Egyptian priests ate like gods – and paid by dying young

The Art Archive, Egyptian Museum Turin / Dagli Orti. A wealthy couple brings gifts to Osiris. After rituals, priests and their families ate the rich food offered to the gods.

By Russell Jenkins in the UK’s Times Online

The banquets offered by high priests to appease the gods of Ancient Egypt may have been welcomed as a perk of the job but they also increased their chances of cardiovascular disease and early death, research suggests.

The priests, a powerful bureaucracy under the pharaohs, would place vast plates of roast fowl and copious quantities of wine and beer before a god’s statue in a rite repeated three times each day. Then the food was divided up among the priesthood and taken home from the temple to be shared with their families.

Egyptologists and scientists at the University of Manchester have disclosed in The Lancet the cost of keeping the gods happy. By combining translations of hieroglyphic inscriptions on temple walls showing details of food offered to the gods with analysis of mummified remains, they have assessed their atherosclerosis, the build-up of fat and calcium in the arteries.

The findings show that cardiovascular disease affected the privileged of Ancient Egypt long before fried food and a sedentary life made heart attacks and strokes a modern killer. Rosalie David, of the university’s KNH Centre for Biomedical Egyptology, said that it was a telling message: “Live like a god and you will pay with your health.”

*****
[Read the rest at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/medicine/article7041859.ece]

Weaponizing Mozart

How Britain is using classical music as a form of social control

By Brendan O’Neill

In recent years Britain has become the Willy Wonka of social control, churning out increasingly creepy, bizarre, and fantastic methods for policing the populace. But our weaponization of classical music—where Mozart, Beethoven, and other greats have been turned into tools of state repression—marks a new low.

We’re already the kings of CCTV. An estimated 20 per cent of the world’s CCTV cameras are in the UK, a remarkable achievement for an island that occupies only 0.2 per cent of the world’s inhabitable landmass.

A few years ago some local authorities introduced the Mosquito, a gadget that emits a noise that sounds like a faint buzz to people over the age of 20 but which is so high-pitched, so piercing, and so unbearable to the delicate ear drums of anyone under 20 that they cannot remain in earshot. It’s designed to drive away unruly youth from public spaces, yet is so brutally indiscriminate that it also drives away good kids, terrifies toddlers, and wakes sleeping babes.

Police in the West of England recently started using super-bright halogen lights to temporarily blind misbehaving youngsters. From helicopters, the cops beam the spotlights at youths drinking or loitering in parks, in the hope that they will become so bamboozled that (when they recover their eyesight) they will stagger home.

And recently police in Liverpool boasted about making Britain’s first-ever arrest by unmanned flying drone. Inspired, it seems, by Britain and America’s robot planes in Afghanistan, the Liverpool cops used a remote-control helicopter fitted with CCTV (of course) to catch a car thief.

Britain might not make steel anymore, or cars, or pop music worth listening to, but, boy, are we world-beaters when it comes to tyranny. And now classical music, which was once taught to young people as a way of elevating their minds and tingling their souls, is being mined for its potential as a deterrent against bad behavior.

In January it was revealed that West Park School, in Derby in the midlands of England, was “subjecting” (its words) badly behaved children to Mozart and others. In “special detentions,” the children are forced to endure two hours of classical music both as a relaxant (the headmaster claims it calms them down) and as a deterrent against future bad behavior (apparently the number of disruptive pupils has fallen by 60 per cent since the detentions were introduced.)

One news report says some of the children who have endured this Mozart authoritarianism now find classical music unbearable. As one critical commentator said, they will probably “go into adulthood associating great music—the most bewitchingly lovely sounds on Earth—with a punitive slap on the chops.” This is what passes for education in Britain today: teaching kids to think “Danger!” whenever they hear Mozart’s Requiem or some other piece of musical genius.

The classical music detentions at West Park School are only the latest experiment in using and abusing some of humanity’s greatest cultural achievements to reprimand youth.

