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Off Topic The "That's interesting"/geek thread

Discussion in 'Queens Park Rangers' started by UTRs, May 25, 2018.

  1. kiwiqpr

    kiwiqpr Barnsie Mod

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    London Dispatch

    Mudlarks Scour the Thames to Uncover 2,000 Years of SecretsMudlarks Scour the Thames to Uncover 2,000 Years of Secrets
    From ribald tokens from London’s Roman past to hints of the Mayflower’s fate, mudlarks discover the story of a constantly changing London — but only at low tide.



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    Lara Maiklem looking for tokens of London’s past along the Thames River.Credit...Andrew Testa for The New York Times
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    By Megan Specia

    • Feb. 12, 2020Updated 5:43 p.m. ET
      • Continue reading the main story

        Within minutes she had spotted fragments of a 17th-century jug, the half-face of a bearded man visible in the clay.

        The name — mudlark — was first given to the Victorian-era poor who scrounged for items in the river to sell, pulling copper scraps, rope and other valuables from the shore. But more recently the label has stuck to London’s hobbyists, history buffs and treasure hunters who scour the river edge searching for objects from the city’s past.
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        Mudlarking’s popularity has grown steadily in recent years, driven in part by social media communities where enthusiasts share their finds, and tour groups that offer a trudge through the shards of history’s castoffs.

        Dr. Fiona Haughey, a London archaeologist who has worked on the Thames since the 1990s, said that although some mudlarks are looking for valuables, others are looking for a connection with the everyday objects of a bygone Britain.

        But it’s the connection with the layers of lives of Londoners before them, revealed by the tides of the river at the heart of the metropolis, that unites the enthusiasts.

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        For Dr. Haughey, a specialist in prehistory, it’s about what an object can tell her about its owner rather than what value it has.


        “I love the conundrum of it,” she said.

        The Port of London Authority, which owns the Thames waterway along with the Crown Estate (i.e. Queen Elizabeth II), began to regulate exploration along the shore in 2016, requiring anyone searching the banks to have a foreshore permit.

        These permits — about 1,500 were issued this year — allow people to explore the terrain, and scrape or dig into the mud up to a depth of 7.5 centimeters, around three inches. Mudlarks are advised to report objects that could be of archaeological interest to the Portable Antiquities Scheme, run by the British Museum.

        treasure” — defined as single finds of gold and silver over 300 years old, and hoards of coins and prehistoric metalwork — to inform the government.

        Britain takes this law seriously, as one amateur treasure hunter learned in November. He was given a decade-long jail sentence after failing, along with another man, to report the discovery of a Viking hoard they dug up in western England.

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        A specialized permit allows deeper digging to a depth of 1.2 meters, or 3 feet and 11 inches. But those permits are available only to members of the exclusive Society of Thames Mudlarks — an invitation-only group of around 50 members — who have already held a standard permit and reported their findings to the Museum of London for two years.

        Some mudlarks bring metal detectors. But most simply recover what the river has naturally revealed, usually a fascinating trinket rather than treasure.

        “I like just to collect what the river decides it’s going to leave on that day,” Ms. Maiklem said. “It’s that element of luck.”

        But sometimes there are more significant finds, like the first “spintria” found in Britain. Spintriae are Roman bronze tokens, with depictions of sexual acts on one face and a Roman numeral on the other, whose purpose remains uncertain.

        And every tide reveals some of the city’s varied story: Roman coins, medieval badges worn by religious pilgrims, an elaborate 17th-century watch.

        The Thames, the very reason people began settling in the city over 2,000 years ago, is one of the best preservers of London’s history. The river has been used many ways over the millenniums — as a highway, a source of food and, most important to mudlarks, as a dump.

        “The Thames is unpredictable, so it’s just all mixed up, like a big washing machine,” said Jason Sandy, an architect who mudlarks in his spare time.

        Continue reading the main story

        In the center of London, where the heart of the Roman city stood, many of the finds are Roman or medieval. Farther west, evidence of prehistoric settlements have been found.

        Where Ms. Maiklem was exploring, in Rotherhithe, once an old shipping center in eastern London, finds from the 16th and 17th centuries are the norm.

        This particular morning, the sun was just rising and the tide was still on its way out as she clambered over rocks.

        that it was likely a love token. At her feet, pieces of clay tobacco pipes from the 16th and 17th century clinked as they washed against rocks, so common as to escape a mudlark’s interest.

