.

Read the rest of the comics at Snafu-Comics

I consider myself a fan of Georgette Heyer.  Her Regency romances are pretty much the best out there – they’re painstakingly-researched, historically-accurate novels full of life and humour, that are well-written and don’t depend on smut but story – and her crime novels are light, amusing tales. I own a number of her books, in both genres.

So why is it that when her romances are so popular, her crime fiction – written at the same time as Agatha Christie and other big names were penning their enduring works – are nowhere near as well read?

1. The speech patterns of her  characters are full of mannerisms and expressions from the 1930s that can alienate the reader.  While the speech patterns are authentic – Georgette Heyer wrote her crime novels during the era in which they are set – combined with other factors (see below) they prevent the reader from becoming fully-absorbed in the story, particularly in the case of some of the more obscure or puzzling expressions.
2. The characters are caricatures.  Agatha Christie was writing at the same time as Georgette Heyer, but her characters have a depth and a psychological realism that makes them as accesible today as when they were first written. Heyer’s characters, by contrast, are two-dimensional stereotypes; in a time when these stereotypes no longer exist in they same form as they did in the 1930s, it is hard for the reader to identify with them.
3. The style of writing that Heyer uses had since fallen out of favour.  Today’s crime novels tend towards being suspenseful thrillers; Heyer’s are not. Her characters patter from one startling event to another; while their circumstances are grim, the light-hearted way in which those circumstances are handled is far from it. Moreover, the crimes that take place are hardly given vital importance; at times you almost wonder if the characters even notice the gravity of the situation they are in, so preoccupied are they with trivial matters. It’s not very suspenseful.
4. Because of the lack of depth, there isn’t any real feel for the character’s psyche.  While Heyer gives her characters motive and means, her characters lack the dimension that would make their decisions and reasons convincing. Today’s crime novels, on the other hand, are big on giving everyone appropriate psychological profiles.
5. She has a fondness for turning her crime novels into romances at the same time.  While a romantic subplot often works well in a crime novel – romantic crime novel is a successful sub-genre all its own – that’s only the case as long as it doesn’t detract from the main thread of the story or divert attention from it. Sadly, Heyer sometimes tried to write a sort of ‘romantic thriller’ that didn’t quite work, either as a thrilling crime novel or as an emotionally-based one.