Author: Serkadis

Concord Monitor (Victoria Shouldis)

Thanks to Tony Marson for sending this link.

With photo.

Like the privileged folk in any society, the noblemen in ancient Egypt expected and had the best of everything: superior housing, superb food and spirits, and tireless servants. So it only makes sense that they wanted to ensure the same treatment in the afterlife.

The fascinating story of just how they set about preparing for that afterlife is the focus of The Secrets of Tomb 10A, an exhibit running through May at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts.

The show actually tells two stories in one: the story of governor Djehutynakht and his preparation for life after death, and the 1915 archeological dig – sponsored by the MFA and Harvard University – that first found the tomb site.

The archeological find was somewhat grisly: accessing a hidden, vertical shaft at a known burial site, the team found a huge amount of broken, pillaged items, and a mummified human head.

The broken items, all painstakingly researched and reassembled in this flawless show, were the result of visits by centuries worth of grave robbers. And the head? Well, nobody knows exactly who that is. It could be the head of governor Djehutynakht, it could be Mrs. Djehutynakht, or it could be a particularly faithful servant, sent along to serve and honor the governor right into the next world.

That head is at once the most grim and star exhibit of the show: It gets its own small room in the exhibit, along with CT-scan images and X-rays. The room gives you a sense of the size of the actual tomb; it also gives you an opportunity to keep the younger kids from viewing a disturbing piece in what is, otherwise, an all-age appealing and all-age appropriate exhibit.

The ancient Egyptians – the tombs here date back to about 2,000 BC – took planning for the life after this one most seriously, and those who could afford preparation left nothing to chance. Among the literally thousands of broken and disassembled pieces found in Djehutynakht’s tomb, researchers have been able to offer this incredibly comprehensive look at the care and thought that went into that planning.

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

Please consider spending part of your Sunday right here, chatting with strangers about the NFL. We offer a full buffet and open bar beginning at kickoff. Day care services available as needed. Cocktail attire, please. No pets, no smoking.

If you require pregame consultation with accredited fantasy gurus, stop by Fantasy Football Live at noon ET. We’re not promising useful advice or insight in the chat below, but you might take away a few life lessons. We’ll just be watching games, taking notes in the margins.

The Yahoo! fantasy staff is contractually obligated to participate in Sunday’s chat. Several members of the extended family will stop in, too. At some point, we expect to be joined by Chris Liss and Dalton Del Don from RotoWire, Chet Gresham from Razzball, Michael Salfino from Comcast SportsNet and Paul Bourdett from Roto Experts. (Unless Paul is fighting crime. He’s also a costumed vigilante).  

Make yourself at home, gamers. Please mingle…

We’ve seen plenty of far-fetched EMG-based input methods, like the concentration-demanding, head-based NeuroSky controller, but Microsoft Research is asking for a patent that involves much simpler gestures — and might actually make a bit of sense. As demonstrated in the video after the break, Microsoft’s connecting EMG sensors to arm muscles and then detecting finger gestures based on the muscle movement picked up by those sensors. It does away for the need of a pesky camera (or Power Glove) to read complicated hand gestures, and can even sense modified versions of the gestures to be performed while your hands are full. Microsoft’s developing a wireless EMG sensor module that could be placed all over the body, and while like all Microsoft Research projects this seems pretty far from market, there’s a small, optimistic part of us that could see some of the benefits here for controlling mobile devices. And boy do we love controlling mobile devices.

Continue reading Microsoft Research patents controller-free computer input via EMG muscle sensors

Microsoft Research patents controller-free computer input via EMG muscle sensors originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 03 Jan 2010 09:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The holiday splurge may have left our wallets begging for mercy, but there’s another tempting offer coming along to bid for your buck. Coming soon to hobby shops and gamer hubs in the UK are deluxe 12″

Jakarta GlobeLocal Biofuel Output Dives In 2009 as CPO Price RisesJakarta GlobeTotal biofuel production was just 104100 kiloliters in 2009, a 96 percent fall from the 2.56 million kiloliters produced in the previous year, …

To Our Clients, Colleagues and Friends, 

· Last week we mentioned the cost of a year at Stanford in 1955 as being $705, so if we take that and run it out to today’s cost of about $55,000, it means that the cost of attending Stanford has been climbing about 8% a year over the past 50 years. Stanford, by the way, is referred to as Stanfurd by people at Cal . For some reason, Cal students think this is hilarious.

