Isegoria

Archaeologists Find Ancient Treasure in modern Bulgaria:

Bulgarian archaeologists have unearthed about 15,000 tiny golden pieces that date back to the end of the third millennium B.C. — a find they said Wednesday matches the famous treasure of Troy.

The golden ornaments, estimated to be between 4,100 and 4,200 years old, have been unearthed gradually during the past year from an ancient tomb near the central village of Dabene, about 75 miles east of the capital, Sofia, said Vasil Nikolov, an academic consultant on the excavations.

‘This treasure is a bit older than Schliemann’s finds in Troy, and contains much more golden ornaments,’ Nikolov said.

Elephants, lions to roam North America once more?:

Scientists are proposing reintroducing large mammals such as elephants, lions, cheetahs and wild horses to North America to replace populations lost 13,000 years ago.

The scientists say that not only could large tracts of North America act as breeding sanctuaries for species of large wild animals under threat in Africa and Asia, but that such ecological history parks could be major tourist attractions.

They might want to try this is, oh, say, San Diego…

The Wall Street Journal‘s latest “The Middle Seat” column discusses A Common Runway Hazard:

Despite nearly three decades of warnings from safety experts, the U.S. still has more than 300 runways at commercial airports that don’t have adequate overrun areas to help avoid accidents like the crash two weeks ago of an Air France jumbo jet that ran off a Toronto runway into a ravine.

Federal standards require an extra 1,000 feet of overrun area at both ends — where planes can skid to a stop without hitting obstacles — but under current rules, airports aren’t required to retrofit existing runways. The National Transportation Safety Board has been pushing for runway-overrun improvements since 1977, and issued recommendations again in 2000 after a Southwest Airlines jet went off the runway in Burbank, Calif., and slid into a gas station.

Buying the Wrong Medicine Overseas explains that sometimes different drugs in different countries share the same name:

A safety alert issued to hospitals and doctors this year by the Institute for Safe Medication Practices, a nonprofit group, identified several drugs in the U.S. that have the same name as very different drugs sold by different manufacturers in European countries. For instance, Norpramin, which is an antidepressant in the U.S., is the name of an ulcer drug in Spain. Flomax for prostate disease has the same name as a pain medication in Italy. And Vivelle, which in the U.S. is a hormone treatment for menopause and osteoporosis, is a birth-control pill in Austria. The group says it has encountered more matches in Asia, South America and elsewhere.

In Brazil, for example, the brand name Dilacor refers to verapamil for irregular heart rhythm and hypertension. But in the U.S., Dilacor is a blood-pressure drug known generically as diltiazem. And in Serbia, Dilacor is the brand name for digoxin, used to treat heart failure.

Who knew? Most Wild Chimps Are Southpaws:

A three-year study of 17 wild chimps in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, found that 12 of them used their left hands when using sticks to probe for termites.

Crocodile blood may yield powerful new antibiotics:

‘They tear limbs off each other and despite the fact that they live in this environment with all these microbes, they heal up very rapidly and normally almost always without infection,’ said U.S. scientist Mark Merchant, who has been taking crocodile blood samples in the Northern Territory [of Australia].

Initial studies of the crocodile immune system in 1998 found that several proteins (antibodies) in the reptile’s blood killed bacteria that were resistant to penicillin, such as Staphylococcus aureus or golden staph, Australian scientist Adam Britton told Reuters on Tuesday. It was also a more powerful killer of the HIV virus than the human immune system.

Mathias Doepfner pulls no punches in Self-satisfied Europe, thy name is cowardice:

The writer Henryk Broder recently issued a withering indictment: ‘Europe, your family name is appeasement.’ That phrase resonates because it is so terribly true. Appeasement cost millions of Jews and non-Jews their lives as Britain and France, allies at the time, negotiated and hesitated too long before they realized that Hitler needed to be fought and defeated, because he could not be bound by toothless agreements.

Later, appeasement legitimized and stabilized communism in the Soviet Union, then East Germany, then throughout the rest of Eastern Europe — where inhuman, repressive and murderous governments were glorified for decades.

Appeasement similarly crippled Europe when genocide ran rampant in Bosnia and Kosovo. Indeed, even though we had absolute proof of ongoing mass murder there, we Europeans debated and debated — and then debated still more. We were still debating when finally the Americans had to come from halfway around the world, into Europe yet again, to do our work for us.

