HoodedHawk

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!

A Norwegian boy was able to escape death (and save his sister) when attacked by a moose by using skills he learned playing World of Warcraft.

Seems the boy and his sister were walking in the woods when they were attacked by a moose (moose bites hurt). He shouted at the mouse to distract it from his sister (she ran away), then as the huge moose stood over him, the boy feigned death , “just like I learned to do on level 30 of World of Warcraft”. The moose apparently was fooled and trotted off.

A recent paper in Science used genetic analysis of ancient Neandertal DNA to show that at least some individuals had red hair and fair skin (similar to their modern European counterparts). The researchers were able to extract a pigmentation gene, mc1r, from the bones of two Neandertals (one from Spain, the other Italy).

The picture at right is a reconstruction of what a Neandertal who possessed these particular genes would have looked like.

The same researchers also recently isolated the FOXP2 gene from Neandertals, and showed that it was identical to modern humans. The FOXP2 gene is one of the genes known to play a major role in speech and language. Since the Neandertals had an identical version of this gene, they may well have had the capacity for speech.

The boys and I went to see a production of Macbeth this past Sunday. It was by the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company, based in Ellicott City, MD. The venue is a small theater (seats about 100). Acoustics are good, and I didn’t have any problem hearing the actors. It didn’t hurt, I guess, that we were in the front row. :)

The actor playing Banquo came out into the lobby before the play and using pictures and diagrams he explained the play to the kids. I like that part, since it at least gives them a fighting chance to understand what is going on (since even I have a hard time following spoken Shakespeare; an eight-year-old gets lost quickly). The play was very well-performed. I hadn’t seen Macbeth performed before so I can’t compare it to a like performance, but this acting company is excellent. If you can’t make it to Macbeth before it ends in December, I can definitely recommend any other productions by this company – I’ve been to 3 or 4 now and have never been disappointed.