england

Toby Martin 2015, The Cruciform Brooch and Anglo-Saxon England Back around Christmas I reviewed the first three chapters of Toby Martin's big book about Anglo-Saxon cruciform brooches. Those are the technical chapters dealing with typology and chronology, and I loved them. They are rock solid. Now I've read the remaining four chapters that deal with the societal interpretation of the brooches. In the following I am going to use the author's given name because Martin is me. I think Toby's investigations and interpretations here are excellent. I particularly like his painstaking study of how…
Toby Martin 2015, The Cruciform Brooch and Anglo-Saxon England This is the definitive study of English cruciform brooches. Now and then a study comes along that is so comprehensive, and so well argued, that nobody will ever be likely to even try to eclipse it. It is my firm belief that future work on English cruciform brooches will strictly be footnotes to Toby Martin. He has collected and presented a huge material, asked interesting questions of it, and dealt with it competently using state-of-the-art methods. I'd be happy to hand this book as a model to any archaeologist anywhere who…
tags: FuÃball, sports, soccer, futbol, World Cup Soccer, USA, England, Lego, silly, satire, humor, funny, television, streaming video This hilarious video satire is surprisingly well-done. It shows a clip from the USA versus England World Cup game. (This is a great video for those who didn't see the game since this video shows the highlights).
A restoration of Megatherium from H.N. Hutchinson's Extinct Monsters. For over a century and a half dinosaurs have been the unofficial symbols and ambassadors of paleontology, but this was not always so. It was fossil mammals, not dinosaurs, which enthralled the public during the turn of the 19th century, and arguably the most famous was the enormous ground sloth Megatherium. It was more than just a natural curiosity. The bones of the "great beast" represented a world which flourished and disappeared in the not-so-distant past, but, as illustrated by Christine Argot in a review of its history…
tags: comedy, humor, funny, fucking hilarious, birds, streaming video This particular exhibit is a living art piece made up of 40 zebra finches jamming on electric guitars and cymbals at the Barbican, in London. The artist, Boursier-Mougenot creates a walk-though aviary for a flock of zebra finches, furnished with electric guitars and other musical instruments. As the birds go about their routine activities, perching on or feeding from the various pieces of equipment, they create a captivating, live soundscape. This video is cute, because it shows a female zebra finch, building a nest on the…
However time may be measured at the Naval Observatory, the clock seems to tick slowly here when Congress is out of town. -Richard Corrigan The following is the mostly true (but somewhat fictionalized) story of the first clocks in the Americas. In the 17th Century, the finest clockmakers in the world were Dutch, going back to the time of Christiaan Huygens. Image: A Dutch Longcase clock, courtesy of The Museum of the Dutch Clock. Huygens determined that if you allowed a pendulum to swing just a little bit, the period of its swing could be used to keep time to incredible accuracy. By the mid-…
tags: kingfisher, Alcedo atthis, image of the day Kingfisher, Alcedo atthis, with a freshly caught flatfish. This species is found in central and southern England, and they are currently increasing in their range in Scotland. Image: Paul Richards [larger view]. This image is part of a lovely photoessay published recently by The Telegraph. Read more about this species.
tags: kingfisher, Alcedo atthis, image of the day Kingfisher, Alcedo atthis, with a freshly caught flatfish. This species is found in central and southern England, and they are currently increasing in their range in Scotland. Image: Paul Richards [larger view]. This image is part of a lovely photoessay published recently by The Telegraph. Read more about this species.
tags: kingfisher, Alcedo atthis, image of the day Kingfisher, Alcedo atthis, on her favorite fishing perch. This bird is found in central and southern England, and they are currently increasing in their range in Scotland. Image: Paul Richards [larger view]. This image is part of a lovely photoessay published recently by The Telegraph. Read more about this species.
tags: Sandwalk, Down House, Darwin, nature, photography, London, England, Bromley, England, sciblog A gate in a brick wall next to the greenhouse behind Darwin's Down House, where Darwin conducted a lot of his botany experiments. Image: GrrlScientist 31 August 2008 [larger view]. Sunday, the day after the Nature Network Science Blog conference was over, Mike, Mo and I caught a train to Bromley, England, where we toured Darwin's Down House and Gardens and walked along the famous Sandwalk that Darwin once walked. This is part three of my photoessay series about Down House, where I focus on…
tags: Sandwalk, Down House, Darwin, nature, photography, London, England, Bromley, England Darwin's Down House near Bromley, England, a short train ride away from London. This view of the house was snapped from the gardens in back of the house. If you look closely, you can see part of the cafe (under the blue umbrellas) to the right of the crooked tree in this picture. I am really proud of this photograph, by the way. Image: GrrlScientist 31 August 2008 [larger view]. Sunday, the day after the Nature Network Science Blog conference had concluded, Mike, Mo and I caught a train to Bromley,…
Apologies for overloading cute on you all. These baby lemurs were recently born at Folly Farm Zoo in Pembrokeshire, Wales.
Via the awesome i&o blog, we bring you Cinders, a pig with mysphobia - a fear of dirt. The porker's owners, Debbie and Andrew Keeble, pig farmers and sausage makers in North Yorkshire England, had never seen anything like it. The tiny piglet would cower and shake in the grass at the edge of the mud pit while his siblings gallivanted about in the filth like proper British pigs. The family's five year old daughter suggested putting her Paddington Bear boots on the pig to overcome its fear and it seems to have worked. Zooillogix was skeptical that one could actually diagnose a piglet with…
Apparently obesity isn't just for American's anymore... make that humans in general. First we have George, the greedy little pig as old British women would call him. This hedgehog was delivered to the Wildlife Aid centre in Leatherhead, England five times heavier than his natural weight. At 5lbs, George is dangerously obese and a testament to the fattening properties of garden insects, fruits and mushrooms. Remind anyone else of this? More of a trailer park tiggywinkle if you ask me. Next we have Peaches, the fat baby wombat, from Tomerong, north of Sydney. In this series of caught-in-the-…
We know that a rash of recent posts has put us at risk of entering cuteoverload territory , but we couldn't resist these pictures of seven baby hedgehogs from two different families at the Prickly Ball Farm Hospital in Devon, England. The hospital copes with orphaned hedgehogs every year. This year, however, because of a particularly mild winter, hedgehog mothers have been giving birth about a month early, and thus the hospital has had to gear up sooner to deal with the little buggers.See video of the adorable tiny hedgehogs here The babies will be weaned to regular food and then released…