• A large percentage of what we do is to help companies not doing too well,  but we also get to see many companies doing extraordinarily well.  If we look at Mountain West, Academy Mortgage, and New American Mortgage, all three are extremely profitable. Mountain West is traditional wholesale, Academy is traditional retail, and New American is a Call Center operation, but all three share a few things in common: (1) Owners who look at the big picture but pay attention to the slightest detail that might hurt profits, (2) tight control over costs, and (3)  very tightly run secondary marketing operations.  The last one means that they price in decent margins, and they realize those margins.  There is almost no leakage.  If they build in 125 bps profit on a loan, they get 125 bps.
• We got lots of nominations for movies about friendships. Brian’s Song was the runaway winner, with the following getting at least two votes. Midnight Cowboy and Shawshank each got eight votes.  Here they are, not listed in any particular order.

In Her Shoes is really about sisters, but the people who nominated it were right.  It’s about the friendship between two sisters.  We saw it, and it may be Cameron Diaz’s second best role (Something abut Mary will always be #1), with her atypically playing a loser.  

• Another excellent compliance consultant is Theresa Ballard .  You can reach her at [email protected].  We frequently run into people who have used her, and they speak highly of her.  
• Some famous people died this year, and is there ever a year in which famous people don’t die?  The names that come to mind are Ted Kennedy, Michael Jackson, Patrick Swayze, Walter Cronkite, and Farrah Fawcett.  Farah Fawcett’s poster was in every college boy’s dorm room at one time. Only a very few college students had Walter Cronkite posters in their dorm rooms.
• At midnight Thursday in Moscow , it was the 18^th anniversary of the last minutes of the Soviet Union .  Their Politburo, a phony Parliament,  had voted earlier in the month to dissolve the USSR , and at midnight, December 31, 1991, the Hammer and Sickle flag of the Soviet Union was flown over the Kremlin for the last time.  Gorbachev officially resigned, the flag was hauled down, and one of the most evil regimes in the history of man ceased to exist, relegated, as Ronald Reagan had once predicted, to the ashbin of history.
• Why isn’t this man smiling?
  
  Jamie Dimon was probably the most successful banker of the past several years, with JPMorgan Chase dodging most of the catastrophes that hit banks so hard. Our sense is that he’s very good at not chasing trends that generate great returns but which entail too much risk when you look at them carefully.  If we could make one suggestion, though, we’d like to see him choose either JP Morgan or Chase, but not have both in the name.
  There was a great Far Side cartoon about Lewis & Clark, with Clark ’s wife yapping at him to get the name to be Clark & Lewis.  So when thinking of bank names, it makes you wonder if William Fargo spent his whole life resenting Henry Wells, wishing they could have called their company Fargo Wells.