        But a perfectly round musket ball was worth plucking from the muck. The leather sole of a hand-stitched shoe, preserved by the anaerobic mud, flapped in the breeze, and she tugged at its toes to wrest it from the bank.

        Continue reading the main story

        Huge wooden beams from the ships broken up here in the 17th and 18th centuries jut out of the mud. The Mayflower is believed to have been broken down here for scrap.

        “There are so many ghosts locked in the foreshore,” Ms. Maiklem said. “Also, it’s so fleeting because if it’s not collected from the surface, it’s going to be washed away or broken down.”

        Ms. Maiklem, who has spent more than 15 years exploring the river’s banks, takes only the most unusual items home with her. She sees her discoveries as part of a shared history and uses social media to reveal her finds. She has more than 100,000 people following her.

        While Ms. Maiklem recently moved out of the city, she still makes the journey to the Thames weekly, driven by the thrill of discovery.

        From here, the hustle of London seems a world away, with gulls cruising between the barges and the old warehouses turned luxury apartments that stand on the north side of the river, a sign of the ever-changing city.

        The Shard — London’s tallest and one of its most recognizable skyscrapers — juts in the distance, reflecting the morning light from its thousands of glass windows.

        “It's a way of just escaping from all of this controlled chaos,” Ms. Maiklem said, gesturing to the skyline. “This is what London is about for me.”
     
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  2. QPRski

    QPRski Well-Known Member

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    #462
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  3. kiwiqpr

    kiwiqpr Barnsie Mod

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    #463
  4. QPRski

    QPRski Well-Known Member

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    Well they do have Artificial Intelligence!
     
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  5. Wherever

    Wherever Well-Known Member

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    Artificial is better than none
     
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  6. kiwiqpr

    kiwiqpr Barnsie Mod

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    Space mission to reveal 'Truths' about climate change
    By Jonathan Amos BBC Science Correspondent
    • 22 January 2020
    • comments
    s
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    Image copyright UKSA/NPL
    Image caption Artwork: Truths will work with other satellites to calibrate and validate their observations
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    The UK is going to lead a space mission to get an absolute measurement of the light reflected off Earth's surface.

    The information will be used to calibrate the observations of other satellites, allowing their data to be compared more easily.

    Called Truths, the new spacecraft was approved for development by European Space Agency member states in November.

    Proponents of the mission expect its data to help reduce the uncertainty in projections of future climate change.

    Scientists and engineers met on Tuesday to begin planning the project. Industry representatives from Britain, Switzerland, Greece, the Czech Republic and Romania gathered at Esa's technical centre in Harwell, Oxfordshire.

    The agency has allocated €32.4m (£27.7m) for the initial design phase, with the scientific lead on the mission to be taken by Britain's National Physical Laboratory.

    NPL is the UK's "keeper of standards".

    It holds references for the kilogram, the metre, the second and all other units used in the international system (SI) of measurement.

    The lab is the place you go, for example, if you want a precise description of the intensity of a light source - something it's able to gauge using a device called a cryogenic radiometer.

    And the aim of the Truths mission is to get one of these instruments into orbit.

    Working in tandem with a hyperspectral camera, the radiometer will make a detailed map of the sunlight reflected off Earth's surface - off its deserts, snowfields, forests and oceans.

    The map should be of such exquisite quality that it's expected to become the standard reference against which all other imaging spacecraft will want to adjust and correct their own observations.

    This ought to make it a much simpler task to compare the pictures from different satellites, not just from those missions flying today but also from the ones that have long since been retired and whose data now sits in archives.

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    Image copyright NASA/DSCOVR/EPIC
    Image caption Truths will take into orbit the primary standard used for the measurement of light
    One of the other big goals of Truths is that in measuring the complete reflectance of the Earth globally, and doing it with such precision, it will establish a kind of "climate fingerprint" that a future version of the satellite, 10 to 15 years' later, can then resample.

    "By doing that we'll be able to detect subtle changes much earlier than we can with our current observing system," explained NPL's Prof Nigel Fox.

    "This will allow us to constrain and test the climate forecast models. So we'll know earlier whether the predicted temperatures that the models are giving us are consistent or not with the observations."

    Invitations to tender for the design work will be sent out to industry shortly.

    A grand plan for how to implement Truths must be ready for when the research ministers of Esa's member states gather for their next major policy meeting in 2022.

    The feasibility work will also need to produce a full costing for the project, likely to be in the region of €250-300m (£210-260m).

    Barring technical showstoppers, the ministers should then green-light the mission for a targeted launch in 2026.

