Links

Grumble. According to the Daily Kos, Tim Robbins gave a good speech to the National Press Club. The excerpt they have is good.

Unfortunately, Salon has the full text of the speech, and their daypass system seems to be broken — I haven’t been able to successfully get through with any browser on either my Mac or my PC, I either get a blank page or the browser crashes.

So…it’s probably good, and I could probably recommend reading it. I’m just not sure.

This made me laugh — The Penis Blog Project.

Needless to say, this is NSFW (Not Safe For Work), and an open mind and good sense of humor is encouraged.

[Disclaimer: I’m not part of this project. Just so’s ya know.]

(via Dyanna)

While many mourn the loss of innumerable historic artifacts (excellent link via Shelley Powers) as one of the many tragedies of the current conflict in Iraq, work progresses in Italy at using infrared imaging to recover writings from charred rolls of papyrus recovered from the ruins around Vesuvius.

The ceremony begins with the presentation of a small plaque to the contingent from BYU. Booras and his colleague Roger MacFarlane, a younger man in a seersucker jacket and a natty bow tie, step up to receive it almost bashfully. On a lectern to one side of the room sits a larger plaque the visitors presented to the library earlier. It displays two different pictures of the same scrap of papyrus. One shows neat lines of Greek lettering. The other is utterly illegible, a ground zero of text. The difference between them is Steve Booras’ camera.

Booras and his team have recorded images of every piece of Herculaneum papyrus in the library: 25,000 images on 345 CDs. The images were made with a high-quality digital camera. More important, most of them were also made with infrared filters. On a legible papyrus seen under normal light, the ink appears black because it absorbs the light; the papyrus reflects it. The carbonized fibers of the Herculaneum scrolls, however, absorb light just as well as the ink does, making the background a distinctly low-contrast black. But the papyrus does not absorb infrared wavelengths quite as readily; in the infrared, there is still contrast.

Most of the scrolls uncovered so far have been written by first-century philosopher and poet Philodemus, leading to conjecture that the owner of the villa where the scrolls were found may have been trying to save Philodemus’ work specifically — but there may be far more in the as-yet unearthed sections of the ruins.

Details of Philodemus’ biography are scarce. It’s not known when he was born or died, how long he spent in Alexandria (possibly) or Athens (definitely). It’s not known which, if any, of the various women featured in his often bawdy poetry might have been his wife, though the ones who required pay can probably be ruled out. But it is known that when he settled in Italy, he did so under the patronage of a high-powered plutocrat — Lucius Calpurnius Piso, one of the richest Romans of his day, scourge of Cicero and father-in-law to Caesar.

Why, then, were the uncovered works more or less all by Philodemus? One answer is that these papyruses were in the process of being saved from the disaster when the mud rolled over the villa, the boiling sea lapping at its lower terraces. The papyruses were discovered scattered along the colonnades, some loose, some in packing cases, as though they were in transit. The writings of Philodemus, goes the argument, had a special emotional value to Piso’s heirs, because Philodemus had once lived in the villa. So when the volcano erupted, slaves were sent to gather the scrolls and carry them down to the shore, where boats would take them to safety with the rest of the household. The bulk of the library — works by more famous hands, but not as precious to the family and more easily replaced — was abandoned. According to this theory, some buried part of the palace may contain a collection of ancient texts too commonplace to have been worth saving then and too valuable to ignore now.

Who knows what treasures may yet wait to be discovered, both around Vesuvius, in other areas of the world — and hopefully, eventually, once again in Iraq.

This hurt to read:

The world’s first written words may have been lost forever. After surviving for more than 5,000 years, distinctive clay tablets that are recognised as the root of all mankind’s written communication have either been destroyed or stolen in yesterday’s looting of the Iraqi national museum.

In addition to the tablets containing cuneiform writing – which utilises symbols chipped into the clay using wedge-shaped tools – thieves also took some of the world’s earliest examples of mathematics. These include calculations that have directly led to the modern system of timekeeping using hours, minutes and seconds based on the number six.

My lord. This website went overbudget and cost four million dollars. I need a web design job for the Australian government.

(via MeFi)

Time Magazine has a special issue out now where to celebrate their 80th anniversary, they pick eighty days that changed the world — their choice for the 80 most important days of the past 80 years. Very, very cool, and I think it’ll be worth picking up a copy of the magazine, in addition to pouring through the web version.

Going through the dates they chose reminded me a lot of my ‘Where were you?’ post from a little over a year ago. I might tie the two together at some point. Or maybe not. Who knows?

(via MeFi)

Here’s an interesting ongoing art/design project: The news in type. Each day, the designer is taking one headline and finding a way to render it typographically. Quite a few good interpretations in there — this is another of my favorites.

(via Jason Kottke)

San Francisco photographer Michael Koller is working on a project he calls Seamless City — a continously stitched together photograph of a thirty mile walk around San Francisco.

(via BoingBoing)