• A major Wall Street firm did projections for what the total losses would be over the full credit cycle. They were losses of $82 billion for JPMorgan Chase, $106 billion for the Bank of America, $117 billion for Wells Fargo, and $122 billion for Citigroup.  That’s a heckuva lot of red ink.
• It’s estimated that over 10 million borrowers owe more on their mortgages than their homes are worth.  Economists estimate that it would take over $800 billion to extinguish borrowers’ negative equity and give them a 95% loan-to-value ratio. Crazy, sad times for a lot of people.
• We always like reading about newer, entrepreneurial companies that validate our optimism in America ’s economy ability to constantly reinvent itself.   A perfect example that Schumpeter’s Creative Destruction theory of capitalism is still alive and well is Netflix, a company that didn’t exist 12 years ago. Movie theaters are closing or struggling everywhere, but Netflix is about to report $111 million in profits on $1.67 billion in revenue. They may not sell any popcorn, but they have 11 million customers who pay a subscription fee month after month.
• All the newspapers are filled with Top Ten lists, for the past year and the just completed decade.  Top books, top movies, and so on. If we had a Top Ten list for sporting events of the past decade, for us, it’s a hands-down no-brainer.  It was the Oakland A’s 20 game winning streak in 2002.  Think of how exciting even a 5 game win streak is, or 8 games or 10 games. But 20 games in a row?  It was a magical three weeks and a fan’s ultimate dream.
• We just saw about 30 seconds of TV show Dance Party.  It’s a kind of like Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, but this was people in their forties or fifties (and older) dressed up like when they were teenagers, dancing to music from the 1950’s.  It made us embarrassed for our entire generation.
• Our 2^nd favorite Pac-10 team is the Oregon Ducks, and did you know that their mascot is the only college mascot ever designed by Walt Disney? Not the company, but good old Walt himself.
• Speaking of mascot trivia, Stanford used to be the Indians, but they became the Cardinals (as in the bird) for a few years, then dropped the plural to become the Cardinal (as in the color). William s College has the Purple Cows, CalTech and Oregon State are the Beavers (always good for a laugh) and 32 schools are Cougars (also good for a laugh).  Cornell is the Big Red, Harvard is the Crimson, and Alabama is the Crimson Tide. Tulane is the Green Wave, Dartmouth is the Big Green, and North Texas is the Mean Green. Pacific University is the Boxers, although it’s hard to know if this means the dog or the underpants.  Finally, UC Irvine has the Anteaters and UC Santa Cruz has the Banana Slugs.  These dumb and dumber names came about because the University gave students the right to choose their own mascots when these schools opened in the 60’s.  What else would you expect from a bunch of 19 year olds sitting around drinking beer and smoking pot?  If you’re thinking of starting a college, do not let the students pick the mascot.
• And you know how people will refer to certain weird, disorienting things as being Kafkaesque?  In the Outback Bowl game Friday, Northwestern quarterback quarterback Mike Kafka completed a staggering 47-of-78 passes for 532 yards and five touchdowns.  For the opposing Auburn Tigers, it must have been downright Kafkaesque
• You know those pesky little penalty fees when you’re late on your credit card payments?  Those little fees generated $23 billion in revenue for card issuers last year.  Unfortunately, credit cards are a scale business, and they just don’t make sense for most community banks.
• We enjoyed The Ninth Wave, but we came across this one bit of writing, describing a college poker game: ”The pot was almost a thousand dollars now.  The room was quiet. Down the hall a door slammed… bare feet sounded on the corridor floor….. a shower hissed somewhere.”  Isn’t that awful writing?  There was some contest for bad writing a few years back where the winning story began with “It was a dark and rainy night.  Somewhere a dog barked.”

Let’s all have a great 2010.Garrett, Watts & Co.  Helping mortgage lenders increase revenues, control costs, and better manage risk.Joe Garrett         ([email protected])Mike McAuley      ([email protected])Corky Watts         ([email protected])

Filed under: Etc., Government/Legal, Technology, Military, Specialty

The obvious glib commentary here would invoke Optimus Prime, or something. Instead, we’re going to digress momentarily and say that the best kind of transformer involves an LP record and an SL1200. Either way, DARPA has its own transforming going on. The Pentagon’s latest initiative has been dubbed Transformer, and it aims to make the prognostications of 1955 come true – flying cars and all. (Bonus points for DARPA if they can get them to fold up neatly into briefcases.)

Pushing military technology is the purpose; the primary goal is a vehicle capable of both driving on the road and flying. Such abilities would allow the vehicle to cross difficult terrain more efficiently, especially considering the vertical take off and landing capability the design brief calls for. Other bullet points include low cost and maximal military utility.

