HoodedHawk

My wife’s family was in town for her grandmother’s and uncle’s birthdays (happy 92nd birthday, Margaret!; happy birthday, Paul!) so we all went to the Freer Gallery of Art in DC. Preston fell asleep in his stroller (but not before some very loud “OUTTA HERE!”s echoed off the gallery walls). The rest of us enjoyed it. :)

I spent most of the time in the galleries of ancient Asian ceramics, and bronze. I’ll definitely be going back for a more leisurely visit, but not around Preston’s naptime.

Some highlights below (click any image for a slideshow), but a lot more via the photography page.

Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Preston at Freer Gallery of Art

Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

 

Tim Berners-Lee in 2001

It was twenty years ago today (March 13, 1989) that Tim Berners-Lee wrote up his proposal for management at CERN, titled “Information Management: A Proposal“.

This document was an attempt to persuade CERN management that a global hypertext system was in CERN’s interests. Note that the only name I had for it at this time was “Mesh” — I decided on “World Wide Web” when writing the code in 1990.

Berners-Lee’s boss thought his proposal was “vague but exciting”. :)

A client/server model for a distributed hypertext system.

 

Preston, Dylan and I went to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History yesterday. Preston just loved the Insect Zoo. No way was Dylan going to hold a bug, but it was hard to keep Preston away. He also held a big beetle, but I couldn’t get a picture as I had to help keep Preston from squishing it.

Click any picture below for larger slideshow…

The new Ocean Hall is quite good. Even Dylan was impressed by the giant jellyfish (seen in foreground). Full-size right whale hangs from the ceiling, and videos of ocean scenes line the walls. Lots of informative exhibits about the ocean.

A lot more pictures are viewable via the Photography page (Natural History link)

 

A 3-D image of Cleopatra has been rendered by computer imaging based on images from ancient artifacts.

Egyptologist Sally Ann Ashton of Cambridge University says the image(s) reflect the Queen’s Greek heritage. Cleopatra was born in 69BC into an Egyptian – Greek dynasty. She took the throne at 17 and by 20 had seduced Julius Ceasar…

Researchers at PennState have published the DNA sequence of an extinct Woolly Mammoth; see the news article at Nature.com, or the November 20, 2008 issue of Nature for a paper by Miller, et al. (Nature 456, 387-390: “Sequencing the nuclear genome of the extinct woolly mammoth“).

Mammoths went extinct some 10,000 years ago, but have been found preserved in Russian permafrost. The hair from one of these preserved (mummified) ancient beasts was used to retrieve DNA. Hair is useful for such extractions as it is relatively easy to wash away contaminating (foreign) DNA.

One tidbit that I found quite interesting: where did the researchers get the Mammoth hair? They bought the hair on Ebay.com! You can too, for only $175.00 for 2.5 grams. Yes, the researchers did verify that this was actual mammoth hair. Anyway, the big question is whether or not we will shortly have a Mammoth clone. Short answer: not any time soon. This is just the first step, but is a major one.

Our ancestors did see live woolly mammoths; here’s a cave painting in France depicting one: