Friday Varia and Quick Hits

It’s dry here and cool and dusty. Last night the cars going by sounded like they on a wet road, but, in fact, it was just the streets covered in sap that hadn’t been washed off by a summer shower. We need rain, but it’s hard to see much in the forecast. 

Since I haven’t had to mow the lawn much and have spent altogether too many hours in front of the computer this summer, I have gathered some varia and quick hits for my loyal readers to enjoy.

• It’s all Dimitri Nakassis, all the time: a cool little article from the American School of Classical Studies at Athens on his work imaging Linear B tables and a interesting blog post critiquing article on the relationship between climate and political collapse in the Late Bronze Age. Good stuff!

• Two Perseid meteors over Meteora in Greece.

• Along similar lines, NASA is exploring tweeting in Latin!

• Jim Stewart, Cyprus, and the development of professional archaeology in Australia. 

• The American School of Oriental Research’s Andy Vaughn remembers the late Martin Bernal. Anyone who went to graduate school in the 1990s recalls the impact of his works.

• “Hundreds of valuable amphora” from the 2nd century found at a Roman shipwreck near Genoa.

• The Getty making thousands of images available freely available.

• The Great War through the eyes of a German Officer on Kickstarter.

• Every second on the internet.

• Andy Warhol’s grave site can be viewed on webcam 24 hours a day. It reminds me of some of the interesting posts on Kostis Kourelis’s blog.

• You can go and check out 40 maps that explain the world or you can simply check out this one brilliant chart.

• Building your own course management system with Jim Groom and Howard Rheingold.

• Hip-hop enters middle age.

• One of the first “old buildings” that I became aware of as a child was the Coach House on Philadelphia Pike. It was a stone building apparently built in 1899 (although to my childhood mind, it could have been centuries older). It had a substantial fire this week.

• Gone Fishing with John Little.

• I’ll show you my desktop if you show me yours.

• Some cool Prairie Talks this fall. 

• More reasons to hate bees. They’re too colorful.

• What I’m reading: W. Caraher, D. Pettegrew, and R.S. Moore, Pyla-Koutsopetria I: Archaeological Survey of an Ancient Coastal Town. in preparation.

• What I’m listening to: The Clean, Vehicle; The Mekons, Fear and Whiskey.

From our rose garden