Europe still hasn’t learned its lesson. Rather than protecting democracy in the Middle East, European appeasement, camouflaged behind the fuzzy word ‘equidistance,’ often seems to countenance suicide bombings in Israel by fundamentalist Palestinians. Similarly, it generates a mentality that allows Europe to ignore the nearly 500,000 victims of Saddam Hussein’s torture and murder machinery, and, motivated by the self-righteousness of the peace movement, to accuse U.S. President George W. Bush of being a warmonger.

This hypocrisy continues even as it is discovered that some of the loudest critics of American action in Iraq made illicit billions — indeed, tens of billions — of dollars in the corrupt UN ‘oil-for-food’ program.

Today we are faced with a particularly grotesque form of appeasement. How is Germany reacting to the escalating violence by Islamic fundamentalists in Holland, Britain and elsewhere in Europe? By suggesting — wait for it — that the proper response to such barbarism is to initiate a ‘Muslim holiday’ in Germany.

I wish I were joking, but I am not.

Daniel Akst summarizes the research on beauty in Looks Do Matter — and makes an amusing observation:

The paradox, in such an age, is that the more important appearances become, the worse most of us seem to look — and not just by comparison with the godlike images alternately taunting and bewitching us from every billboard and TV screen. While popular culture is obsessed with fashion and style, and our prevailing psychological infirmity is said to be narcissism, fully two-thirds of American adults have abandoned conventional ideas of attractiveness by becoming overweight. Nearly half of this group is downright obese. Given their obsession with dieting — a $40 billion-plus industry in the United States — it’s not news to these people that they’re sending an unhelpful message with their inflated bodies, but it’s worth noting here nonetheless.

Again, read the whole article for a good summary of the research on beauty and how much it matters.

Gannibal: the Moor of Petersburg sounds like an absolutely fascinating character:

The extraordinary Gannibal was the African great-grandfather of Aleksandr Pushkin, Russia’s greatest poet, who spoke proudly of his own inherited ‘blackamoor profile’. In his elegantly written new biography, Hugh Barnes suggests Gannibal was born in Chad, taken as a slave to Constantinople, and purchased in 1704, aged seven or eight, by Tsar Peter the Great of Russia. While still a teenager, Gannibal was writing the tsar’s letters, working on encryption for secret messages, and helping to plan military campaigns. As an adult he rose to the top of the Russian army. Gannibal also read Racine, Corneille and Moliere, and was, in Paris, the friend of Montesquieu, Diderot and Voltaire, who called him ‘the dark star of the Enlightenment’. Yet this was less than a century after France had established its slave colonies in the West Indies, and Voltaire also said that the intelligence of black people was ‘far inferior’, while Montesquieu, equivocating about slavery, said it was sometimes ‘founded on natural reason’. How did Gannibal manage to surmount 18th-century attitudes to slavery and to Africans?

Maya Jasanoff opens Secret Signals in Lotus Flowers, her review of Gautam Chakravarty’s The Indian Mutiny and the British Imagination, with a narrative hook:

Tucked away in the lanes of Old Delhi, not far from the Red Fort of the Mughal emperors, sits the little visited Anglican church of St James, consecrated in 1836. With its Renaissance-style dome and campanile, and painted a cheerful lemon, this church would not look out of place in Italy. In Delhi it is an oddity, as was its founder, the swashbuckling military adventurer James Skinner, who built it ‘in fulfilment of a vow made while lying wounded on the field of battle’. (Skinner’s equally remarkable contemporary Begum Samru — a Kashmiri dancing-girl turned army commander — built a Catholic church in similar style at Sardhana, with two Wren-like spires flanking the dome.) Skinner did not come seamlessly to Christian piety: half-Scot and half-Rajput, he never visited Europe, began his career in the service of the Marathas, and sired numerous part-Indian children by (it was said) 16 wives and mistresses. In a small yard outside the church, members of his multi-ethnic clan lie buried. Some of their tombs have crosses on top and epitaphs on the side in Persian — memorials to a period in Anglo-Indian history when European and Eastern cultures comfortably converged.

Now I want to read about James Skinner and Begum Samru…

Ooh, BBC Radio 4 has a Woman’s Hour devoted to Begum Samru.