HoodedHawk

This is the story of the Archimedes palimpsest (hidden writing). Basically, a medieval prayer book was created by taking parchment from several ancient codices (books), scraping off the old text and re-using the parchment to create a new book. One of these ancient manuscripts happened to be a copy (the earliest surviving) of Archimedes Codex C.

The old prayer book/palimpsest was purchased in 1998 at auction for $2 million. The new owner entrusted William Noel, the curator of the Walters Museum in Baltimore with the book in order to unlock it’s secrets. Reviel Netz is a Stanford University classicist, and the two alternate chapters.

I was more interested in the technology used to uncover the Archimedes text than in the text itself. However, the majority of the book concerns the text itself and how it contributes to our understanding of Greek mathematics (geometry, combinatorics, etc.). Turns out that at some point in the last 100 years 4 forged religious paintings were added to the manuscript. These made deciphering the underlying text on these pages especially difficult. Only the last 20 pages or so of this book deals with how they got past this – via high-powered X-rays. This is what initially caught my attention: they used one of the beamlines at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) to do X-ray absorption studies on the manuscript. This revealed the hidden text via the Fe (iron) in the original Archimedes text’s ink.

In a previous life I actually did some experiments at SLAC using one of the high energy X-ray beam lines [1].

I think Noel is either being tongue-in-cheek (I hope so) or else is actually a new-earth creationist. At one point while discussing parchment (made from sheep skin) he says that sheep skin evolved “or was intelligently designed” with more antibiotic properties on the side facing the outside. In another passage, when discussing dates found in the codex, he says the dates as written were from the “origin of the earth” which “as everyone knows was ~5500 BC”. Again, I hope he was being tongue-in-cheek and doesn’t really believe that the earth is 7,000 years old! But that’s a minor nit and doesn’t detract from the book.

Interestingly (and sadly), as described in the book, most of the damage and deterioration of the Palimpsest took place not in the distant past, but in the 20th century. The book today is very mold damaged, brittle, and some of the pages are actually glued(!) together at the binding. This hinders reading of the underlying text, to say the least.

[1] Biochemistry 35: 12241-12250 (1996)
Structural Investigations on the Coordination Environment of the Active-Site Copper Centers of Recombinant Bifunctional Peptidylglycine alpha-Amidating Enzyme
John S. Boswell, Brian J. Reedy, Raviraj Kulathila, David Merkler, and Ninian J. Blackburn

This is book one of Virga. The story takes place inside a planetoid-sized balloon world called Virga. We don’t know much about the outside, but inside Virga is a world of wooden “ships” and swordfights. Some tech does remain (the “suns” are small fusion reactors that give off light for simulated daylight) but most of the story involves intrigue and “naval” battles. Since the people are inside a sphere, there is no gravity unless they create some by spinning their habitats.

Hayden Griffin is a main character, from the nation of Aerie. He is orphaned when Aerie is attacked and taken over by the neighboring nation of Slipstream. Keep in mind that nations are more like city-states, and consist of various wooden habitats all strung together (usually around one of the artificial suns). They all free-float in the world of Virga, and so their absolute position within Virga changes. Hayden’s parents had been trying to build an artificial sun for Aerie when they were attacked. Hayden grows up, and has only revenge on his mind – to kill Admiral Chaison Fanning, who led the expedition that killed his parents.

Venera is the admiral’s scheming wife, and throws a spanner into Hayden’s plans. Eventually Hayden gets a job as Venera’s driver, and they both travel on the admiral’s ship, Rook. Lots of adventures ensue. This is a fun read, once you accept the premise of a balloon world with wooden ships (and just where does all this wood come from?). It would be interesting to learn more about the outside world, but perhaps in a sequel (which is already out). One of the characters – a beautiful armorer, Aubrie – is from the outside. She has made a deal with the admiral to help him with his plan to defeat a neighboring state that is about to invade.

I didn’t particularly like the ending, but then, I’m more of a romantic. I’m not rushing out to read the sequel, but it is in my queue, so I’ll get to it someday.

Brandon and I went to see Carbon Leaf last Thursday (Dec 13, 2007) at the 9:30 Club in DC. Carbon Leaf is a local (Virginia) band, and has about 6 albums out. Only the last two CD’s have had national exposure. I only recently heard of them while browsing on iTunes. I grabbed Indian Summer and loved it.

This was Brandon’s first concert and the band didn’t disappoint. He wasn’t very into the warmup band and spent that time watching a movie on my pda. However, once Carbon Leaf came on and started playing his expression changed and he had a good time. The band allows recording, so I videotaped the concert (at left is a still). Very enjoyable! I definitely recommend seeing them live.

Last week I went to a lecture on the Stonehenge Riverside Project, by Professor Michael Parker Pearson. Prof. Pearson spoke for almost 2 hours; he is a very engaging speaker. I videotaped the lecture (got a nice front-row seat); the shot at left is a still from the lecture.

This was part of National Geographic’s “Live” series of lectures on the past [I also attended the Maya lecture]. Nice venue, and they open the employee parking lot (right under the lecture hall) for the public on these evenings. Very convenient as parking in DC is nasty.

The true purpose of Stonehenge is not known, but they are trying to answer that question in the context of the wider surrounding area – which hold other monuments such as Woodhenge and Durrington Walls. The talk focused mostly on Durrington Walls, where the floors of neolithic dwellings are being excavated. It is thought that these may well have been the houses of the workers who actually built stonehenge.

Western Digital is crippling their network-ready drives. That d*mn RIAA again! Don’t bother getting them if you want to serve up your mp3 or avi (movie) files. Doesn’t matter if you are doing so legally. According to the WD tech support site:

Due to unverifiable media license authentication, the following file types cannot be shared by different users using WD Anywhere Access.

If these file types are on a share on the WD My Book World Edition system and another user accesses the share, these file will not be displayed for sharing. Any other file types can be shared using WD Anywhere Access.

The filetypes include .mp3, .avi, etc. Why in the world else would you need a one Terabyte server on your home network but to serve up media files?

On a related note, I returned two 500GB WD “MyBook” external drives because it turns out they have a bug in the firmware that prevents more than one firewire drive mounting at the same time. Defeated my purpose of having one of the drives as a backup!