HoodedHawk

Professor Jeremy Sabloff gave a talk on Thursday, 11/2/2006 at the Carnegie Institute in Washington, DC.

No, Professor Sabloff is not angry in this picture – he was answering a question and I think the light was in his eyes. This was the only useful picture I came away with; the rest were too blurry since I didn’t want to use a flash.

He spoke for over an hour, explaining areas where “traditional” views of the Maya have changed in the past 20 years or so. Traditional focus has been on the Classic period, from circa 300-800 AD. More recent interest is in the pre- and post-classic periods, and they have been shown to have been much more active than traditional views held.

As one example of more recent views, he cited Tikal – a major Maya center with palaces, temples (pyramids), etc. The earlier view was that such centers were sparsely populated – mostly the domain of the Maya rulers and elite. However current research indicates that Tikal may have had a population as high as 40,000 at its height. Clearly a major urban center, with a large population – not just a place for the elite and ceremonial get-togethers.

Another area of new research is regarding the decline/ collapse of the civilization very quickly after 800 AD. The traditional view was that the major areas were abandoned, and the people dispersed. But more recent views indicate that a major population was maintained in such areas for perhaps many centuries after the Classic period. It is mainly the construction of temples, palaces, and stone monuments that declined.

Prof. Sabloff did contrast his view of the end of the Classic period with Jared Diamond’s view in Collapse. Both agree that environmental issues may well have been the cause of collapse (denuding of forests, over-use of land for agriculture, severe drought, etc.). However, while Diamond contends that the rulers of the time ignored the signs and did nothing, Sabloff commented that they probably actually did too much – and may have made things worse. The belief is that the rulers may have had the people (at the end of the Classic) undergo even more construction of temples, etc. (to appease the gods). This just exacerbated the already bad environmental issues. It’s a toss-up as to which view more closely resembles what our current leaders are doing (regarding the environment).

At the end of the lecture Prof. Sabloff entertained questions from the audience. I got the impression he would have answered more than the 10-15 minutes’ worth but the moderator shut things down. I did manage to go up to him after the lecture and he graciously inscribed two of his books for me [ Cozumel: Late Maya Settlement Patterns and The New Archaeology and the Ancient Maya ]. A number of the illustrations he used during his talk reminded me of illustrations/maps in his book, The New Archaeology.

I recorded the lecture in my iPod. The recording capability of the iPod is ok, but not as good as a “dedicated” recorder. I do use an external microphone, but the lack of record-level settings and a low sampling rate limit the quality of recordings. However I still find it more useful and less distracting than having to take copious notes. Maybe someday I’ll take the time to learn how to cleanup such recordings in say, GarageBand – but for now these are straight off the iPod (well, after conversion to mp3 from the wav format! that the iPod uses for recordings). The first minute or so I was fiddling with the mic; after that it’s fairly steady.

If you ever get a chance to attend one of Prof. Sabloff’s lectures, I highly recommend it.

The Cassini probe has returned some really great, high-resolution pictures of Saturn’s rings. The above color-enhanced photo was taken when Saturn was between Cassini and the Sun, allowing features of the rings to standout that normally would be masked by sunlight. It’s a composite of some 165 images taken while Cassini was in Saturn’s shadow. This orientation allowed Cassini to get shots of light reflecting off ring particles as small as a micrometer. At this time Cassini was about 1.3 million miles from Saturn.

Beautiful!

Professor Richard Dawkins was at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C. tonight, giving a reading/discussion of his new book, “The God Delusion“. Notice the imposing bodyguard in the background. Another was stationed on his left. When asked, he said he had not received threats; they were just hired by his publisher.

I’d estimate that there were about 200 people (or more – standing room only going way back into the store) at the reading/signing. I managed to get there early enough to get a seat in front, and a place at the front of the line for the signing.

When Prof. Dawson came on, he noticed the size of the crowd and decided to “skip the reading of Chapter One, which has a conciliatory tone – and start with Chapter Two, which is decidedly not conciliatory”. There’s a reason Prof. Dawson has been labelled “Darwin’s Rottweiler“. His basic premise is that God does not exist (yes, he is an atheist), and religion in general has not done us much good – on balance. One of the questions posed to him after the reading had to do with the “faith-based” recovery methods of groups such as Alcoholics Anonymous. He admitted that he was not aware that Alcoholics Anonymous had a religious undertone – “that’s just terrible” (or some such comment – my memory isn’t as good as it could be due to Preston being up most nights lately).

I recorded the reading and the discussion after.

IBM just got a contract to build the first petaflops supercomputer (that’s 1000 trillion computations per second). The machine will be used at Los Alamos to simulate nuclear explosions. What is really interesting is that some of the specialized processors that will be used were originally designed for the PlayStation 3.

An ancient hair dye formula, used by both the Romans and Greeks 2000 years ago (and still marketed as Grecian Formula) is based on nanoparticles, researchers say. The dye contains lead, which when applied to hair reacts with the sulfur in keratin protein to precipitate dark lead sulfide crystals. Using X-ray diffraction and other techniques they imaged the crystals. They appear to be like today’s lead sulfide quantum dots created via techniques from materials science, and are just 5 nanometers wide. Ancient Nanotech!

An article in SCIENCE this week [September 15 2006, 313 (5793)] reports the discovery of a stone block believed to be about 3,000 years old (dating to ~900 B.C.E). The block has chiseled into it a series of glyphs thought to be the earliest writing in the Western Hemisphere, and is attributed to the Olmec civilization. The Olmecs pre-dated the Maya and Aztec cultures of Central America. The block of text has yet to be disciphered, and it may never be – until a Rosetta Stone equivalent is found. The discovery of a new form of (ancient) writing is a rare event, so this is a major find.

Interestingly, the block was found by workers in Veracruz, Mexico while building a road. Unfortunately is was not left in place, but was brought to a local antiquities official along with some shards of pottery also found. This was back in 1999, and the official kept the pieces in his house all this time. While it is fortunate that the workers saved the block rather than using it for fill, it is unfortunate that it now has to be studied “out of context”, as it were. Plans are in place to go back to the site of discovery to hopefully find more artifacts.