Month: December 2006

Blogging to tagging

you may have noticed that this blog is far less active than it used to be. i blame del.icio.us. the opportunity to write pithy one-liners instead of rambling posts is just too attractive. if you want to enjoy those, either join my network (preferred, i like to know who enjoys my stuff) or subscribe to my del.icio.us feed, or both.

i also went ahead and added tags on here. You can now read all posts tagged with science. i also blend in the appropriate del.icio.us results at the bottom.

if you are feed-challenged, you can also follow the latest del.icio.us links on the side bar on my blog. otherwise, i recommend google reader.

Pyramids built with concrete blocks

This makes me wonder if the whole pyramids business was really a japanese-style ploy to bolster the economy 🙂
2022-07-04: Evidence of highly skilled workers

On a summer afternoon 4600 years ago, near the end of the reign of the pharaoh Khufu, a boat crewed by some 40 workers headed downstream on the Nile toward the Giza Plateau. The vessel, whose prow was emblazoned with a uraeus, the stylized image of an upright cobra worn by pharaohs as a head ornament, was laden with large limestone blocks being transported from the Tura quarries on the eastern side of the Nile. Under the direction of their overseer, known as Inspector Merer, the team steered the boat west toward the plateau, passing through a gateway between a pair of raised mounds called the Ro-She Khufu, the Entrance to the Lake of Khufu. This lake was part of a network of artificial waterways and canals that had been dredged to allow boats to bring supplies right up to the plateau’s edge.

Based on the contents of the papyri, at least some workers in the time of Khufu were highly skilled and well rewarded for their labor, contradicting the popular notion that the Great Pyramid was built by masses of oppressed slaves. In several instances, Merer and his team were awarded gifts of textiles. In addition to a diet including poultry, fish, fruit, and a variety of breads, cakes, and beers, the men were also provided with dates and honey, delicacies that were extremely scarce and generally reserved for those within the royal entourage. In fact, the laborers may have been quite close to the royal family. During their several months working at the Giza Plateau, Inspector Merer’s phyle—and possibly other phyles that were part of the same group—appears to have taken turns guarding and helping to provision a royal institution called Ankhu Khufu, which likely referred to Khufu’s valley temple. In the papyri, Merer’s men are called the setep za, “the chosen phyle” or “the elite,” a phrase that can denote a royal guard force. “I think these boatmen were a very special category of workers because their activities were really vital for the royal project. I think the monarchy had an interest in being fair to them because it was essential to have them working well.”

Cylon Roomba

Here’s how to make your very own Cylon Roomba. Like the projects in the book, this one doesn’t harm or permanently modify your Roomba. After you’re done playing Cylon with it, you can turn it back into a music box, painter, or even a vacuum cleaner (I hear they do that too). You don’t need the book to do this project, but it might help if you’re not that experienced with electronics and programming

and so it begins

Gates plays Petals Around the Rose

The game does work well with real dice. Comex reports that one major convention was largely disrupted when they arranged for the gift shop at the hotel to stock a large supply of dice, then introduced Petals Around the Rose to many conference attendees. “It was amazing, distinguished looking ladies and gentlemen in neat business clothes could be seen crawling on their hands and knees in little working groups all over the hotel. While speakers were saying important things on lecture platforms, the rattle of dice and mutterings about answers almost drowned them out from all over the dimly lit halls. We don’t like to do this too often. Makes enemies.”

Even the Microsoft guys agreed that Petals Around the Rose offers a good excuse for doing a bit of applications software. Indeed, Bill scratched out a program for the game on a napkin and passed it over the seat so that it could see daylight in Personal Computing.

heh. took me 2 min

LAMP and the Spread Toolkit

includes updated PHP bindings. last time i looked at this, the 2002 vintage discouraged me

Spread is an open source toolkit that provides a high performance messaging service that is resilient to faults across local and wide area networks. Spread functions as a unified message bus for distributed applications, and provides highly tuned application-level multicast, group communication, and point-to-point support. Spread services range from reliable messaging to fully ordered messages with delivery guarantees.