For the next year I’ll be able to attend Members-Only events such as lectures, guided tours, plant sales, etc.
The Arboretum is my favorite part of Golden Gate Park, especially the Garden of Fragrances which was built in 1965 as the world’s first garden for the blind.
For the next year I’ll be able to attend Members-Only events such as lectures, guided tours, plant sales, etc.
The Arboretum is my favorite part of Golden Gate Park, especially the Garden of Fragrances which was built in 1965 as the world’s first garden for the blind.
Archaeologists in Turkey have unearthed a mosaic depicting a happy skeleton including the uplifting and wise words: ‘Be cheerful, live your life’.
The unusual 2,400 year-old mosaic was found during excavations on the Syrian border province of Hatay.
This was the site of the ancient Greek-Roman city of Antioch, which now boasts Turkey’s largest collection of ancient mosaics.
The striking skeleton mosaic, is, like many, composed of tiny meticulously pieces of stone, with a striking black background that makes the image look foreboding, before viewers read the Greek text.
The result may arguably be akin to a modern motivational poster.
There are three scenes on glass mosaics made of black tiles:
Two things are very important among the elite class in the Roman period in terms of social activities: The first is the bath and the second is dinner. In the first scene, a black person throws fire. That symbolizes the bath.
In the middle scene, there is a sundial and a young clothed man running towards it with a bare-headed butler behind.
The sundial is between 9 p.m. and 10 p.m. 9 p.m. is the bath time in the Roman period. He has to arrive at supper at 10 p.m. Unless he can, it is not well received. There is writing on the scene that reads he is late for supper and writing about time on the other.
In the last scene, there is a reckless skeleton with a drinking pot in his hand along with bread and a wine pot.
The writing on it reads ‘Be Cheerful and Live Your Life,’” Chief Archeologist Demet Kara explained.
Source: ‘Be cheerful, live your life:’ Ancient mosaic ‘meme’ found in Turkey’s south – ARCHAEOLOGY
The European high Alps are internationally renowned for their dairy produce, which are of huge cultural and economic significance to the region.
Although the recent history of alpine dairying has been well studied, virtually nothing is known regarding the origins of this practice. This is due to poor preservation of high altitude archaeological sites and the ephemeral nature of transhumance economic practices. Archaeologists have suggested that stone structures that appear around 3,000 years ago are associated with more intense seasonal occupation of the high Alps and perhaps the establishment of new economic strategies.
Even though cheese-making had been documented earlier at lower altitudes, making cheese in the mountains was an impressive feat for our ancestors. “Prehistoric herders would have had to have detailed knowledge of the location of alpine pastures, be able to cope with unpredictable weather and have the technological knowledge to transform milk into a nutritious and storable product,” Francesco Carrer, an archeologist at Newcastle University and lead author of the paper, said in a press release. “Even today, producing cheese in a high mountainous environment requires extraordinary effort.”
Here, we report on organic residue analysis of small fragments of pottery sherds that are occasionally preserved both at these sites and earlier prehistoric rock-shelters.
Based mainly on isotopic criteria, dairy lipids could only be identified on ceramics from the stone structures, which date to the Iron Age (ca. 3,000–2,500 BP), providing the earliest evidence of this practice in the high Alps. Dairy production in such a marginal environment implies a high degree of risk even by today’s standards. We postulate that this practice was driven by population increase and climate deterioration that put pressure on lowland agropastoral systems and the establishment of more extensive trade networks, leading to greater demand for highly nutritious and transportable dairy products.
I just applied this cool metal flake sign to the window at the oldest restaurant on Haight St.
The sparkling doesn’t show well in photos but here’s a couple of pics:
It cost $57.00 (slightly more expensive because it is metal flake and 2 colored)
Pretty easy to attach if you’re careful and follow the explicit instructions included with your sign.
(I changed the last word to Café to make it fit better)
Check out http://www.signspecialist.com
They have an almost overwhelming selection of colors and fonts.
What surprised the researchers is that the reef could exist at all, because all the gunk in the Amazonian plume often sheltered it from the sun.
Later cruises by Moura and other Brazilian researchers have indicated that the reef’s biology varies depending on its location.
