Safeguarding skeletons using 3D digitisation

The University of Bradford has secured almost £750K to safeguard skeletons from world-renowned collections based in Bradford and London.

The project, funded by the 'Joint Information Systems Committee' (JISC), will use 3D laser scanning, CT scans and high resolution photography together with new clinical descriptions and historical illustrations to create a web-accessible archive of photo-realistic digital 3D models of pathological type-specimens. The skeleton collections used in the project will be from internationally renowned collections that have restricted access and are therefore usually only seen by students and researchers.

Archaeology News Network

From Cemetery to Clinic

And when you die, you go to a wonderful place called heaven....Nah, I'm just jackin' ya, you'll all rot in the ground. ....

S. 1253 will allow indefinite military detention of American civilians without charge or trial

A sinister bill has quietly been introduced, so expansive in scope and dangerous in nature that it makes the PATRIOT Act look like the Bill of Rights.

Bill Text
112th Congress (2011-2012)
S.1253.RS

Activist Post

The Contents of Your Daily Life......

How many hours a day do you spend in front of a television screen? A computer screen? Behind an automobile windscreen? All three screens combined? What are you being screened from? How much of your life comes at you through a screen, vicariously? Is watching things as exciting as doing things? Do you have enough time to do all the things that you want to? Do you have enough energy to? Why? And how many hours a day do you sleep? How are you affected by standardized time, designed solely to synchronize your movements with those of millions of other people? How long do you ever go without knowing what time it is? Who or what controls your minutes and hours? The minutes and hours that add up to your life? Are you saving time? Saving it up for what? Can you put a value on a beautiful day, when the birds are singing and people are walking around together? How many dollars an hour does it take to pay you to stay inside and sell things or file papers? What can you get later that will make up for this day of your life?
How are you affected by being in crowds, by being surrounded by anonymous masses? Do you find yourself blocking your emotional responses to other human beings? And who prepares your meals? Do you ever eat by yourself? Do you ever eat standing up? How much do you know about what you eat and where it comes from? How much do you trust it? What are we deprived of by labor-saving devices? By thought-saving devices? How are you affected by the requirements of efficiency, which place value on the product rather than the process, on the future rather than the present, the present moment that is getting shorter and shorter as we speed faster and faster into the future? What are we speeding towards? Are we saving time? Saving it up for what? How are you affected by being moved around in prescribed paths, in elevators, buses, subways, escalators, on highways and sidewalks? By moving, working, and living in two- and three-dimensional grids? How are you affected by being organized, immobilized, and scheduled rather than wandering, roaming freely and spontaneously? Scavenging? (Shoplifting?) How much freedom of movement do you have--freedom to move through space, to move as far as you want, in new and unexplored directions? And how are you affected by waiting? Waiting in line, waiting in traffic, waiting to eat, waiting for the bus, waiting to urinate--learning to punish and ignore your spontaneous urges? How are you affected by holding back your desires? By sexual repression, by the delay or denial of pleasure, starting in childhood, along with the suppression of everything in you that is spontaneous, everything that evidences your wild nature, your membership in the animal kingdom? Is pleasure dangerous? Could danger be joyous?
Do you ever need to see the sky? (Can you see many stars in it any more?) Do you ever need to see water, leaves, foliage, animals? Glinting, glimmering, moving? Is that why you have a pet, an aquarium, houseplants? Or are television and video your glinting, glimmering, moving? How much of your life comes at you through a screen, vicariously? If your life was made into a movie, would you watch it? How do you feel in situations of enforced passivity? How are you affected by a non-stop assault of symbolic communication--audio, visual, print, billboard, video, radio, robotic voices--as you wander through a forest of signs? What are they urging upon you? Do you ever need solitude, quiet, contemplation? Do you remember it? Thinking on your own, rather than reacting to stimuli? Is it hard to look away? Is looking away the very thing that is not permitted? Where can you go to find silence and solitude? Not white noise, but pure silence? Not loneliness, but gentle solitude? How often have you stopped to ask yourself questions like these? Do you find yourself committing acts of symbolic violence? Do you ever feel lonely in a way that words cannot even express? Do you sometimes feel yourself ready to LOSE CONTROL?

VIA

Something to think about.....

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?

— Mohandas Gandhi

VIA

"Well, in those days Mars was just a dreary uninhabitable wasteland... much like Utah. But unlike Utah, it was eventually made livable..."

Henry Rollins - I know you

Something to think about.....

