Still busy…

…hence no post on the Antikythera Mechanism. That won’t be appearing till October at the earliest as there’s some really odd stuff in the original papers.

The thing that puzzles me most is what is month Dodekateaus about? Is this ‘12th Month’ or a month when there’s a festival to twelve gods?

From arXiv there’s also
Is Faith The Enemy Of Science?
and
Comment on “Is Faith the Enemy of Science?”

You plagiarist!

You plagiarist, this is by Richard Hinckley Allen

Anonymous on July 23, 2008 at 7:32 pm

A comment left on the Solar Zodiac entry written by, as anonymous said, Richard Hinckley Allen. It seems when the entries were imported from the archaeoastronomy.co.uk site RHA’s entries were credited to me because he doesn’t have a WordPress account. I could set one up for him and then correct all the entries, but I really don’t have the time and there’s now plenty of sites with RHA’s text on display, so instead I’m deleting them.

I imagine the same has happened to the Hadrian’s Wall posts, so I’ll take them down when I get time.

If you want to read RHA’s thoughts on star names I’d recommend Bill Thayer’s site.

+ve on Bonekickers

To clarify, I am not being at all sarcastic when I say I’m positive about Bonekickers. The first episode wasn’t brilliant, but first episodes of any series tend to be poor because not only are they introducing a story, they’re introducing characters. The entire first season of Star Trek:TNG and DS9 are poor, but with characters established they improved massively. The perpetual problem with new Doctor Who is that each series introduces a new assistant or new Doctor which causes problems for developing stories. So in light of that, the current shallowness of the characters in Bonekickers is understandable.

It would also be easy to go through and pick every point that made me laugh during the show. I could do the same for 1960s era Batman. Like picking apart Batman I’m not sure there’d be much point to it. There are some problems though. There are certain assumptions about reality which have to hold. It might be possible to have a Bat-microscope which can view inside atoms, but you can bet Batman will have to use his open eye to view it. Similarly there are certain basic archaeological assumptions and this clip shows where they get it wrong.

The line about ‘get in the trench or out of it’ is an echo of what had been said to the archaeologist earlier in the show. That’s not been commented on much because the bit where they yank out the wood has caused howls of derision. I think this is fair because prior to this jargon and technobabble was getting dropped to show how they were serious archaeologists. The public know that wood rots and this isn’t plausible. My reaction would be if it’s the holy cross then surely all bets are off, but people don’t think like that. There have to be some basic foundations which the drama is built on and this scene breaks them.

That aside, if you look at the assumptions Bonekickers uses then it’s actually very positive towards archaeology. The programme shows archeologists in a largely flattering light. They appear almost normal. The reason the Head of the Department is odious is that real archaeologists don’t go chasing media attention. This comes up a couple of times.

The technobabble emphasises that this is a mentally demanding profession. Often engineers or biologists in TV shows are shown giving things their best guess. In contrast the archaeologists in this series Know What They Are Talking About. They have a wide range of skill sets, but this is the basis of how they know stuff rather than just making it up.

Two of the four central characters are from ethnic minorities. I don’t know of a single archaeological department in the UK that has more than one non-white lecturer. I would be delighted if that’s down to my ignorance rather an accurate reflection of reality. Nonetheless universities as a whole and archaeology in particular are struggling to recruit ethnic-minorities onto courses, which isn’t going to help representation at staff levels.

The assumptions aren’t all helpful. Bonekickers lives in its own financial universe so the lab, which serves the same function as the Batcave or Torchwood Hub, is amazingly well equipped. This is probably a dramatic necessity. Carbon dates and post-ex analysis needs to be supplied fast to keep the story moving, but that means that Wessex University must have a bottomless pit of money for the archaeology department. It’s also amusing that the lead character lives on Bath’s Royal Crescent. This must mean she’s independently wealthy, but there’s also the assumption that the workers have a living wage, which any field archaeologist will find hard to swallow.

There are oddities. The insistence that they have an archaeological consultant seems a bit po-faced. Thanks to Daniel Petts at the PAS, I know Mark Horton has been saying what his role was. Star Trek also has scientific consultants who they ask about physics before deciding the problem can be solved by running warp power through the deflector. I don’t think they make a big deal of it though. On the plus side next week’s episode might bear some resemblance to a project Mark Horton has been working on concerning a ship found in the Bristol channel. That sounds like a way of getting the political implications of archaeology out for discussion. He also says that it’s funnier.

They say a good wine critic is judged by the wine he rejects. Certainly the safe option would be to pan Bonekickers and thus imply that my work is far superior. Perhaps there are medics who berate Green Wing for its unrealism. I think that would be missing the point and the same goes for Bonekickers. It’s not an out-and-out comedy but I don’t think it is meant to be entirely serious either, else it’d be called something like The Unsilent Grave. I think it could be a good series given the opportunity.

Bonekickers

I’ve got far more emails about this than the Stonehenge thing that was on earlier this summer. I liked it. If you haven’t had chance to see it, it’s a cross between Torchwood and 1960s era Batman. It could do with a bit more Police Squad in the mix. It wasn’t brilliant but first episodes never are (except for Due South). There’s a lot to be positive about and it has potential. The archaeologists come across as almost normal. As for accuracy, ok it’s close to Mitchell and Webb’s medical drama.

I’ll try and write up more about what it seems everyone else is missing when I get a break.

