A palimpsest is a manuscript page from a scroll or book from which the
text has been scraped off and which can be used again. The word "palimpsest" comes through Latin palimpsēstus from Ancient Greek παλίμψηστος (palímpsestos,
“scratched or scraped again”) originally compounded from πάλιν (palin, “again”) and ψάω (psao, “I scrape”) literally meaning
“scraped clean and used again”. Romans
wrote on wax-coated
tablets that could be smoothed and reused, and a passing use of the term
"palimpsest" by Cicero seems to refer to this practice. The term has come to be used in similar
context in a variety of disciplines, notably architectural archaeology. Because parchment,
prepared from animal hides, is far more durable than paper or papyrus, most
palimpsests known to modern scholars are parchment, which rose in popularity in
western
Europe after the 6th century. Also,
where papyrus was in common use, reuse of writing media was less common because
papyrus was cheaper and more expendable than costly parchment. The writing was
washed from parchment or vellum using milk and oat bran.
With the passing of time, the faint remains of the former writing would
reappear enough so that scholars can discern the text (called the scriptio
inferior, the "underwriting") and decipher it. The best-known palimpsest in the legal world
was discovered in 1816 by Niebuhr and Savigny in the library of Verona
cathedral. Underneath letters by St.
Jerome and Gennadius was the almost complete text of the Famous examples: Institutes
of Gaius, probably the first student's textbook on Roman law and the Archimedes Palimpsest, a work of the
great Syracusan mathematician copied onto parchment in the 10th century and overwritten
by a liturgical text in the 12th century.
See other examples at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsest
The conservation of the Archimedes Palimpsest was undertaken by Abigail Quandt, Senior Conservator
of Rare Books and Manuscripts at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. Her first priority was to ensure the continued
safety of a very fragile historical document. Her second priority was to prepare the
manuscript for imaging. T his entailed disbinding the manuscript, as the under
texts run through the gutter of the book.
Work on disbinding the manuscript started in February 2000, and finished
in November 2004.
See pictures at: http://archimedespalimpsest.org/about/conservation.php
Ten percent or more of Delaware’s land mass could be submerged by rising ocean waters by the end
of the century, and that would include up to three-quarters of the Port of
Wilmington, as much as a fourth of coastal industrial land, and virtually all
of the state’s extensive tidal wetlands.
More than 60 percent of dams, dikes and levees could be inundated;
sections of railroad flooded out, some roads and bridges made impassable, and
up to a fifth of wastewater treatment plants knocked out as an anticipated
one-meter rise in sea level spreads across the low-lying state. Homeowners, business people and government
officials face widespread disruption and increased costs ranging from higher
insurance premiums to relocation or construction of flood-resistant buildings. Some coastal farmland may be ruined by salt
water; aquifers could be contaminated, and already-endangered species of birds
and animals would be driven out of their habitats. After more than a year’s work, DNREC’s
Coastal Programs team has released a long-awaited draft of its vulnerability
study, not yet to the public, but to the state officials, nonprofit groups,
academics, and business people that make up its Sea Level Rise Advisory
Committee. The 230-page document,
entitled “Preparing for Tomorrow’s High Tide,” is the most detailed study yet
by any U.S. state into the threat posed by rising ocean waters, officials
said. http://www.wdde.org/25303-rising-seas-cut-delaware-land-ten-percent
See also: http://www.udel.edu/udmessenger/vol20no2/stories/alumni-love.html
Retailers have long scoured the
Web for
mentions of their companies or products as a form of customer service, offering
apologetic messages and refunds to disgruntled customers. Now, they are going further. "We're using that real-time feedback to
help suppliers improve products faster," said Greg Hall, Walmart.com's
vice president of marketing. Wal-Mart
earlier this year pulled a prepaid wireless Internet stick on account of angry
customer reviews on its website. It
turned out the wireless carrier had mistakenly failed to activate the sticks;
it was able to turn them on remotely and the sticks went back on sale on
Walmart.com within two days, the company said.