    Britain will almost certainly bear the majority of the cost of implementing Truths.

    The UK has been its leading advocate.

    "It plays to our strengths," said Beth Greenaway, the head of Earth observations and climate at the UK Space Agency. "NPL is remarkable. It does the standard time for the world; it does the standard metre. We like to think of ourselves leading on climate change so we should be providing the standard reference for Earth's radiation budget."

    Truths is an acronym for Traceable Radiometry Underpinning Terrestrial- and Helio- Studies. It will be sensitive to light in the visible and near-infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum.

    Esa recently agreed to implement another UK-led mission called Forum which will map Earth's radiation at longer wavelengths in the far-infrared.
     
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  7. kiwiqpr

    kiwiqpr Barnsie Mod

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    Neanderthal 'skeleton' is first found in a decade
    By Paul Rincon Science editor, BBC News website
    • 7 hours ago

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    Image copyrightGraeme Barker
    Image caption The ribcage of Shanidar Z
    Researchers have described the first "articulated" remains of a Neanderthal to be discovered in a decade.

    An articulated skeleton is one where the bones are still arranged in their original positions.

    The new specimen was uncovered at Shanidar Cave in Iraq and consists of the upper torso and crushed skull of a middle-aged to older adult.

    Excavations at Shanidar in the 1950s and 60s unearthed partial remains of 10 Neanderthal men, women and children.

    During these earlier excavations, archaeologists found that some of the burials were clustered together, with clumps of pollen surrounding one of the skeletons.


    The researcher who led those original investigations, Ralph Solecki from Columbia University in New York, claimed it was evidence that Neanderthals had buried their dead with flowers.

    This "flower burial" captured the imagination of the public and kicked off a decades-long controversy. The floral interpretation suggested our evolutionary relatives were capable of cultural sophistication, challenging the view - prevalent at the time - that Neanderthals were unintelligent and animalistic.

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    Image copyrightGraeme Barker
    Image caption The skull of Shanidar Z was found to have been crushed
    Before the most recent specimen uncovered in Iraq, the last articulated Neanderthal remains were unearthed at Sima de las Palomas in 2006-7 and at Cova Forada in 2010 [Link in Spanish]. Both sites are located in south-east Spain.

    But Dr Emma Pomeroy, from the University of Cambridge, said the new skeleton - dubbed Shanidar Z - is more substantial and more completely articulated than those previous finds.

    Dr Pomeroy is the lead author of a paper in Antiquity journal describing the find and was part of the excavation team working at the cave in Iraqi Kurdistan.

    "So much research on how Neanderthals treated their dead has to involve returning to finds from 60 or even a hundred years ago, when archaeological techniques were more limited, and that only ever gets you so far," said Dr Pomeroy.

    "To have primary evidence of such quality from this famous Neanderthal site will allow us to use modern technologies to explore everything from ancient DNA to long-held questions about Neanderthal ways of death, and whether they were similar to our own."

    Ralph Solecki died last year aged 101, having never managed to conduct further excavations at his most famous site, despite several attempts.

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    Image copyrightGraeme Barker
    Image caption The entrance to Shanidar Cave
    In 2011, the Kurdish Regional Government approached Prof Graeme Barker from Cambridge's McDonald Institute of Archaeology about revisiting Shanidar Cave.

    With Solecki's support, initial digging began in 2014, but had to be stopped after two days when Islamic State got too close. It resumed the following year.

    "We thought with luck we'd be able to find the locations where they had found Neanderthals in the 1950s, to see if we could date the surrounding sediments," said Prof Barker. "We didn't expect to find any Neanderthal bones."

    In 2016, in one of the deepest parts of the trench, the researchers identified a rib, followed by a lumbar vertebra - part of the spine. Then, they uncovered the bones of a clenched right hand. However, metres of sediment needed carefully digging out before the team could excavate the skeleton.

    During the 2018-19 excavation, team members went on to uncover a complete skull, flattened by thousands of years of sediment, and upper body bones almost to the waist - with the left hand curled under the head like a small cushion.

    Early analysis suggests the specimen is more than 70,000 years old. While the sex has yet to be determined, the discovery has relatively worn teeth, suggesting the individual was a "middle- to older-aged adult".

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    Image copyrightGraeme Barker
    Image caption The bones of Shanidar Z's left hand
    However, the lower part of the skeleton appears to be missing. "The ribcage and spine are almost complete, but [Shanidar Z] was cut off at about waist level by the removal of the block of sediment containing Shanidar 4 (another Neanderthal specimen from the site) in 1960," Dr Pomeroy told BBC News.