It does not require a majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority keen to set brush fires in people's minds.

- Samuel Adams

Wandering......

Black Friday marks the beginning of the idiocy.....

Pepper spray, Shootings, Fist fights...and of course police brutality...

Happy fuckin' Holidays.....

Stupidity

Oh my God. Who let you boys out of the state institute? We'd better get you boys back in the hospital. ......

The Hitchhiker's Guide To Murder

According to the U.S. Dept. of Transportation, 99.9 percent of hitchhikers are murderers...

If a Tree Falls.

If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front explores two of America’s most pressing issues — environmentalism and terrorism — by lifting the veil on a radical environmental group the FBI calls America’s “number one domestic terrorism threat.” Daniel McGowan, a former member of the Earth Liberation Front, faces life in prison for two multimillion-dollar arsons against Oregon timber companies. What turned this working-class kid from Queens into an eco-warrior? Marshall Curry provides a nuanced and provocative account that is part coming-of-age story, part cautionary tale and part cops-and-robbers thriller.

The Film

Something to think about.....

"The earth is not dying—it is being killed. And the people who are killing it have names and addresses."

Utah Phillips

Cutthroat Castle Ruins (Canyons of the Ancients)

Hate crime charges filed in Amish beard cutting....

Seven members of a breakaway Amish group in eastern Ohio were arrested on federal hate crime charges for allegedly shaving the beards and cutting the hair of individuals who refused to support their leader, according to a criminal complaint released Wednesday.

One of the seven men is Samuel Mullet Sr., the leader of the breakaway sect and a man that local law enforcement and other Amish in the area consider a cult leader.

VIA

I wonder what good all that therapy is going to do you when the world is in ashes.......

Something to think about.....

"It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself--anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face...; was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime..."

- George Orwell, 1984, Book 1, Chapter 5

Holly Canyon Ruins (Canyons of the Ancients)

Without deviation progress is not possible......

Depleted Texas lakes expose ghost towns, graves.....

As the drought continues, receding lakes are exposing long-hidden artifacts in Texas. A marble headstone marking an infant’s grave from 1882 and concrete foundations from the old town of Bluffton have appeared in Lake Buchanan. The lake created in the 1930s is now shrinking.

A prehistoric skull, ancient tools and fossils have been found in dry areas of other lakes in recent months. A small cemetery that appears to contain the graves of freed slaves was discovered at a Navarro County reservoir.

Some artifacts have attracted interest from historians, and looters also have scavenged for pieces of history.

Texas finished its driest 12 months ever through September. Water levels in many of the region’s lakes have dropped by more than a dozen feet.

Bold Native

Bold Native is a fiction feature film. Charlie Cranehill, an animal liberator wanted by the United States government for domestic terrorism, emerges from the underground to coordinate a nationwide action as his estranged CEO father tries to find him before the FBI does. The film simultaneously follows a young woman who works for an animal welfare organization fighting within the system to establish more humane treatment of farmed animals. From abolitionists to welfarists, Bold Native takes on the issue of modern animal use and exploitation from several angles within the context of a road movie adventure story.

We've got some trouble to start

Occupy the Machine

It's the End of the World...

Johnny Rotten's graffiti: The new heritage?

Archaeologists typically record and analyze the traces of past human activities. The caves of Lascaux in southern France are celebrated as a place where early humans made their marks on cave walls. The cave is now protected, and an exact replica is what the public now encounter.

But a new study by archaeologists has been examining marks made much more recently -- graffiti by the Sex Pistols now discovered on the walls of the flat the punk group rented in London in the mid-1970s. The authors of a paper in the latest issue of the journal Antiquity argue that both are pieces of art and both lend themselves to archaeological investigation.

PhysOrg

At the rate we're going, the 21st century looks pretty clear. It's going to be pretty violent. .......

H.R. 1955: Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007

First introduced in the US Congress in 2007 by Democratic Representative Jane Harmon, this new law passed the US House of Representatives by a secretive voice vote, but failed to pass the US Senate, after which it was believed dead until this past week when it was embraced by Obama who became the first American President to name his own citizens as a threat to his Nations security.

H.R. 1955

VIA

"When I go, I leave no trace,"

When I go I leave no trace. The beauty of the country is becoming a part of me. Now the aspen trunks are tall and white in the moonlight. A wind croons in the pines, The mountain sleeps.