Across the UK, local councils and other public institutions now play recorded classical music through speakers at bus-stops, in parking lots, outside department stores, and elsewhere. No, not because they think the public will appreciate these sweet sounds (they think we are uncultured grunts), but because they hope it will make naughty youngsters flee.

Tyne and Wear in the north of England was one of the first parts of the UK to weaponize classical music. In the early 2000s, the local railway company decided to do something about the “problem” of “youths hanging around” its train stations. The young people were “not getting up to criminal activities,” admitted Tyne and Wear Metro, but they were “swearing, smoking at stations and harassing passengers.” So the railway company unleashed “blasts of Mozart and Vivaldi.”

Apparently it was a roaring success. The youth fled. “They seem to loathe [the music],” said the proud railway guy. “It’s pretty uncool to be seen hanging around somewhere when Mozart is playing.” He said the most successful deterrent music included the Pastoral Symphony by Beethoven, Symphony No. 2 by Rachmaninov, and Piano Concerto No. 2 by Shostakovich. (That last one I can kind of understand.)

In Yorkshire in the north of England, the local council has started playing classical music through vandal-proof speakers at “troublesome bus-stops” between 7:30 PM and 11:30 PM. Shops in Worcester, Bristol, and North Wales have also taken to “firing out” bursts of classical music to ward of feckless youngsters.

In Holywood (in County Down in Northern Ireland, not to be confused with Hollywood in California), local businesspeople encouraged the council to pipe classical music as a way of getting rid of youngsters who were spitting in the street and doing graffiti. And apparently classical music defeats street art: The graffiti levels fell.

Anthony Burgess’s nightmare vision of an elite using high culture as a “punitive slap on the chops” for low youth has come true. In Burgess’s 1962 dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange, famously filmed by Stanley Kubrick in 1971, the unruly youngster Alex is subjected to “the Ludovico Technique” by the crazed authorities. Forced to take drugs that induce nausea and to watch graphically violent movies for two weeks, while simultaneously listening to Beethoven, Alex is slowly rewired and re-moulded. But he rebels, especially against the use of classical music as punishment.

Pleading with his therapists to turn the music off, he tells them that “Ludwig van” did nothing wrong, he “only made music.” He tells the doctors it’s a sin to turn him against Beethoven and take away his love of music. But they ignore him. At the end of it all, Alex is no longer able to listen to his favorite music without feeling distressed. A bit like that schoolboy in Derby who now sticks his fingers in his ears when he hears Mozart.

The weaponization of classical music speaks volumes about the British elite’s authoritarianism and cultural backwardness. They’re so desperate to control youth—but from a distance, without actually having to engage with them—that they will film their every move, fire high-pitched noises in their ears, shine lights in their eyes, and bombard them with Mozart. And they have so little faith in young people’s intellectual abilities, in their capacity and their willingness to engage with humanity’s highest forms of art, that they imagine Beethoven and Mozart and others will be repugnant to young ears. Of course, this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The dangerous message being sent to young people is clear: 1) you are scum; 2) classical music is not a wonder of the human world, it’s a repellent against mildly anti-social behavior.

*****
[http://reason.com/archives/2010/02/24/weoponizing-mozart/singlepage]

Eurocopter Moves One Step Closer to ‘Whisper Mode’

Just about every helicopter operator is quite familiar with noise complaints. Whether it be the local news helicopter or even a medical helicopter, many people on the ground don’t like the sound created by rotary-wing aircraft.

This week Eurocopter unveiled its most recent effort to reduce helicopter noise with the radical-looking Blue Edge rotor blade. The new blade has been tested on one of the company’s EC155 helicopters and was shown to reduce noise 3 to 4 decibels, according to the company.