Still not here

I’m in the final months of the PhD and family members are queuing up to be hospitalised, so I don’t have a lot of reliable time to be social in. As a result I’m still not planning on blogging much in the foreseeable future, but I’m getting more of an idea of what I will be doing.

I will have a public weblog so when I’m ready and able to publicly converse things will appear. It may be here. It may be at Phreadz, Viddyou or Blip.tv. Bizarrely video is proving slightly faster to talk with than writing and Seesmic/Phreadz/Viddyou all look like they could make video chat feasible.

I also have a personal/research weblog. This is not listed on Google which means I can put up drafts, sketches and ideas open for collaboration without it counting as prior publication. If you get hits from an odd looking site that’s me. It exists because I find some ideas distracting so I can blog them in a morning and get them out of my head and on with work. I’m not going to be very social there either. I won’t be advertising it and I’d be hugely grateful if the RSS wasn’t re-published elsewhere because that would eliminate the whole point of not listing it on Google. Anything remotely sane from that weblog will probably cross over to here anyway.

Elsewhere on the web

I was in the April newsletter of the Study Group for Roman Pottery with An Introduction to recent developments in open access and the on-line dissemination of information. I’m pretty certain I didn’t come up with the title as it makes far too much sense. It’s probably a preview of a talk I’ll be giving at the IFA conference next year. I think that’ll be the first Archaeology conference I’ll have been to for a few years as I’ve tended to go to the Classics conferences instead.

There’s photos. I was at the Ashmolean yesterday. I’ve also found some 200 photos in a block which were marked private. I’ve unlocked the British Museum photos. Quite a few are duplicates of what’s up but there’s some new stuff too.

Apart from that I’m still working.

Well, someone needs therapy

Still too busy to blog and when I do return it won’t be here. Possibly back in late June.

Someone posing as Creationist C. David Parsons went on a bit of a spree last night posting various homophobic comments across a number of blogs. They seemed to have a bit too high opinion of their intellect and there were some clues this wasn’t genuine Parsons lunacy but an impostor. I assume it’s someone’s idea of a jape to mock a creationist. It’s no challenge or effort and can be fun sometimes. More often I feel pity rather than amused by creationist ignorance, but there you go.

What is ugly about this action though is the casual dropping homophobia into the comments. Many creationists are homophobes, but it’s not a universal so there’s two problems. One is that it’s dishonest. Y’know the whole ‘lying for Jesus’ schtick that creationists get right mocked for. That’s not an invitation to ‘lie for reality’. It’s a particularly bad idea for a pro-humanist to do this because there’s already enough smears that evolution is a hoax out there. This bonfire doesn’t need any more wood chucking on it by someone who can’t stand by his own ideas.

The other problem is that the defence on many blogs is that Darwin wasn’t homosexual. That’s true. He documented his attraction a woman, so at best he was bisexual, which is a whole different bundle of fun. What bothers me about these denials is that it reinforces the old ‘homosexuality is something to be ashamed of’ cliché. Darwin could have serviced 20 sailors a night for all it matters. So long as it was consensual I couldn’t care less. It has bugger all to do with the veracity of evolution. Feeding the whole Homosexuality = Anal Sex stereotype might seem amusing, but in reality it plays into strengthening homophobic attitudes. There’s a lot more to homosexuality than penetration, even if that it’s the obsession of some men who are scared by their own sexuality. Foreplay is not just a golfing term.

So rather like the creationists, I can’t help but feel pity for whoever it was. You have to feel pity for someone who has lost their grip on reality to such an extent they introduce themselves by exhibiting their own sexual insecurities. They’ve pretty much become what they find so objectionable. Though I can offer some helpful advice - if you are after some intimate attention, I wouldn’t leap straight to the end.* Try and establish if there’s mutual interest. I’m sure there’s some websites around where you could find discreet ways of indicating your desires.

Thanks to Brian Larnder at Primordial Blog for speaking about his concerns over this.

Additional:

The blog the comment linked to was attributed to Corey Washington. Corey Washington appears to be informed well informed about how to impersonate someone on Blogger because he claims he recently caught someone else doing it (not a pleasant link). Unfortunately he didn’t learn well enough. Scroll to the bottom and click on Corey Washington’s name for his profile. Yes, that’s the Quest for Right blog listed as his.

*Unintentional double-entendre.

Few posts for the foreseeable future

I’m not planning to update this site for the foreseeable future, unless I have announcements of articles which have come out. Ongoing family problems mean that I have very little free time. I’m using the break to have another rethink about what I can do with a weblog. If anything new does happen it may not happen till 2009.

The Carnival of Space - One year old!

Congratulations to Henry Cate and Fraser Cain on the one year anniversary of the Carnival of Space. The anniversary edition is up at Henry Cate’s weblog. It’s a particularly notable achievement because this carnival is weekly which puts a lot of pressure on the organisers.

I should also mention Fraser Cain’s article on The Value of Space Exploration, which I forgot to link to last month.

Busy…

I’ve sent off a couple of urgent articles in the past couple of weeks and set up an experiment to run later this month in the Physics department - hence the silence. I’m hoping to get back on top of things this weekend.

Though I said that last weekend.

In the meantime I’ve been interviewed.

Oh and because I can’t resist a quick gadget I’ve had a play with the new video facilities at Flickr. They’re rather good.