    Shanidar Z's body lay right below Shanidar 4's upper body. "Observations by T Dale Stewart (the physical anthropologist on the 1960 project) and Ralph Solecki suggest there were a pair of legs just below Shanidar 4's head and upper body, and based on the limited information we have about the original position of the legs, they are very consistent with belonging to Shanidar Z," Dr Pomeroy explained.

    It's possible that the lower legs and feet of Shanidar Z were misattributed to another of the Neanderthals from the cave, Shanidar 6. Unfortunately, many of the Shanidar remains are thought to have been lost during the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq.

    A prominent rock next to the head of Shanidar Z may have been used as a marker for Neanderthals repeatedly depositing their dead, said Dr Pomeroy.

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    Image copyrightEmma Pomeroy
    Image caption Diagram showing the burial position of the Neanderthal, a stone sits behind the head
    But whether the time between deaths was weeks, decades or even centuries will be difficult to determine. Relationships between Shanidar Z and the other skeletons could potentially be resolved by analysing DNA.

    But genetic material is difficult to obtain from hot regions of the world, and even if scientists can retrieve DNA from the new specimen, there may be little to compare it to, as many of the other remains are missing.

    "The new excavation suggests that some of these bodies were laid in a channel in the cave floor created by water, which had then been intentionally dug to make it deeper," said Prof Graeme Barker. "There is strong early evidence that Shanidar Z was deliberately buried."

    Shanidar Z has been brought on loan to the archaeological labs at Cambridge University, where it is being conserved and scanned to help build a digital reconstruction, as more layers of silt are removed.
     
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  8. Steelmonkey

    Steelmonkey Well-Known Member

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    "
    "
     
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  9. kiwiqpr

    kiwiqpr Barnsie Mod

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    BEERS MEANS YEARS
    Drinking beer daily ‘can nearly DOUBLE a man’s chances of hitting 90 compared to teetotallers’
    Exclusive
    • 21 Feb 2020, 22:42
    • Updated: 21 Feb 2020, 22:42
    A DAILY tipple nearly doubles a man’s hope of hitting 90, a study says.

    Those on half a pint of beer a day are 81 per cent more likely than teetotallers to reach a tenth decade.

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    1
    A study has found that men who drink half a pint of beer a day nearly double their chance of hitting 90Credit: Alamy
    Women who drink similar amounts increase by a third their chance of reaching that landmark.

    Even blokes who consumed three nips of whisky or two pints daily — double the recommended NHS maximum — are two-thirds more likely to live to that ripe age when compared to abstainers.

    The booze habits of 5,500 people were tracked by researchers from Maastricht University in Holland for over two decades.

    Lead researcher Prof Dr Piet van den Brandt said: “Our analyses show significantly positive associations between alcohol and longevity in men and women.”


    One theory is moderate drinking is good for heart health. But too much booze can be toxic, explaining why bingers do badly.

    However, the researchers claim their results do not mean teetotallers should hit the bottle.

    They said: “The results should not be used as motivation to start drinking."
     
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  10. QPRski

    QPRski Well-Known Member

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    #470
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  11. Steelmonkey

    Steelmonkey Well-Known Member

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    David Gedge reads this forum - fact!!

     
    #471
  12. QPRski

    QPRski Well-Known Member

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    Amazing landscape pictures of Mars.

     
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  13. QPRski

    QPRski Well-Known Member

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    #473
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  14. UTRs

    UTRs Senile Member

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  15. Steelmonkey

    Steelmonkey Well-Known Member

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    **** sake - I climb a lot for a living, but that is some scary ****! Was giving me the willies watching some of that <laugh> mental
     
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  16. UTRs

    UTRs Senile Member

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  17. UTRs

    UTRs Senile Member

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    Fair play to you Steels and this fellow nutter in the video<ok>
     
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  18. UTRs

    UTRs Senile Member

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  19. Steelmonkey

    Steelmonkey Well-Known Member

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    We're all good pal. Feel for jnr, his driving test was supposed to be tomorrow and it's been moved to end of June - he's bored ****less, is bashing the hell out of his drums in frustration! He's talking about writing an album about isolation!!!

    Looks a lot more crazy down there than it is up here, you housebound or out and about? Stay safe :emoticon-0148-yes:
     
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  20. kiwiqpr

    kiwiqpr Barnsie Mod

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    I felt unsafe and I'm sitting down
     
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