To be sure, online reviews can be a faulty resource: Most are anonymous, and questions over
authenticity persist. Companies have
been known to pay reviewers to give positive ratings or instruct employees to
promote their own products while bashing those of competitors. Companies can use computer-recognition
technology to monitor for fraud. Bazaarvoice,
BV -0.04% a company
that helps retailers like Wal-Mart and Best
Buy Co. BBY +0.05% manage and
monitor online reviews, said it used a process earlier this month called device
fingerprinting to identify a certain company that was spouting off hundreds of
positive reviews on one of its products and negative reviews on a competitor's
item. In the past two months,
Bazaarvoice has flagged 12,000 fraudulent posts among companies that use its
reviews platform, it said. Experts also
say customers tend to take their opinions to the Web only in extreme
circumstances—when they really like or dislike a product. So in some cases the majority of customers may
be happy with a product but online reviews reflect the opinions of a few
outliers. Shelly Banjo http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303292204577517394043189230.html
The notion
of a “super trail” had been a parlor topic in New England hiking-organization
and even academic circles for some time, but the October 1921 publication of
“An Appalachian Trail: A Project in
Regional Planning” in the Journal of the American Institute of Architects
is almost universally seen as the moment of birth for the Appalachian Trail. Benton MacKaye—former forester and government
analyst and newspaper editor, now intermittently employed as a regional
planner—proposed, as a refuge from work life in industrialized metropolis, a
series of work, study, and farming camps along the ridges of the Appalachian
Mountains, with a trail connecting them, from the highest point in the North
(Mt. Washington in New Hampshire) to the highest in the South (Mt. Mitchell in
North Carolina). Hiking was an
incidental focus. MacKaye immediately
set about promoting his idea within his network of friends and colleagues in
Washington, New York, and Boston, but it was again hikers who took up the
cause—newspaper columnist Raymond Torrey in New York especially, who led a
small crew building the first A.T.-specific miles in Harriman–Bear Mountain
State Park under the aegis of Maj. William A. Welch, who soon shifted the goal
to “Maine to Georgia” and designed the iconic diamond Trail marker. By March 3, 1925, MacKaye and the Regional
Planning Association had enough support to convene the first “Appalachian Trail
conference…for the purpose of organizing a body of workers (representative of
outdoor living and of the regions adjacent to the Appalachian range) to
complete the building of the Appalachian Trail.” On August 14, 1937, the Appalachian Trail
finally was on the ground, a continuous “wilderness” footpath of an estimated
2,000 miles from Mt. Oglethorpe, Ga., to Baxter Peak on Katahdin in central
Maine. While the end of World War II
allowed the restoration of the A.T., it also triggered a vast wave of
residential and highway development that threatened it anew. Almost half the Trail was still on roads and
private property people wanted for vacation homes. In the early 1960s, Maine-born Stanley A.
Murray of Kingsport, Tenn., who would become the ATC’s second-longest-serving
chair, hatched with a small group of Maine and Washington, D.C., Trail veterans
a campaign to both reenergize the organization (by sharply building up its base
of individual members) and revive the idea of the federal government’s
protecting of the Trail and its surrounding lands from adverse development. Both MacKaye and Avery had advocated such
protection from the beginning, despite the volunteer origins of the whole
project. The campaign had its fits and
starts, but, on October 2, 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law
the National Trails System Act (NTSA), creating within the national park and
forest systems a new class of public lands, national scenic trails—with the
A.T. and the unfinished Pacific Crest Trail the first designated. In March 1978, President Jimmy Carter signed
into law the ATC-generated NSTA amendments directing the federal
agencies to move forward and authorizing almost $100 million from the Land and
Water Conservation Fund for that purpose. The most complicated public-land acquisition
program in history was begun, NPS formed an A.T. Project Office and special
A.T. Land Acquisition Office, and the ATC led the way in securing the required
annual appropriations—an effort now in its fourth decade and more than 99 percent
complete. That has been the story of the
ATC for the past quarter-century, reflected in the July 2005 change of its name
to Appalachian Trail Conservancy, still volunteer-based. Read more at:
http://www.appalachiantrail.org/about-the-trail/history
Gabriel
García Márquez was born on March 6, 1928, in Aracataca, a small town near
the Colombian city of Cartagena. Like
Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro, García Márquez studied law in a Jesuit
college. However, the soon to be famous
novelist dropped out of school and started working as a journalist. In 1954 he was sent to Rome on an assignment
by the daily El Espectador newspaper. Since then he has lived outside his homeland
in a self-imposed exile. In the early
1980s he returned to his native Colombia, where he mediated a peace accord
between the government and leftist guerillas.
In 1955 he published his first book, Leaf Storm and Other Stories.
In 1966, while in Mexico City and
suffering from writer's block, he had a vision of his next novel. Eighteen months later he finished One
Hundred Years of Solitude, which has been called the greatest novel in
Latin American history. Since its
publication in 1967, it has sold more copies world-wide than any other work by
a Latin American author and has made the literary genre "magical
realism" a household term. Another of his novels, Autumn of the Patriarch
-- written in 16 gigantic sentences -- tells the grotesquely phantasmagorical
story of a prototypical Latin American dictator who refuses to leave power even
after everything around him has rotted and died. In
1982 García Márquez received the Nobel Prize for Literature "for his
novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined
in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and
conflicts." http://www.myhero.com/go/hero.asp?hero=g_garciamarquez
Navy Week is
in 15 cities in 2012. The remaining ones
this year are in:
Aug. 27-Sept. 4, Detroit September 3-10, Buffalo September 10-17and HoustonOctober 22-28. http://www.navyweek.org/
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