Flying cars have been developed before, all with some level of compromise. Even now, there’s the Moller SkyCar, and the Terrafugia Transition; both are nearing feasible production, albeit with large, six-figure price tags. If you’ve developed a car to fly over traffic jams like we all wish for, you’ve got less than a week to register with DARPA for the January 14th kickoff.

[Source: Inside Line | Image: Hanna-Barbera]

Report: Washington starting its own “Transformer” program originally appeared on Autoblog on Sun, 03 Jan 2010 09:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Some of our readers do not like these comparison videos, but from our search logs we can see there are many people looking for guidance on which handset to choose.

As can be seen from the video above, the HTC HD2 has a more natural interface for call handling than the iPhone 3GS, with HTC’s added features creating a device that is responsive to the user in a surprising but intuitive way, which is one of the pillars of HTC Sense UI.

Features which are particularly welcome are reducing the volume of the ring when you pick the phone up. Straighttalk Lite also works well and very intuitively. 

Smart Dialling is also a great feature that I am really surprised is not yet on the iPhone.  With it one never have to go into the address book, and the iPhone’s search feature is a poor replacement.

Other noted features which make the HTC HD2 superior for phone calls are the louder ring tones, ring tones that become even louder when the phone is in your pocket or bag (Pocket Mode) and the ability to easily make ring tones from the music on your phone.

And of course, of particular note is that there is no “App for that” for these features, unless you want to jailbreak your phone and get into a battle with Apple.

In this, case, and for phone calls, the HTC HD2 is clearly superior.

Mark-Jan Nederhof’s Gardiner font pages

The updated version is available from the above address

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

Publishing Archaeology (Michael E. Smith)

I’ve published Michael’s post in full below. Do contact him from his blog at the above address if you are intersted in contributing.

Do you have something interesting to say about issues of publishing in archaeology? I worry that this blog is too heavily dependent upon my own idiosyncratic and limited perspectives and experiences. I’d be happy to publish guest posts if they fit the range of topics covered. Right now I am the only one with permission to post, but you can send me your text in an email (as a Word attachment is probably best).

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

Www.PalArch.nl

André J. Veldmeijer. 2009. Studies of Ancient Egyptian Footwear. Technological Aspects. Part x. Leather Composite Sandals.
PalArch’s Journal of Archaeology of Egypt/Egyptology, 6(9) (2009)
Abstract

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

After it’s outstanding million-copy sales at day one (qjnet/playstation-3/final-fantasy-xiii-sells-over-a-million-at-day-one.html) and the success that followed the rest of that week, the mad rush to get Final Fantasy XIII has now waned and the sales have begun to dip.

The mind shift is the switch from normal thinking to saying to yourself something like, “oh no!” or “I’m going to die!”

It’s the dividing line between regular thoughts and panicked thoughts.

It’s easy to recognize this shift in thinking, and once you do it well, it can help you to reduce and shorten your bouts of anxiety and panic.

This mind shift happens fast, and many times it happens so fast that you seem to fall into a panic state without even knowing how it happened.

That’s why you’ll often hear people say that they were doing something mundane when all of a sudden they became overwhelmed with panic.

It’s also why the phrase “It came out of the blue” gets thrown around so much by anxiety sufferers when trying to explain how their panic started.

I was first introduced to the idea of the mind shift by Dr. Claire Weekes .  She correctly pointed out that people tend to talk or think their way into panic without knowing it.

Dr. Weekes never spoke of a “mind shift” per se, but she hammered the idea that anxiety is set off by  phrases or thoughts that signal some kind of disaster.

So then, if you find yourself having anxiety symptoms or even if panic just flashes for no reason, keep your mind clear, listen to yourself.  If you think or say things like, “oh my God,” “get me out of here” or really anything that screams emergency in your mind just before the panic strikes, then you can tell yourself that this is anxiety at work.

You can use this recognition to calm yourself and think your way out of panic.  Usually when panic grips you the ability to think clearly gets tossed out the window.  But this is why it’s important for you to reel in the logical part of your brain as quickly as possible.

