September 28, 2011 · 10:35 AM

Obscure technologies, part 6

The revolver camera from 1938. This is, of course, just a scaled down version of the gun cameras that are still used today on military aircraft to facilitate damage assessment and help evaluate tactics. Unfortunately, this smaller version doesn’t seem to have caught on. I can’t seem to find any information on how well the camera survived the shock of the revolver firing, but that might have been a reason why it was not successful.

Today it should be fairly easy to design a system that would work, though, even possibly one that records video with sound. In fact, it might be a good idea to equip police firearms with recording devices that would help with the investigation that follows a shooting.

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September 23, 2011 · 9:42 PM

Dr. Donald Johanson

Last night Catherine and I spent a very enjoyable evening listening to Dr. Donald Johanson, who gave a talk at Truckee Meadows Community College. This was the first time I’d heard Johanson speak. His talk was both entertaining and educational, and of course, much of it was about Lucy and her significance in understanding human evolution.

There was, however, just one minor thing that bothered me a bit. When Johanson described how he first discovered the fossilized skeleton on Nov. 24, 1974, he mentioned several times that one of his students was with him, but he never once mentioned that student’s name (Tom Gray, according to other sources that I’ve read).

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September 22, 2011 · 1:22 PM

NY Times article on Çatalhöyük

A good brief update on the continuing work to understand this very important Neolithic site. As an undergraduate I read James Mellaart’s book on Çatalhöyük in my Intro. to Archaeology class. I remember being struck by that fact that he seemed to pay much more attention to the artwork than to the fact that he found two physically distinct populations buried there, although there are no apparent signs of social differentiation. I wondered who those people were, and what was the nature of their association.

At the end of the Times article is a quote from the field director, Shahina Farid, that I particularly like: “People always ask what’s the best thing you’ve ever dug up? And I don’t know because it’s not an item, it’s a story. It’s the story that goes with it that excites me.”

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September 19, 2011 · 6:34 PM

Seeing and hearing in language

Here’s a great video illustrating an illusion called the McGurk Effect, in which a sound that is seen to be spoken overrides the sound that is heard. This touches on both the linguistic and the biological sides of anthropology. Not my particular specialty, but interesting nevertheless.

Interestingly, in an episode of Superman: The Animated Series, the character Mxyzptlk is first seen walking through town looking for somebody named “McGurk”. Given that the episode revolved around speaking a very hard to pronounce name, I have to wonder if the reference was simply a coincidence.

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September 16, 2011 · 6:12 PM

Dinosaur feathers

Found preserved in amber in Canada. I’m old enough to remember when dinosaurs were slow moving, cold blooded, and scaly. And their tails all dragged on the ground. At the ripe old age of six I took a book on dinosaurs to school and was annoyed to discover that my teacher could not pronounce the names properly. (Looking back, the lesson that teachers don’t know everything, and that I needed to research things myself may have been the most important thing I ever learned in school.)

Anyway, this finding is very cool.

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September 9, 2011 · 1:12 PM

Advice for heroines

Especially in action or horror genres. When you’ve managed to clobber the serial killer/rapist/monster/whatever over the head and he’s laying stretched out on the floor, DO NOT SIMPLY RUN AWAY AND LEAVE HIM FOR DEAD! It only takes a moment to grab something sharp and slash his carotid artery, thus avoiding enormous difficulties later in the story. (You do carry at least a pen knife, right? A responsible adult should no more leave the house without a knife than they would without their keys.)

I’m just saying.

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September 7, 2011 · 6:22 PM

Space archaeology

NASA has just released a group of photos showing the Apollo landing sites taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft. From an archaeological standpoint, these photos are important for two main reasons. First, they document the current condition of some of the most significant cultural heritage sites in existence. The lunar landing sites certainly should be preserved for future generations, and the first step to preserving any site is determining what condition it is in right now.

Second, photos like these are important because they help improve our understanding of what happens to objects left on the lunar surface. Archaeologists use the term taphonomy to refer to the various decay processes that occur after an artifact or feature enters the archaeological record (i.e. gets abandoned or lost). Understanding these processes is crucial to making sense of the remains that we find in the field. Because we have been exploring space for such a short time, detailed information on long-term environmental processes is hard to come by, and still largely theoretical. This set of photos will help provide the data that future space archaeologists will draw upon.

 

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September 2, 2011 · 12:58 PM

DIY Railroad

What do you do when you have a railroad track but no trains? You build them yourself, of course.

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August 31, 2011 · 8:07 PM

Sometimes the good guys win

It looks like more and more courts are not going along with police departments that try to stop citizens from recording police officers in public. Just the other day, the First Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling that not only is recording the police an activity that is protected under the First Amendment, but that the officers who wrongfully arrested a Massachusetts man for doing so can be sued.

However, it looks like the state of Illinois didn’t get the message. As reported by NBC Wabash affiliate, the state attorney general is trying to send a man to prison for doing exactly the same thing. In this case, if the facts are as reported, the violation is so blatant that both the attorney general and the arresting officer(s) really ought to face arrest and prison themselves. However, I will be quite happy if the First Circuit Court precedent results in them being sued for everything they’ve got. This “we watch you, you don’t watch us” crap needs to stop NOW.

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August 30, 2011 · 7:31 PM

Slow blog week

I’ve mostly been spending my free time catching up on my reading, both fiction and non-fiction. In the latter category, I’m being slowed by the fact that every time I finish a chapter in the Handbook of North American Indians, I want to go back and read the more detailed ethnographic sources cited therein. Fortunately (or possibly unfortunately) many of them are available online. As a result, I’ve been spending a lot of time in the company of A.L. Kroeber, Anna Gayton, Edward Gifford, and even Stephen Powers.

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