In addition to the Blue Edge rotor blade, the company also introduced something called Blue Pulse technology. Also designed to reduce helicopter noise, the Blue Pulse system uses three flap modules in the trailing edge of each rotor blade. Piezoelectric motors move actuate the flaps 15 to 40 times per second in reduce the “slap noise” often heard when a helicopter is descending.

Both of these technologies are able to reduce noise by minimizing the blade-vortex interaction of the main rotor on a helicopter. Blade-vortex interaction is the source of the pulsating sound most of us are familiar with when helicopters fly overhead. The noise is created when a rotor blade hits the wake vortex left behind from the blade in front of it.

*****
[Read More http://www.wired.com/autopia/2010/02/eurocopter-moves-one-step-closer-to-whisper-mode/]

Only picture from life of Nelson and Lady Hamilton in Bonhams sale

They were painted seated in an open boat as they were rowed along a river in Sicily in 1800

By Simon de Bruxelles in the UK’s Times Online

It was an affair that scandalised early 19th-century society: the ménage à trois between a beautiful actress, an elderly aristocrat and the country’s greatest hero.

The affair between Vice-Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson and Emma, Lady Hamilton, was followed by a fascinated public that devoured every word published in the newspapers and scandal sheets. But these were the days before the paparazzi. Cartoonists could lampoon and caricature but as far as seeing the couple together, the public were forced to use their imagination.

Now a small watercolour sketch has been identified as the only known painting from life of them with her husband. They were painted seated in an open boat as they were rowed along a river in Sicily in 1800, the year before Lady Hamilton gave birth to Nelson’s illegitimate daughter, Horatia, and five years before his death at the Battle of Trafalgar.

The image was painted by Ellis Cornelia Knight, a friend of Lady Hamilton, who filled a sketch book with pictures when she accompanied the couple on a tour of the Mediterranean on board Nelson’s flagship Foudroyant. The small pictorial diary has been in a naval family for many generations and has never been seen in public before.

Nelson and Lady Hamilton had fallen in love in 1798. She was married to Sir William Hamilton, the much older British envoy to Naples, who had acquired her, sight unseen, from a nephew and been smitten by her beauty. Sir William, not so much a cuckold as a consenting partner, has been tentatively identified as the figure in civilian clothes.

Lady Hamilton is sitting on Nelson’s left, so he can hold a parasol with his left hand, having lost his right at Tenerife in 1797. Nelson can be identified by the gold epaulettes on his shoulders and his distinctive bicorn hat.

*****
[Read the rest at http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article7041882.ece]

Violent but Charming

The Dictionary of Old English explores the brutality and elegance of our ancestral tongue.

By Ammon Shea

“Dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none, and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.” So said Samuel Johnson, according to James Boswell—and if any man can get away with making a pithy, slightly nonsensical, yet somehow illuminating statement about the merits of dictionaries, repositories of our language, it is Johnson.

Watches and other kinds of clocks may not “go quite true” yet, but they have managed to attain such a degree of exactness that the point is largely moot. The most accurate form of timekeeper available today, a cesium fountain atomic clock, is expected to become inaccurate by no more than a single second over the next fifty-plus million years (although it is by no means clear what other clock might be used to judge the world’s most accurate timekeeper).

What of dictionaries? Have they been improved to the same extent as clocks? Is there somewhere a dictionary that is expected to be wrong by only one word in the next fifty million years?

It not only has not been done, it cannot be done, for there is no such thing as a perfect dictionary.

There are a number of reasons that a perfect (or even near perfect) dictionary is an impossibility: First, any dictionary is out of date before it is even finished. For instance, the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary began publishing in 1884 and finished some forty-four years later, by which point the editors had to begin revising it, adding the words that had assumed prominence in the intervening years. During the time that it was being compiled, the language that it defined was continuing its incorrigible and immutable process of mutability. Semantic change waits for no man.