This happened to me the other night.  I was roaring down the interstate at a staggering 55 mph because I had noticed that I couldn’t take in a deep breath.  I guess I had slowed down without knowing it, and in what seemed like 2 seconds, figured I was going to die because I couldn’t catch my breath.

And just as I thought that I was about to veer off the road, I just as quickly thought of Dr. Weekes.  I thought about her because just before I began to panic, I thought, “oh no!”  Literally, those were the exact words that ran through my mind.

So I stopped this thought from repeating, and replaced it with information I knew to be true.  I thought, “I can breathe”, “I’m not dying”, “just anxiety”.  After about 2 to 3 minutes I was able to get it back together again.  The “oh no!” thought was my clue that anxiety was working its voodoo.

It happens.  You can not have a panic attack for a long time, or any anxiety for that matter, and have it come back occasionally for no reason.  But it’s important to not dwell on the fact that it comes back.  It’s more important to know that many times you can slow down anxiety so it doesn’t mount and get out of control.

I know that this probably sounds too simple to work,  but trust me on this one.  Knowing that you’re panicking, versus thinking that you’re dying, is not the same thing.  It’s not even the same sport.

At least when you know it’s panic or anxiety you can reason with yourself, and most critically, not feed your fears.

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Filed under: Features, iPhone

Apple’s campus is a surreal place to be. You’re surrounded by a loop of buildings where some of the most advanced technological innovation is going on behind closed doors. That excitement aside, another great thing about being on campus was being able to dine at Café Mac. Café Mac is Apple’s cafeteria/restaurant for employees. It’s some of the best food you’ll ever eat and the café rivals whatever Google has. But I loved Café Mac for more than the food. It is a place where you can meet and mingle with people from all different departments, be that legal, marketing, IS&T, software, or hardware.

Now before I go any further, let me state right now that every single Apple employee I’ve ever met takes their NDAs very seriously and no employee has ever revealed insider knowledge or let any secrets slip (to me anyway). I’ve remained iChat friends with a bunch of Apple employee’s I’ve met from some very cool departments on various trips to campus. I can tell you, though Apple would never admit to being influenced by sites like Engadget or TUAW, individuals at Apple do read those sites and do take into consideration what they read on them.

Now, here’s where you come in: I know there’s been a ton of excitement about the impending Apple iSlate, but let’s not forget that, if past years are any indication, the iPhone OS 4.0 will be previewed sometime this Spring with a probable Summer release. I’m sure you all have your hopes and dreams what you want the next iPhone and iPhone OS to include, so here’s your chance to get your voices heard – hopefully by many of the people on Apple’s campus too.

I’m writing a series of features about what people want in the next iPhone and I need you to send me emails detailing what you would like to see in it. I’ll have one iPhone article a week for the next month. Each article will deal with a specific wished-for area of the iPhone: next week’s article will deal with the iPhone OS as a whole (settings, home screen, search, general behavior, etc.). Week two’s article will cover iPhone hardware, while week three and four will cover the iPhone’s built-in apps like Mail, Maps, Calendar, etc.

Until Friday, January 8, I’ll be collecting your wishes and ideas for the next “general” iPhone OS. You have until then to email me your feedback, wants, mock-ups, and concept drawings. Don’t be afraid to link to concepts you’ve seen at other places on the web either. And don’t be afraid to borrow features from the Palm Os or Android, too. If they have something you like there’s no reason Apple can’t learn from them, so by all means include it if you think it would make the iPhone better. I’ll present everything you guys tell me in an article and hopefully the boys in Cupertino will take notice.

Only feedback sent to tuawiphone [at] me dot com will be considered, but please feel free to lash out your thoughts in the comments too. Also, please only send me your “general OS” wish-lists now, or things could get lost in my mail box if you send your hardware wishes for articles down the line, etc. And, judging from the amount of email I’ll get, it would be a great help if you could put your ideas in list form with a description for each if necessary.

TUAWTUAW readers: Help us tell Apple what you want in the next iPhone! originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sun, 03 Jan 2010 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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