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.

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.

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.

DENMARK: Alphologists at the University of Billund, Denmark have announced the discovery of the 27th letter of the English Alphabet. The letter, which has yet to be named, was uncovered during library renovations over the Easter Break. Professor Olaf Proil who identified the letter said the discovery was a complete surprise:

“Alphologists think there are plenty of letters waiting to be discovered, but that most of these lie out in the far reaches of the alphabet, far beyond the punctuation marks and the symbols you get on cellphones. What is so surprising is that this letter is near the middle of the alphabet, between Q and R. It is an extremely small letter, which may explain why no-one had noticed it before. We think it may have been hidden behind the tail, or pesce which comes out of the Q.”

The site of the proposed missing letter.
© Olaf Proil, Pål Foilor, University of Billund

The find is set to be controversial when it is presented at the International Alphological Union next month. One professor has already dismissed the new letter.

“We get this kind of headline every few years and each time it’s proven to be nonsense. It’s almost certainly a variant of another letter, just like there are two variants of writing a lower-case A. This was settled a couple of years ago when the IAU elected to designate such things as dwarf letters.”

History will prove me right

Proil nevertheless claims there is historical proof this is indeed a missing letter.

“There’s clear evidence that this letter dates back to the Dark Ages. A close examination of A History of England by the Venerable Bede shows there are elements missing from the page. Previously historians have argued these were spaces, or possibly that he’d forgotten to dip his quill in the ink. Documented Viking raids on Lindisfarne, the monastery where the Vulnerable Bede wrote his history, could well have taken the letter back to Denmark as booty along with the gold and jewels.”

Proil speculates that the letter could be even older:

“We have references to Celtic texts in Roman histories, but so far all Celtic material seems to use the Roman Alphabet which was imposed on them when the emperor Maximus invaded their territory. It is possible some Celtic letters were smuggled to Britain during the Roman invasion and hidden from the conquerors. We need to carbon-date it, but we may have the first prehistoric letter.”

Media Controversy

Dr. Pål Foilor who has assisted Prof. Proil in his work admits that there have been problems in announcing the letter to the public.

“My first reaction was email all my friends with the exciting news. That’s when I realised I couldn’t, because the letter wasn’t on my keyboard!”

Foilor has been working with Compaq to produce a downloadable version of the letter which users will be able to type by pressing Q and R similtaneously.

“Compaq are the obvious choice for any computing work requiring heavy-duty lexicography. They’ve been safely using a ‘q’ without a ‘u’ buffer on their products for years. The saving by using Compaq makes it 14% more eco-friendly than Compaqu. That’s the kind of expertise we need in reproducing the new letter.”

Not everyone has been so positive. Major cellphone manufacturers are skeptical about the new letter’s use. Avril Poisson of the American Cellphone Federation said:

“While new letters might seem like fun, we shouldn’t forget there’s a cost too. The number 7 on cellphones already hosts P,Q, R and S. Adding a new letter between Q and R could overload the key and mean we lose the use of 7, which is the world’s luckiest number.”

Family groups have also urged caution, noting that the new letter might be used to promote drugs, pornography and women’s rights. Bill Donohue, of the Catholic League, is said to be angry - though experienced Donahologists are as yet uncertain if this is about the letter.

Nonetheless Prof Proil says that he is looking forward to the unveiling of the letter at noon. “While the letter is tiny, the possibilities are huge, I think its small size could make it particularly useful when describing sub-atomic particles.”

The Discovery Channel will be covering the event live in their program “The Lost Letter”.

Other programs covering the letter in the following week will be a BBC Horizon Special and the History Channel’s “The Secret Letter of the Third Reich.”

[Compiled from a press release by the University of Billund and stories around the web]

Mitchell and Webb discuss how we triumphed.

It also seems they may have identified the best candidate for the next big professorial post in Ancient History.

Links that I’ve bookmarked in the past few days should be below the fold.

If Jimmy Carr ever decides the comedy isn’t working out he could make a living as Lloyd Cole look-alike in my opinion. This is one of Lloyd Cole’s overlooked works. Though that pretty much describes everything he’s done post-Commotions.

I’m still working through my RSS backlog and wouldn’t have known about this if I hadn’t noticed a post from Rogue Classicism. I’m not really qualified to talk about him personally. We only exchanged a few of emails, but he was always helpful. I can’t really comment academically either, his professional influence was extraordinarily wide ranging as a read through his entries on the Stoa will show.

It’s a cliché to say that someone’s death is a great loss, but sometimes clichés are true.

There’s an obituary at the Stoa and a post on his influence by Tom Elliot.

It shouldn’t be news. I mentioned the possibility in 2005, and again late last year. When you buy unprovenanced antiquities you don’t know who you’re buying them from.

Now the Ashland Daily Tidings reports on the work by Matthew Bogdanos, which he says shows that the connection between the trade in illicit antiquities and Islamic insurgents is undeniable. Yes, you read that right. It turns out some members of Al-Qaeda are prone to criminal activity.

Despite that fair-play to Antonia Kimbell at the Art Loss Register who said that she’s seen no evidence of a direct link. The way the Art Loss Register works is they check a database of illicit artefacts. Obviously that means that someone needs to have registered an artefact as illicit, but that’s not a problem so long as Al-Qaeda remember to fill out the paperwork.

I went to look at David Gill’s blog to fact check the workings of the Art Loss Register because Kimbell’s comments seemed unfeasibily moronic. I can’t believe someone that credulous would be able to hold down a job at the Art Loss Register if it worked the way I described it. But it does, and David Gill is also blogging this story.

There’s a lot of things I’d like to see happen with the Iraqi occupation. One is that I’d like to see UK and US governments support our soldiers by making it harder for ‘art collectors’ to fund the enemy. If you’d like to read more about how you can fund the killing of British and American soldiers and pick up a nice antiquity into the bargain then you can read Looting Matters, Illicit Cultural Property and Safe Corner.

Links that I’ve bookmarked in the past few days should be below the fold.