Second, no dictionary could ever truly be comprehensive. One might very well say that a perfect dictionary would include all the words in a language. But if this were so, it would include not only the hundreds of thousands of common and not-so-common terms found in an unabridged dictionary, but also several million scientific words that are used by only a handful of professionals. To include all possible words would swamp the vernacular of the language in a sea of jargon and specialized terminology. So a perfect dictionary presents a conundrum of size: If it doesn’t include all the words, it is incomplete, and if it does, it has too much information.

Third, and perhaps the most insurmountable obstacle of all, dictionaries are intended to reflect a language as it is used, whether spoken or written, and this can never be done in anything less than an incomplete fashion. In the United States alone there are now hundreds of thousands of books being published every year. To read all of them (and many are doubtless not worth reading) and keep track of all of the word usage and meanings within would require an army of erudite madmen.

And so having established that there is no such thing as a perfect dictionary, it really is quite delightful to discover that a small team of researchers has decided to not be bothered by this minor point, and is attempting to write one anyway.

They are creating a dictionary that includes not only every single word in a specific language, but every shade of meaning that each of these words has ever had. They can do this because they have managed to collect and organize every single word of text (that we know of) that native speakers of this language have written.

This is possible because no one has been a native speaker of this language for more than eight hundred years. The lexicographic work in question is the Dictionary of Old English (DOE), currently being compiled at the University of Toronto. This team of researchers, now led by Antonette diPaolo Healey, is working from a corpus that contains every known piece of Anglo-Saxon text (some three thousand items) and is fully searchable by computer.

The DOE corpus is comprehensive, and contains about four million words, which makes it almost five times the size of the collected works of Shakespeare. It represents at least one copy of every piece of surviving Anglo-Saxon writing, although in some cases the corpus has more than a single copy of a work if it is in a different dialect or from a different date. So, by attempting to catalog a dead language (with a vocabulary more or less immune to normal linguistic change) that has a relatively minuscule number of texts to draw from, Healey and her cohorts are putting together what is, at least theoretically, a perfect dictionary.

The question is, Why do we need a dictionary of Old English?

*****
[Read the rest at http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/2010-01/OldEnglish.html]

Expat Assignments Abroad – Hard Truths About the International Aid Industry

By C. Davies in The Expat daily News

International aid is big business. Over 500,000 people are employed in it, many of them on expat contracts. Aid is a multi-million dollar industry in fact. The country where I live is more or less run by aid, over 50% of the government’s budget comes from donations, grants and loans.

When I was younger and contemplating an expat life I could think of nothing better than to be bumping along rough roads in a developing country, in my slightly scruffy linen clothes, visiting villages, listening wisely to local elders, and handing out food or advice. I fondly imagined sending home photos of me surrounded by beaming poor people, grateful for my help, and knew that I could use my skills to right the wrongs of my country’s colonial past. Naive, foolish and offensive, I know, but that was the image I developed based on the information available to me at the time.

I am a bit more cynical now!

Extended exposure to the aid industry in this country has shown me that it’s not the altruistic thing that I had thought. The main problem with aid is that it is not accountable. Business is required to set targets and report on success or failure to hit those targets. Repeated failure, mis-spending and lack of control are punished by dismissal, or collapse of the company. Lessons are learned from failure. Aid does not work like that. In fact, failure often leads to manipulated reporting to demonstrate success and good money being poured after bad.

Of course not all aid is bad, one only has to look at Haiti to see the amazing work that is being done in response to that disaster, and I have the utmost respect for the doctors and others working in appalling conditions to save lives. But it is quite likely that when disaster relief ends and reconstruction begins, so will the problems. Of course aid also has a role to play in rebuilding infrastructure that poor country governments cannot afford to invest in, but surely it also has a role to play in monitoring the quality and relevance of what is built?

I expect that you give money to charity, most adults in the West do. But what do you know about where that money really goes? What do you know about the, probably huge, sums that your country’s government spends in aid? These are questions we should all ask. After all we are part of the mass of humanity that urges politicians to cancel third world debt and “do something” about poverty. So we have the right to know where the money we want to see spent is going, and why this massive spend is apparently not working.

