Friday Quick Hits and Varia

It’s another blizzard-y Friday here in North Dakotaland, but there is still plenty of excitement to keep us distracted (and the thermometer pushing 30 degrees doesn’t hurt either!). 

My friend Sarah Lepinski did a great job with yesterday’s Cyprus Research Fund Lecture keeping a crowd of 80 fascinated and engaged. She answered an interesting group of questions before heading out to mingle with graduate students and faculty at a local watering hole. Thank you Sarah and to all the people who joined us online and in person.

Let’s hope the rest of the weekend is as thought provoking as Sarah’s talk. To do my part, I offers a little gaggle of quick hits and varia:

• It seems like a bad idea to even contemplate privatizing the management of archaeological sites in Greece.

• Another week, another Early Christian basilica with mosaic floors.

• The foods of Cyprus.

• This is an interesting take on the fall of the Golden Dawn party in Greece.

• Some new dreams about the future of Varosha (Famagusta) Cyprus.

• Carbon footprint maps.

• A chart showing the changing populations of the major urban centers in the U.S. over time. And a bunch of cool charts of historical opinion polls.

• This is a cool example of crowd sourcing and devotional texts. 

• An interesting study of the first year open online courses offered by HarvardX and MITx. 

• Prison radios.

• A Spider speaks out about the use of rap lyrics in court.

• Where college professors send their kids.

• A ghost ship filled with rats!

• What I’m reading: S.J. Friesen, S.A. James, D.N. Schowalter eds., Corinth in Contrast: Studies in Inequality. Brill 2014.

• What I’m listening to: nothing yet, but something soon!