07 Feb 2007
Prehistoric lovers found locked in embrace

The more things change, the more they stay the same. These kinds of finds from the Neolithic hold a lot more significance than most folks realize:

"The Neolithic is a very formative period for our society," said Luca Bondioli, an anthropologist at Rome's National Prehistoric and Ethnographic Museum. "It was when the roots of our religious sentiment were formed."

If you want to understand the tree, be it an oak or a family, take a good long look at the roots.

Archaeologists have unearthed two skeletons from the Neolithic period locked in a tender embrace and buried outside Mantua. The site is just 25 miles south of Verona, the romantic city where Shakespeare set the star-crossed tale of "Romeo and Juliet."

(link) [CNN]

22:48 /Asatru | 0 comments | permanent link

Down and dirty

Interesting construction technique. I wonder what the foundations are like in these homes with new dirt floors? I wonder if they'd be chilly like tile, or if the earth would hold heat like a rug? Certainly something to think about, from a lot of angles.

Forget the rug. The latest thing in floor coverings is mud.

(link) [New York Times]

22:45 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link

Senator to propose surveillance of illegal images

Political grandstanding? Who knows, but this bit of boneheadedness would certainly chip away at our few remaining liberties. Note that it's already mandatory for ISP's to report kiddie porn - this bill goes a lot further. For example, all all of these girls over 18? Who has their age statements on file? And isn't that a depiction of bestiality?

My point is that we should tread very gingerly when declaring whole classes of images to be "illegal", lest we throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Proposal from Sen. John McCain would force Internet providers to report illegal images, even "cartoons."

(link) [CNET News.com]

22:38 /Politics | 0 comments | permanent link

U.S. sent pallets of cash to Baghdad

The next "conservative" Republican that opens his mouth about the evils of "income redistribution" should get a black eye after this ... un-freaking believable.

Reuters - The U.S. Federal Reserve sent record payouts of more than $4 billion in cash to Baghdad on giant pallets aboard military planes shortly before the United States gave control back to Iraqis, lawmakers said on Tuesday.

(link) [Yahoo! News: Top Stories]

Update: A commenter points out that I skipped the second paragraph of the Yahoo piece linked above -

The money, which had been held by the United States, came from Iraqi oil exports, surplus dollars from the U.N.-run oil-for-food program and frozen assets belonging to the ousted Saddam Hussein regime.

So to a certain extent, I suppose, it is indeed Iraqi money. The paragraph was skipped as it didn't show up in my RSS feed, and I already had caught the gist of the tale from other sources, none of which mentioned the alleged source of the funds.

So why was it in dollars and not dinars? Why not transfer via wire to the central bank (which was functioning by December of 2003)?

But I do stand corrected: if this was in fact Iraqi cash, then no income redistribution took place. I guess I'll have to wait for the next round of Republican corporate welfare to excoriate them properly ...

22:17 /Politics | 1 comment | permanent link