This could be a marketing opportunity for somebody.
Franciscan archaeologists digging in the biblical town of Magdala in present-day Israel say they have uncovered vials of perfume similar to those used by Mary Magdalene, the woman believed to have washed the feet of Jesus.
…”[W]e have in our hands ‘cosmetic products’ from Christ’s time,” said [lead archaeologist Father Stefano] De Luca.
[Image: Wikimedia Commons]
Looks like it’s not only the iPhone alpha geeks who’ll be able to feed their reading jones with their favourite piece of portable tech; Nintendo have teamed up with publishers HarperCollins to provide a collection of classic books for reading on the little DS handheld games console. [image by catatronic]
While it’s interesting to see more of these partnerships emerging, this one looks to be half win and half fail. On the plus side, getting affordable reading content onto a low-priced device with good penetration into the youth market and no additional fees for regular usage (in other words, the complete opposite of the iPhone) is a brilliant move; that’s exactly the demographic space publishers need to colonise.
But bundling up crusty old classics like Jane Austen and Charles Dickens? Where’s the kid appeal there? Plus most of those titles are so cheaply available in book form it seems pointless charging for them in electronic form.
HarperCollins might have been wiser to initially push out YA, chick lit and graphic novels; I expect those DS users who read fiction would be more likely to part with some money for something a bit more modern than anything by the Brontë sisters or Shakespeare. No amount of marketing speak about “broadening the user base for the device” is going to convince me otherwise, either.
After a few decades of relative hiatus, there’s been a distinct increase of traffic around the Moon of late, and that has legal types scenting potential work in the offing. Once we start colonising our sister satellite – whether in person or via robot proxies – how do we decide who the territory belongs to?
Luckily for us, one Virgiliu Pop is already on the case. He’s a research specialist at the Romanian Space Agency (Romania has a space agency? Who knew?) who has been looking into the laws that might, by precedent, affect lunar settlements… and he reckons it’s rugged individualism and the pioneer spirit that will win the day:
“Homesteading is likely to transform the lunar desert in the same manner as it transformed the 19th Century United States,” he said. “Space is indeed a new frontier calling for individualism rather than collectivism, and its challenges need to be addressed with a legal regime favorable to property rights.”
As many empires have learned the hard way, maintaining control over distant colonies is no easy trick – and when the colony is at the other end of a steep gravity well, that’s only going to be more true. Anyone fancy a sweepstake on the period between first Lunar colony and first colonial secession? [image by jurvetson]
Prof Mark Jacobson of the University of Stanford believes that (for the USA) the best solution to the various problems of energy security, peak oil, and global warming lies in wind and solar thermal power:
The raw energy sources that Jacobson found to be the most promising are, in order, wind, concentrated solar (the use of mirrors to heat a fluid), geothermal, tidal, solar photovoltaics (rooftop solar panels), wave and hydroelectric.
In Prof Jacobson’s research paper he looks at how you could power every road vehicle in the USA using different methods and finds the best combination is wind power and electric battery vehicles.
[at Physorg][image from kevindooley on flickr]
Paul Greenberg is writing a book about fish, but you could pay him not to. Noting that in the ’30s, President Roosevelt created a program to keep 6,000 writers working, he adds that the problem today is that too many people want to be writers. So he proposes a program modeled after agriculture subsidies, which would pay people not to write. Andy Borowitz, who he notes had already proposed this in a piece that he (well) wrote, says it would take $400,000 to keep him out of the game.
Of course, putting this kind of money on the table would require the strictest of oversight, and for this we could make use of a structure already in place — i.e., the long-suffering spouses and domestic partners of writers. Under the terms of the bailout, these emotional custodians would be transformed into fiscal custodians and would release funds only when a full cessation of writing activities occurred.
[Image tip: Ex-Boloukos]
