Seen Elsewhere

El Castillo at Chichen Itza, Mexico. Photo by Lightmatter.

I’m trying to pull things back together after the boiler ceased work, so I’m a little busy again. If I were on top of things then I would have liked to have written something about the equinox event at Chichen Itza. The BBC have a few nice photos.

I’ve found some of the Mark Steel lectures on the web. This site has links to them in MP3 format, except part two of his Marx lecture, which is a shame. Fortunately I’ve found a page which links to part two here. The talk was given to Marxism 2002 and isn’t wholly uncritical of Marx and is often funny. A sample quote:

But there was one problem with Kapital, which is that it took him 15 years to write it. He’d been commissioned to write it, but it took him 15 years. After 15 years in fact the publisher got in touch with him and said, “Look, can you please finish this?” And Marx wrote a fantastic reply, he said:”I shall have finished soon, having finally begun the actual writing. [pause] Now, for all his analysis of the world of work, he didn’t seem to have grasped one point, which is that the employer isn’t happy when after 15 years you go “I’m getting started”…

The Resistance site also includes some programmes by Jeremy Hardy in the comedy section.

If you want to practise for the revolution, then there’s the surprisingly addictive and multiplayer Bomb Wars, which I was sent recently for no fathomable reason.

I’ve been sent the address of a Grey literature database for archaeological reports. It’s online at http://csweb.bournemouth.ac.uk/aip/aipintro.htm. At the moment I’m not getting much sense out of it yet but I may not be using it correctly.

Finally, Google recently took over another company which produces SketchUp. It’s an easy architecture program and I was going to look to see how useful it would be in producing simple models of archaeological sites. Until I saw the cost. You can integrate it with Google Earth though, and there’s a cool example available at Google Hacks, a model of Stonehenge. You can also download other structures including Elton John’s house. Not sure how he feels about that.