Everett Ruess

SAY THAT I KEPT MY DREAM

Wherever poets, adventurers and wanderers of the Southwest gather, the story of Everett Ruess will be told. His name, like woodsmoke, conjures far horizons. Everett left Escalante, Utah, November 12, 1934 to write, paint and explore among a group of ancient Indian cliff dwellings. His last letter to his parents in Los Angeles explained that we would be unable to communicate for ten weeks. Alone with his paints, books and two burros, he disappeared into what is probably the most uninhabited, unvisited section of the United States. He never came back......

Something to think about.....

You can't fight City Hall, but you can goddamn sure blow it up.

- George Carlin

Three Fingers Ruin

Oh, “meltdown”. It’s one of those annoying buzzwords. We prefer to call it an “unrequested fission surplus”.

“Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime.”

Something to think about.....

“For us to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other and especially to ourselves. The lies are necessary because, without them, many deplorable acts would become impossibilities.”

― Derrick Jensen

UC Davis Incident Shows Pepper Spray Becoming Weapon Of Choice Against Occupy Activists

This image by Louise Macabitas is of Lt. John Pike walking along a line of University of California at Davis students and acting as if he was spraying Febreze on some smelly hippies. But it isn't Febreze, it's pepper spray. The cop looks happy, almost bored as he does this to students who could be my kids, your brothers and sisters or you or me. It's an image that says it all: I have power and you don't. I have a job and you don't. I have rights and you don't.

The police department has issued a statement saying "The officer was surrounded and feared for his safety."

VIA

DNA solves Angel Mounds 'twins' mystery

A mystery revealed 70 years ago when archaeologist Glenn A. Black suggested the ancient remains of two infants buried at Southern Indiana's Angel Mounds archaeological site were conjoined twins has been solved through DNA analysis at Indiana University.

The Archaeology News Network

A portion of the East Village of Angel Mounds near Evansville, Ind., under excavation in 1941 by Works Progress Administration workers led by Indiana archaeologist Glenn A. Black. Black proposed that a pair of co-buried infant skeletons excavated at the time were conjoined twins [Credit: Indiana University]

Governments use statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts... for support rather than illumination.

Endless Bloodshed........

Appalachian Terror Unit

Theres a stench in the air,
Death draws near.
Innocents scream as the warmachine starts its gears.
A conquest of butchers,
The bodies pillied high.
So the victor can raise his sword to the sky
The warplanes above,
Insure their banners will fly.
By releasing hellfire
into winds of genocide.
You have been chosen
To feel deaths embrace.
So lay down your life and accept your fate.
Its your leaders command,
To take the reapers hand.
Give your life to the rulers land.
Ages of man,
With blood on their hands.
Nothing has been learned through centuries of war.
Except that soilders are meat,
And kings are swine.
From the flesh of the fallen the pigs will dine.
If they call on me,
Let it be known.
That I will take my own life before I die for the throne.

I learn something new everyday..........

I didn't know that "paying in cash" was on a list of "potential indicators"
of terrorism.....but I do now.

Potential Indicators of Terrorist Activities

See you later..............

"One final paragraph of advice: Do not burn yourself out. Be as I am-a reluctant enthusiast... a part time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it is still there. So get out there and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, encounter the grizz, climb the mountains. Run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, that lovely, mysterious and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to your body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much: I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those deskbound people with their hearts in a safe deposit box and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this: you will outlive the bastards."

Edward Abbey

Some people never go crazy, what truly horrible lives they must live.

Something to think about.....

The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is apt to spread discontent among those who are.

- H.L. Mencken

It's all fun and games........

until she leaves scratch marks in the furniture.......

Not so far in the near future........

7 Occupations That Changed US History

American history is rich with examples of political occupations that left a lasting impact. Sometimes the 99% pushed progress forward, as with Rosa Park’s occupation of a bus seat that propelled the Montgomery Bus Boycott and ended with Alabama’s bus segregation being declared unconstitutional. Often the 1% of the time – slaveholders, robber barons and merchants of war – re-asserted control with new methods of domination such as after the Great Upheaval of 1877. But each event proved that true democracy lies in collective act of taking space public and private, while corporations and the state are just two arms of the same beast.

AlterNet

Something to think about.....

When the enemy advances, withdraw; when he stops, harass; when he tires, strike; when he retreats, pursue.

- Mao Tse-Tung

Every normal man must be tempted at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.

"The Forces of the Last Gasp, on Meat Street."

Activist Post

Some asshole still thinks he can make a video.....

Meet "Ernie" An Endangered Montana Merkle

Cave Valley rock art.....