trial trench and taphonomy

Via the always interesting and never boring The Browser, comes an announcement of an Indiana Jones-style hunt for the tomb and (looted treasure) of Alaric I under the waters of the river Busento flowing through the town of Cosenza (an army of mourners apparently dammed and diverted the river in order to give Alaric a proper burial) in southern Italy, where the victorious Alaric suddenly and unexpectedly died.

This king of the Visigoths, once enlisted as a mercenary fighter for the Roman cause, famously and fateful sacked the city of Rome in 410 AD, although the Western capital had already been strategically removed to the more easily defensible Milan, which Alaric had attacked as well—prompting an even more shameful retreat to the inaccessible swamps of Ravenna where the court could circle its wagons. The legend of the lost tomb with its funeral goods—or hidden horde of plunder and ransom monies paid for the barbarians to go off and attack someone else, after the mythos of the Nibelungen and the Rheingold (Himmler’s Ahnenerbe programme investigated here as well)—has been firmly ensconced in local lore since the last siege of ancient Rome (which was not as wantonly destructive nor as violent as portrayed in the popular imagination), but now the government and institutions of higher education have thrown their support behind a serious and concerted excavation—previously, Rome had misgivings about celebrating the figure that oversaw its downfall, though historically, this region was one of the last, loyal holdouts for the successor Byzantium Empire in the West. Sceptical reactions are probably merited in the face of promoting the tourist industry, but it will interesting nonetheless to see if this venture unearths any artefacts and contributes to the heritage of Calabria.

pale blue dot

In 1990 after the space probe Voyager 1 had accomplished her primary mission of exploration of the outer planets, famed astronomer and project architect Carl Sagan requested that the emissary turn its lens back once more and capture an image of the Earth in all its humbleness from such a great distance.
It did not matter much that the photograph with two weeks’ delay was not quite as dramatic as Sagan had envisioned as his poetic reflections on this invisible parting-shot managed to inspire multitudes. Seizing on a similar opportunity twenty-three years later, Sagan’s students sought to make his pale blue dot as envisioned a reality by directing the Cassini to take a break from exploring Saturn and focusing back on its place of origin. Still not awash among a field of stars, the Earth’s latest selfie was produced, with the planet’s inhabitants being urged in advance—perhaps without sufficient publicity—to take a moment to appreciate the uniqueness of the world outside as they smiled for the camera. Maybe such a moment was not as well promoted as it could have been, as I hope I wasn’t on the wrong side of the globe or doing something tedious and inside as all of this transpired—paradoxically, I think we were at that moment experimenting with our own aerial photography. Of course, we were all present for 19. July 2013 when robot photographed its makers from the orbit of Saturn, awash in the erupting jets of the Moon Enceladus whose mysterious geysers might be spouting off the most accessible hints of life elsewhere in the solar system. It’s an inspiring, sacred look back and more in the spirit of Sagan’s vision than the original.

5x5

genealogy room: via Boing Boing, a service that maps the prevalence and distribution of one’s family name

the plot thickens: a 1919 screenwriters’ resource of ten million photoplay expositional combinations

die roboter: elementary school class in Mainz perform Kraftwerk

your brain on drugs: testing the web-spinning capabilities of spiders under the influence was an abortive forensics ploy for drug-testing

lowered-expectations: due to a profound lack of same-species mates, the coywolf is emerging

extracurricular or rolling-stock

Via the ever interesting Presurfer comes a look at a yet extant relic of the planned economy in the Soviet Union and its satellite states in the form of heritage railways created as training platforms for apprentice students (die so genannt Pionieresienbahnen, but also present in Uzbekistan, Belarus, Hungary, China, Ukraine, Slovakia, Poland and Cuba) and aspiring engineers, complete with all the scaled down but functional equipment to learn all aspects of running a train-service to include switching-stations and actual routes that attend to recreational spots. Going to school during East German times, H told me that there was one period a week reserved for what was termed practical education but as his class was brought to a lamp factory, it really couldn’t be considered anything but child-labour and was a rather dreary, dangerous hour. It is all the more depressing to think that there was such a Pioneer Railway located right in Leipzig, where H grew up, for the luckier kids.  I think it would have been fun to be a conductor and get to wear a spiffy uniform, like those pictured at the link.