Researchers aboard the Atlantis sort through the first results of the coral dredge (Patricia Yager)
The southern section is only covered by the plume three months of the year, so its environs can complete more photosynthesis. (Most corals live in symbiotic relationships with photosynthetic algae that inhabit their pores.) The southern section contains more staghorns and other colorful corals, “much more what you might imagine a coral reef would look like,” says Yager.
The north section, dominated by sponges and carnivorous creatures, is shielded from sunlight by the muddy plume more than half of the year.
One of the early coral specimens retrieved by the researchers (Patricia Yager)
Source: Scientists Have Discovered a 1000km Coral Reef – The Atlantic
The demon Ikenty represented as a large bird with a black feline head on a Middle Kingdom coffin. The same demon appears as a large bird on a much older leather roll.
(Wael Serbiny)
A Belgium-based Egyptologist has discovered the oldest depictions of ancient Egyptian demons, showing that demonic entities populated the ancient Egyptians’ imaginations as far back as 4,000 years ago.
Ammut, a female demon from ancient Egypt with a body that was part lion, hippopotamus and crocodile—the three largest “man-eating” animals known to ancient Egyptians. A funerary deity, her titles included “Devourer of the Dead,” and “Eater of Hearts.” ( Public Domain )
The sun god Ra, in the form of a Great Hare, slays the demon snake Apep, who embodied chaos. – (Public Domain)
Sehaqeq, the headache demon. Ostracon Leipzig, Ägyptisches Museum Georg Steindorff. Inv.-No. 5152. ( Rita Lucarelli/UCLA ) –
Abstract by Wael Sherbiny Presented recently at the International Conference on Ancient Egyptian Demonology at Swansea University, U.K., these demons gripped their victims and cut off their heads.
“Although textual descriptions of all sorts of supernatural entities are attested in the religious texts as early as the Pyramid Texts (if not earlier), the visual expressions about these entities are scarce in the documents bearing religious texts antedating the elaborate representations from the New Kingdom onwards (such as the Book of the Dead, the Amduat, etc).
Guardian demons of Spell 145 of the Book of the Dead. (Rita Lucarelli/UCLA )
A great deal of the iconographic information attested within the Coffin Texts proper on the insides of the decorated Middle Kingdom coffins was deemed secondary by the editors of the celebrated Coffin Texts Project of the Oriental Institute (The University of Chicago). This textually biased approach resulted in omitting several iconographic details. Since almost all of these coffins were never scientifically published as archaeological objects, only the published texts as appeared in The Egyptian Coffin Texts formed the basis for all the subsequent studies. The composition of the so-called Book of Two Ways offers the best examples of highly elaborate representations of supernatural entities introduced into the corpus of the Coffin Texts.During my intensive research on the composition of the so-called Book of Two Ways which has been going on for the past seventeen years, I discovered, to my surprise, a large number of iconographic details in the supposedly-published material that were simply skipped by the Coffin Texts editors. These include inter alia a number of new pictorial renderings of various supernatural entities. In my paper a brief reference will be made to images of the supernatural entities I discovered on the oldest surviving leather roll from Ancient Egypt (2300-2000 B.C.), the discovery of which I announced in the last International Congress of Egyptologists in Florence.
Source: Decapitating Demons May Be the Oldest Fearsome Entities of Ancient Egypt
Gryposuchus pachakamue mandible in the field. Credit: D. De Francesci
Fossils of a 13-million-year-old extinct crocodilian from the Peruvian Amazon suggest that South American and Indian species evolved separately to acquire protruding, “telescoped” eyes that helped the animals conceal their bodies underwater while scanning the river’s edge. The new study, published today in the journal PLOS ONE, provides a long-sought insight about the extremely long and slender-snouted gavialoids—one of the three major types of crocodilians, along with alligators and crocodiles—that are represented today by just one living species, the Indian gharial.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-04-million-year-old-storyteller-crocodylian-fossils-evidence.html#jCp
Some more cold-blooded critters. Mostly crocodilian but other cuties as well:
Some pleasant places to imagine yourself visiting:
The Truthiness Shall Set You Freak
Stannous Flouride's Book of Truthiness 
