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PalArch

Gregory Bearman* & William A. Christens-Barry

Bearman, G. & W.A. Christens-Barry. 2009.
Spectral Imaging of Ostraca
Palarch’s Journal of Archaeology of Egypt/Egyptology 6(7) (2009), 1-20.

ABSTRACT
By analogy with ancient texts, infrared imaging of ostraca has long been employed to
help improve readings. We report on extensive spectral imaging of ostraca over the visible and near infrared. Spectral imaging acquires the complete spectrum for each pixel in an image; the data can be used with an extensive set of software tools that were developed originally for satellite and scientifi c imaging. In this case, the spectral data helps explain why infrared imaging works to improve text legibility (and why not in some cases). A better understanding of the underlying imaging mechanism points the way for inexpensive methods for taking data either in the fi eld or at museums.

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

Toyota joined the club of companies developing solar powered services with its plans to build solar charging stations for electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles. Toyota Industries Corp has designed the station to have a solar panel with an output of 1.9kW and a storage battery with a capacity of 8.4kW. The converter has a maximum output of 3.2kW in grid-connected operation and 1.5kVA in self-sustained operation. The charging station compromises of a solar photovoltaic system and storage system to store the energy reaped from the sun. When the energy from the storage runs out, the electricity derived from the grid is used as a backup. This enables vehicles to be charged undisturbed at any time. When energy is in excess, the power station is capable enough to transfer the extra power to utility companies. Twenty one such charging stations will be built at eleven places by the municipal government of Toyota City in Japan which will be operational in April 2010. Toyota’s plans will certainly help increase the use of cleaner vehicles and reduce the pollution created due to emission of greenhouse gases in future.

[Techon]

The Congressional Budget Office has released final budget numbers for fiscal year 2009. The numbers allow us to take a last look at the Bush administration’s record on spending from a statistical point of view.

The following three charts show annual average real (or constant dollar) outlays during the tenures of recent presidents. Presidents were in office for either 4 or 8 budget years, except JFK (3 years), LBJ (5 years), Nixon (6 years), and Ford (2 years).

President George W. Bush’s last year was fiscal 2009. Outlays that year were $3.522 trillion, according to the CBO. However, $108 billion was spending for the 2009 economic stimulus package passed under President Obama. Bush was thus roughly responsible for $3.414 trillion of spending in 2009, which includes outlays for the financial bailouts enacted under his watch. (For FY2009, $154 billion for TARP and $91 billion for Fannie and Freddie).

Read the whole story at Cato@Liberty — >

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Morgan Stanley: Interest Rates Set To Soar 40% As Bond Vigilantes Make Geithner And Obama Pay For Their Mess
• Shocker: Washington DC Got More Stimulus Money Per Capita Than Any State In The Union
• The Government Is Still Spending Money On WWI

Somebody at Palm is working late. Most of the apps included in the round-up for yesterday landed after this blogger hit the sack last night, so much so that half of them say they were uploaded to the Catalog today. Anyway, Sprint says that webOS 1.3.5 is coming today, and even though their changelog doesn’t mention the app limit fix, we know it’s there. Rejoice, the end of at least one of our webOS gripes is near! So hop on after the break and check out the new apps you’ll be able to download once Palm expands our app corrals.

read more

Soap Roots (soapwort extract, soapwort fluid) is used for extraction of Soap Root Extract (also called Soapwort Extract, Soapwort Fluid, Soapwort Liquid, Soapwort Juice) for further aplication in manufacturing halva.

Licorice Root Extract Paste (Semi-Liquid)

Origin: Turkmenistan

BRIX 70

Glyc. acid 18% min

Package: 200 l plastic or metal drums

Doha is undergoing futuristic and environment friendly changes in the way traffic guidance operations are carried out. Several road projects are underway due to which traffic guidance systems are needed. With the support of the Qatar Science Club, The Public Works Authority (Ashghal) will soon resort to the use of robots instead of the traffic police. These robots are designed to guide traffic in areas where road projects are being executed in Doha and the outskirts. So what makes these steps taken by the authority’s environment friendly? Well, these robots are to be powered up using solar energy! Fabricated out of light fibers, these intelligent machines are made to withstand the climatic conditions of Qatar. According to the Assistant Secretary General of the Qatar Science Club, Rashid Ibrahim, these robots are designed to work for 24 hours continuously (a superhuman task!), and will be powered by solar energy from a solar cell that will be connected through a battery. He hopes that more robots like these are produced to meet the needs of the whole of Ashghal.

[ThePeninsulaQatar]

http://www.wgsr.uw.edu.pl/pub/uploads/mcg04/22plit.pdf

AND REGIONAL STUDIES OF WARSAW UNIVERSITY
Florian Plit
Miscellanea Geographical 2004, Vol.11

Abstract: During January and February 2004, an interdisciplinary group from the Institute of Developing Countries at the Faculty of Geography and Regional Studies of Warsaw University spent time at the Farafra Oasis in Egypt, observing changes in resource management and transformations in the society. The aim was to compare the results with those of earlier studies conducted in 1993.

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

NWO Library

Carolyn Harris

Egyptologists like Morenz, Piankoff, Mercer, Frankfort, Faulkner, Assmann, Hornung or Allen have good reasons to stress the difference between the Greek and the Pharaonic perspective on initiation (from the Latin “initio”, introduce into a new life). The Egyptians maintained a series of rituals aimed at “a constantly renewed regeneration” (Hornung, 2001, p.14). At best, the Greeks induced the point of death in order to glimpse into its darkness, to “see the goddess” and renew. But they had no “science of the Hades” as in the Amduat. The active continuity between life and death found in Egypt, contradicts the closed and separated interpretation of the Greeks, fostering “escapism” (the “body” as a “prison” out of which one needs to escape). In Egypt, no “new” life was necessary. Death could bring “more” life. For both life and the afterlife depended on identical conditions : offerings ; either directly to the deities through Pharaoh or indirectly to the Ka of the deceased. If dualism fits the Greeks, triadism is Egyptian.