Here’s a hint. In many developing countries those responsible for administering aid earn salaries many thousands of times those of their local counterparts, they live in plush houses, drive luxurious vehicles and rarely get out into the field to see where your money is being spent. In fact, before your money has even got into the country a large proportion of it may have been spent on supporting the administrative arm of the relevant organisation in your own country. Aid agencies will argue that it is important to provide good conditions in order to hire the best people, and that home country administration and fund-raising is vital. But it’s a question of percentages, many agencies spend more than 20% of what is donated on looking after themselves!

The new concept in bilateral (i.e., country to country) aid is “direct budget support.” This means that large chunks of aid are given over directly to the local government for it to spend as it sees fit. A blind eye is often turned to misappropriation or mismanagement of funds, because the local government is ‘still learning!’

Where aid is directed through projects or programmes it may be invested directly in infrastructure for example, but often the amount allocated and the cost of doing the project well are not the same; so roads are built to lower specification, or not completed, hospitals are built in places where politics demands, not where the need is – and so on. There is a culture of arrogant blamelessness and a lack of introspection in the aid industry. These problems are not reported as failures so it is difficult for us, as the people giving the money, to see what has gone wrong, and by not acknowledging what has gone wrong and learning from it, the aid industry continues to pour our good money after the bad it has already wasted, always with an eye to keeping its people employed, and its budgets renewed or increased.

My cynicism has led me to move into the business sector, there at least I can see exactly what is happening with the money and the benefits we can achieve by creating jobs, training people and investing directly in them. Of course the aid issue is not as black and white as I am making out, but anyone wanting to understand more should get hold of a copy of Dambisa Moyo’s excellent book “Dead Aid” which puts forward the arguments for reforming the way we give. In the mean time, I don’t say you should stop giving, but I do say that you should ask for more information about where your money is going, so you can make an informed decision.

*****
[http://www.expatdailynews.com/2010/02/expat-assignments-abroad-hard-truths.html]

Stand Up While You Read This!

Wrong: Sitting at your cubicle. Better: Walking while clicking and talking.

By Olivia Judson in The New York Times

Your chair is your enemy.

It doesn’t matter if you go running every morning, or you’re a regular at the gym. If you spend most of the rest of the day sitting — in your car, your office chair, on your sofa at home — you are putting yourself at increased risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, a variety of cancers and an early death. In other words, irrespective of whether you exercise vigorously, sitting for long periods is bad for you.

That, at least, is the conclusion of several recent studies. Indeed, if you consider only healthy people who exercise regularly, those who sit the most during the rest of the day have larger waists and worse profiles of blood pressure and blood sugar than those who sit less. Among people who sit in front of the television for more than three hours each day, those who exercise are as fat as those who don’t: sitting a lot appears to offset some of the benefits of jogging a lot.

So what’s wrong with sitting?

The answer seems to have two parts. The first is that sitting is one of the most passive things you can do. You burn more energy by chewing gum or fidgeting than you do sitting still in a chair. Compared to sitting, standing in one place is hard work. To stand, you have to tense your leg muscles, and engage the muscles of your back and shoulders; while standing, you often shift from leg to leg. All of this burns energy.

For many people, weight gain is a matter of slow creep — two pounds this year, three pounds next year. You can gain this much if, each day, you eat just 30 calories more than you burn. Thirty calories is hardly anything — it’s a couple of mouthfuls of banana, or a few potato chips. Thus, a little more time on your feet today and tomorrow can easily make the difference between remaining lean and getting fat.

You may think you have no choice about how much you sit. But this isn’t true. Suppose you sleep for eight hours each day, and exercise for one. That still leaves 15 hours of activities. Even if you exercise, most of the energy you burn will be burnt during these 15 hours, so weight gain is often the cumulative effect of a series of small decisions: Do you take the stairs or the elevator? Do you e-mail your colleague down the hall, or get up and go and see her? When you get home, do you potter about in the garden or sit in front of the television? Do you walk to the corner store, or drive?

