Art in progress

Art in progress
Originally uploaded by tamaranth

The pliers are mightier than the pen. (So's the cat, but that's not important right now.)

BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | 'Lost' music instrument recreated

New software has enabled researchers to recreate a long forgotten musical instrument called the Lituus.
The 2.4m (8ft) long trumpet-like instrument was played in Ancient Rome but fell out of use some 300 years ago.
BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | 'Lost' music instrument recreated

Historical Fiction and History: Hilary Mantel and Derek Wilson at the British Library, 27.05.09

Hilary Mantel in conversation: British Library, 27th May 2009

I've just read Hilary Mantel's latest novel, Wolf Hall, and enjoyed it very much: she makes Thomas Cromwell a sympathetic character despite his disinclination to talk about, or especially like, himself. This event saw her reading from the novel, and in conversation with Erica Wagner (Literary Editor of The Times), and historian Derek Wilson.

( transcript of notes, not necessarily complete or coherent )

Built by DRUIDS

Saturday-LongMeg
Originally uploaded by tamaranth

Second installment (Saturday) of my Hadrian's Wall Wallcon 09 photos now up at Flickr.

Having told everyone that miscellaneous un-signed objects were BUILT BY DRUIDS, K and I felt obliged to go and look at some stuff that actually* was Druidy.

Yes, Druidy is a word.

*for values of 'actually' including 'maybe' and 'you can't prove it wasn't'

New GoogleLabs Thingy: Google Squared

Dunnett novels - Google Squared

This is dead cool, though frequently not right. (When I tried this, the entry for Checkmate read Checkmate (frequently shortened to mate) is a situation in chess (and in other boardgames of the chaturanga family) in which one player's king is threatened ....) But basically the app builds a table of data based on your search terms, with columns depending on the nature of the information it finds.

I was pretty impressed by results for 'Greek pantheon', 'Famous Belgians' and 'opera'. And very amused by 'science fiction women'.

edit. 'Feline villains' also made me snort. They have left out residentevil666. But it is only a matter of time ...