Alun's posterous

Feb 1 / 8:35am

Re-thinking Mars

I've been rummaging through the depths of my hard-drive and found a few things I'd forgotten about. Here's one of them, a presentation on the contemporary archaeology of Mars.

The reason I've pulled it up is I might want to go back and think this over again. I'm not happy with it, which is why it was left on the drive, but it might have potential.

The slide on the 1980s probes is intentionally blank, because there were hardly any probes sent in the 1980s to Mars. The reason is that the competition between the major powers has moved to Earth Orbit, with the USA building the Shuttle and the USSR building long-term space stations. Recent events have highlighted a couple of reasons why it's worth looking at this again. One is the registration of lunar heritage by California, which is grabbing headlines for something that Alice Gorman and Beth O'Leary have been saying for a while. The other is Obama's cancellation of the return to the Moon.

It could be a scientific re-prioritisation, but like the Mars gap in the 1980s, it could also be due to politics. The Nobel laureate already has wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to manage, and he wants to keep his options open for a war with Iran. That could turn very nasty as Iran is next door to his two other problems. It's possible that there simply isn't a threat on the Moon, but there is in the Middle East. Unless China develops lunar ambitions, the discovery of water on the Moon could be a scientific curiosity rather than a stepping stone to colonisation.

There's a few reasons why I don't like this presentation as it stands. I think the biggest problem is that one of the big factors for making it was that I needed a presentation. It wasn't an idea that was ready, and to some extent the problem was "there's something archaeology could say about this, but what?" I think now I'm thinking about the social, political and economic effects of Mars exploration. This time around I see archaeology as a tool to finding out about these factors, rather than 'being archaeological' as the purpose of project.

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Filed under // archaeoastronomy archaeology heritage history of astronomy

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Jan 31 / 10:36am

Jing Test

You never know - Posterous is pretty nifty, can it parse Jing URLs?

View on screencast.com »

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Filed under // Jing Posterous

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Jan 25 / 11:37am

What journals did before they invented 'Comic Sans'

From the 1934 volume of Babylonaica.

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Posted from Oxford, United Kingdom

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Jan 17 / 7:35am

Criteria for the Attribution of Intent to Archaeoastronomical Alignments

This came through into my email box today. Seeing as Sky still have me offline, I'll email it back out as a note so I can check it out when I do have Internet access.

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2010AAS...21533103A

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Jan 16 / 2:09pm

I ATEN'T DEAD

I’ve been busy recently with OER work. The iScience department will be putting course materials into various archives with Creative Commons licences. Most of the courses are Physics-based, but one will be Prophets and Powers, the opening Archaeoastronomy/Physics/Geology module of the Interdiscipinary Science BSc. This is a problem based on studying the Egyptian pyramids. If I can get clearance I’ll see if we can release the Stonehenge-based version of the same module.

Another difficulty is that my ISP cut my internet conection on Wednesday when someone mucked about at the exchange. They now say it’s fixed and the fact we still don’t have broadband is nothing to do with them. This morning they cut the phone too, but that’s been fixed for now. The broadband will be ‘assessed as a priority within 72 hours’, which is better than saying “We’re doing nothing about it for half a week.’

In the mean time there’s this nice write up on Matt Parker’s work at Bad Science. It’s exactly the sort of thing I should be reading, because it pokes fun at exactly the sort of mistake that I can easily make. In fact in the depths of my hard drive I’ve found a presentation lurking showing exactly how I wasted six months chasing a magic number. Once I have a proper connection I’ll try and upload it to slideshare. I’ve also found a few other presentations which I think have big mistakes in, but potential to be knocked into something interesting.

Till then blogging will be more sporadic than usual.

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Nov 30 / 2:21am

The HEA vs the forthcoming Alien Invasion

I know what you're thinking: "A used spoon bowl is all well and good, but what are you going to do if killer aliens invade?"

No faffing around with grills here like on Star Trek. If we need to escape the ducts are entered through handy full-size doors.

Then, if it turns out someone forgot to charge the laser cannon this morning, we can defeat them with an unhygienic spoon.

You'd have to get up pretty early in the morning to outwit the HEA. But not too early otherwise you'd arrive with masses of time to wait for the meeting and get a bit bored.

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Posted from York, United Kingdom

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Nov 30 / 2:07am

At the HEAcademy

I'm at the HEAcademy today. It's amazingly hi-tech and professional. There's swipe cards and big green buttons to open doors. But there's something even more impressive.