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

After Jean Todt, Ferrari will have yet another former member of the Maranello organization joining the International Automobile Federation (FIA) for the future. We’re talking about the Italian team’s engine chief Gilles Simon, who has been picked by the new president of the FIA to investigate new environmentally friendly technologies for the future of the sport.

It’s worth mentioning that Simon will not focus only on new types of energy for the Formula One championship, but also o… (read more)

Things are getting better for General Motors, as sales of both Buick LaCrosse and Chevrolet Malibu are going well in the United States. As a result, the former bankrupt manufacturer is now planning to boost capacity at the Fairfax assembly plant and establish a three-shift working schedule to align production with market demand.

The facility is currently building 4,500 cars per week but, thanks to the new schedule that will come into effect in two weeks, production will be increas… (read more)

It would seem somebody over at Archos HQ was sipping a little too much of the Chardonnay over the holidays, as the company’s latest firmware update for the 5-inch Internet Tablet has suffered something of a false start. Intended to bring the onboard Android up to the civilized ways of version 1.6 and to fix a few outstanding bugs, the update has been yanked due to the above “last-minute major issue.” Mind you, when the non-toxic version does hit, you should still be wary — it appears the latest firmware disables the hack that allowed users to re-install some Google apps missing from the default software on the device. Ah well, a shambling but active updating regimen is better than none at all.

Archos 5 says hello, goodbye to Android 1.6 originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 28 Dec 2009 05:37:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Egyptians blog (lovely Tim Reid)

This is a list of the most important Egyptian artifacts not the property of Egypt’s Supreme council of antiquities. Though there are certainly more contenders for the list including perhaps the gold headdress of a wife of Thutmosis III in New York’s Metropolitan museum of art or the Norbert Schimmel talatats from that same institution.

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes

Google has finished off its holiday doodle series with a very interesting image of the moon and a space ship complete with Christmas lights to give it a festive touch. The image was a bit of a mystery for most people, but it all makes sense when you realize that Google is funding an ambitious project, the Google Lunar X Prize, to put a robot on the Moon designed for privately funded teams.

The doodle ended a series of five Google logos which ran last week to mark the beginning of the winter holidays. The series started off with a peculiar image of a tropical location and a palm tree dressed in Christmas lights, not exactly the most obvious image of Christmas. Since Google is a global brand and the Internet removes borders or cultural differences, for the most part, the company has tried to make the logos appeal to a wider audience as possible.

The second doodle in the series was a much more familiar sight, with snow everywhere and snowmen dressed in the Google colors. The series moved forward on the third day with a mountain location depicting a lake-side cabin. Despite all the postcards from previous days being stacked on top of each other, the Google logo can still be made out from the objects in the doodle.

The fourth doodle logo is a scene from what some are saying is … (read more)

I’m taking some time off beginning today. I’ll return after the New Year. Stay well and enjoy the holidays.

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We didn’t find it under the Christmas Tree on Friday like a certain PreCentral editor and the rest of us webOS fiends were hoping for, but this is close enough to count: the Sprint support website is saying that webOS 1.3.5 is to be released today, and that 1.3.5 is indeed the current version. 

Rubinstein mentioned during Palm’s Q2FY2010 earnings call that we’d be seeing the update around CES next month, so if the Sprint support website is to be believed, they’re free to announce something a little more exciting during their presentation… like announcing that Unreal Engine 3 has been ported over to webOS or some new hardware.

Here’s Sprint’s minimal changelog:

WebOS – 1.3.5
Build 194
Sprint Config – 2.0

12/28/2009

This update includes enhancements to the following:

• Improvement in battery life optimization when in marginal coverage areas.
• QCELP capability fix to allow play and audio of video sent via MMS.
• Launch Google Maps or Sprint Nav when tapping an address from contacts.
• Minimized package of MR size through binary difference. Customers can now download over 2G connections if necessary.

[via Engadget]

… but it plans to focus on making motorcycles. Bajaj Auto, India’s second-biggest motorcycle maker by sales, announced plans to stop scooter production by the end of March 2010, because of lower sales in this segment.

Currently, we are making our Kristal only for exports, which we don’t think is viable. So, we plan to exit the scooter business by the end of this financial year, Rajeev Bajaj, the company’s managing director, was quoted as saying by local media reports.
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The official specifications of the 2011 Ford Mustang GT have been revealed. Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, we already knew the basic specs of the muscle icon, but now Ford Motor Company has released the full details.

As Repetitia mater studiorum est, we are never bored of reporting that the GT’s new 5.0 liter V8 engine uses 4 valves per cylinder and Twin Independent Variable Camshaft Timing (Ti-VCT), offering 412 HP and 390 lb-ft (529 Nm) of torque. The news that the old … (read more)

drhawass.com

For more photos and information about the tomb of Sennedjem see the following links:

http://osirisnet.net/tombes/artisans/sennedjem1/e_sennedjem1_01.htm
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/farid/egypt/sennedjem.html
http://egyptsites.wordpress.com/2009/02/07/tomb-of-sennedjem-tt1/
http://wesheb.tdonnelly.org/esenedj.html

Egyptology News Blog, Andie Byrnes