Just to underscore the point that you do have a choice: a study of junior doctors doing the same job, the same week, on identical wards found that some individuals walked four times farther than others at work each day. (No one in the study was overweight; but the “long-distance” doctors were thinner than the “short-distance” doctors.)

So part of the problem with sitting a lot is that you don’t use as much energy as those who spend more time on their feet. This makes it easier to gain weight, and makes you more prone to the health problems that fatness often brings.

But it looks as though there’s a more sinister aspect to sitting, too. Several strands of evidence suggest that there’s a “physiology of inactivity”: that when you spend long periods sitting, your body actually does things that are bad for you.

*****
[Read the full article at http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/23/stand-up-while-you-read-this/?8ty&emc=ty]

TamTam GPS flashlight concept to light the way

By Paul Ridden in Gizmag

The TamTam Flash concept GPS torch is both a familiar looking and new technology in a number of ways. It resembles an ordinary flashlight and its name sounds an awful lot like TomTom, which neatly links to the fact that the concept torch is actually a GPS mapping device that gives its user the option of either a street map view or a turn by turn guided navigation projected onto a surface.

The designers of the TamTam concept are hoping to cater for the kind of tourists who want to explore and experience the region in which they find themselves. “TamTam flash takes its user by the hand and on a playful discovery tour”, acting like a local guide who is small enough and portable enough to be carried in the pocket.

*****
[Read the rest at http://www.gizmag.com/tamtam-gps-flashlight-concept/14284]

Life Among the ‘Yakkity Yaks’

By BARI WEISS

‘Who do you think made the first stone spear?” asks Temple Grandin. “That wasn’t the yakkity yaks sitting around the campfire. It was some Asperger sitting in the back of a cave figuring out how to chip rocks into spearheads. Without some autistic traits you wouldn’t even have a recording device to record this conversation on.”

As many as one in 110 American children are affected by autism spectrum disorders, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Boys are four times more likely to be diagnosed than girls. But what causes this developmental disorder, characterized by severe social disconnection and communication impairment, remains a mystery.

Nevertheless, with aggressive early intervention and tremendous discipline many people with autism can lead productive, even remarkable, lives. And Ms. Grandin—doctor of animal science, ground-breaking cattle expert, easily the most famous autistic woman in the world—is one of them.

Earlier this month, HBO released a film about her to critical acclaim. Claire Danes captures her with such precision that Ms. Grandin tells me watching the movie feels like “a weird time machine” to the 1960s and ’70s and that it shows “exactly how my mind works.”

At the Manhattan screening I attended, Ms. Grandin was dressed in her trademark look—an embroidered cowboy shirt, in this case brown with a red neck kerchief—and was holding forth confidently, cracking self-deprecating jokes. Parents of children with autism thanked Ms Grandin for her books; she’s the reason they can relate to their children. Teachers asked for specific recommendations: How can they capitalize on their autistic students’ obsession with dinosaurs? A boy, perhaps 10 or 11, sought Ms. Grandin’s advice on how to deal with the bullies that pick on his nonverbal brother.

Her cadence is unusual, staccato-like, and her pale blue eyes sometimes drift off into the distance. But she seems a different person from the young woman in the film, for whom being hugged, let alone schmoozing at a cocktail party, seemed physically painful. What’s changed?

“The thing about being autistic is that you gradually get less and less autistic,” she says, “because you keep learning, you keep learning how to behave. It’s like being in a play; I’m always in a play.”

*****
[Read the full article at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB40001424052748703525704575061123564007514.html]

Water Bobble

A beautifully designed and patented water bottle with its own filter. A steal at $10

*****
[www.waterbobble.com via http://www.likecool.com/Water_Bobble--Outdoor--Home.html]