Ranga’s Blog

During the reign of the pharaoh Menkaure, thought to be between 2532 and 2503 BC, Egypt was run from a city on low ground near the Giza plateau. Known as Heit el-Ghurab, this was a large administrative centre surrounded by houses, workshops and bread ovens. After decades of occupation, it was abandoned and buried under tens of metres of sand.

Karl Butzer of the University of Texas at Austin and colleagues have been excavating Heit el-Ghurab since 2001. They discovered layers of muds and sands, which they dated by identifying the relics in them, as well as radiocarbon dating.

The team found that the site was hit by three floods in 26 years during the reign of the previous pharaoh, Khafre. The first destroyed the town, while the others caused widespread damage. But under Menkaure the devastation multiplied.

…

“A huge flood came barrelling through,” says Butzer. It carried a torrent of rocks and mud, smashing buildings to pieces. … Menkaure ordered the construction of a 70-metre-long defensive barrier called the Wall of the Crow, yet flooding continued. Another flood struck soon after Menkaure’s death. In total, Heit el-Ghurab flooded 10 times within about 45 years.

…

It’s not clear why the ancient Egyptians kept rebuilding the city in the same dangerous place. “It doesn’t make any sense,” says Butzer. People do build houses on floodplains, but not if they get swamped every four years. … Menkaure might be to blame, says Butzer. “He had a problem with his sense of importance. He was the divine offspring of the gods, and he thought if he prayed hard enough things would be OK. They weren’t.”

The floods may explain why there are only three pyramids at Giza. Menkaure built the last, and smallest, of them. Later pyramids were built elsewhere, despite the Giza plateau’s prime position, which meant its pyramids are visible from great distances. “Menkaure was the last one,” says Butzer. “Maybe there was a reason his son wanted to go someplace else.”

Source: Michael Marshall, Egypt’s City of Bean Counters Suffered Flash Floods, New Scientist (June 5, 2013).

British scientists have provided evidence that ancient Egyptians used meteorite iron to make accessories as early as 3,300 BC. The evidence comes from strings of iron beads which were excavated in 1911 at the Gerzeh cemetery, about 44 miles south of Cairo.

Dating from 3350 to 3600 BC, thousands of years before Egypt’s Iron Age, the necklace bead analyzed was originally assumed to be from a meteorite owing to its composition of nickel-rich iron. … Researchers from the Natural History Museum in London, the Open University in Milton Keynes and the University of Manchester used a combination of electron microscope and X-Ray CT scanner to demonstrate that the nickel-rich chemical composition of the 5,300-year-old Gerzeh bead confirms its meteorite origins.

“Meteorite iron had profound implications for the Ancient Egyptians, both in their perception of the iron in the context of its celestial origin and in early metallurgy attempts.”

“Today, we see iron first and foremost as a practical, rather dull metal. To the ancient Egyptians, however, it was a rare and beautiful material which, as it fell from the sky, surely had some magical or religious properties,” said [] Dr Joyce Tyldesley of the University of Manchester.

Source: Enrico de Lazaro, Ancient Egyptians Used Meteorites as Jewelry, Say Researchers, Sci-News (May 31, 2013); see also Jacob Aron, Ancient Egyptian Jewellery Carved From a Meteorite, New Scientist (May 30, 2013).

Under MacOS X Mountain Lion (10.8) Kindle for Mac appears to store its eBook files in the following folder:

~/Library/Containers/com.amazon.Kindle/Data/Library/Application Support/Kindle/My Kindle Content

To access this folder easily, I created a symlink in ~/Documents as follows:

$ cd ~/Documents && ln -s ../Library/Containers/com.amazon.Kindle/Data/Library/Application\ Support/Kindle/My\ Kindle\ Content .

The Third Circuit has now joined the D.C. Circuit in finding that the National Labor Relations Board lacks authority to act because one of its members was not properly appointed:

We hold that “the Recess of the Senate” in the Recess Appointments Clause refers to only intersession breaks. As a consequence, we conclude that the National Labor Relations Board panel below lacked the requisite number of members to exercise the Board’s authority because one panel member was invalidly appointed during an intrasession break. We will therefore vacate the Board’s orders.

Source: National Labor Relations Board v. New Vista Nursing and Rehabilitation, Nos. 11-3440, 12-1027, 12-1936, Slip Op. at 5 (3rd Cir. May 16, 2013) [PDF]; see also Noel Canning v. National Labor Relations Board, Nos. 12-1115, 12-1153, Slip. Op. (D.C. Cir. Jan. 25, 2013) [PDF]; U.S. Const., Art. 2, cl. 3 (”The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.”).

This is my kind of hot sauce:

Source: Brian Boychuk and Ron Boychuk, Super Diablo Hot Sauce, Chuckle Bros (May 3, 2013)

To make Firefox and RequestPolicy work properly with the 1Password Firefox extension, try the following:

1. Select Tools > Add-ons in Firefox’s menu bar.
2. Locate the RequestPolicy extension and click its Preferences button.
3. Select the Whitelist preference pane.
4. On the Origins tab, enter 127.0.0.1 in the input field and click the Allow button.
5. Then enter onepassword-at-agilebits-dot-com and click the Allow button.
6. Restart Firefox.

Source: AgileBits Support, How To: Configure the RequestPolicy Firefox Extension (Apr. 30, 2012).

To enable retina display support in Firefox 19, try the following:

• Type about:config in the address bar.
• Search for gfx.hidpi.enabled and set it equal to 2.
• Restart Firefox

Source: smuggin, Is there retina display support for new Firefox 19?, Mozilla Support Forums (Feb. 20, 2013); see also mozzilaZine, About:config (Oct. 6, 2012).

A U.K. appeals court dismissed a libel lawsuit from Tesla Motors Inc. (TSLA), a maker of electric vehicles led by billionaire Elon Musk, against the British Broadcasting Corp. show “Top Gear.”

The court rejected Tesla’s appeal of last year’s decision to strike out its “libel and malicious falsehood” case against the BBC. The Palo Alto, California-based company said “Top Gear” faked a scene that appeared to show a Tesla Roadster running out of power, which led to lower sales.

The “Top Gear” review wouldn’t have misled “a reasonable viewer” into thinking the Tesla car’s range was less than the company’s estimate of “200 miles under normal driving conditions,” Martin Moore-Bick, an appeals court judge in London, said in his decision today.

Source: Ben Moshinsky, Tesla Libel Suit Over BBC’s ‘Top Gear’ Dismissed in U.K., Bloomberg (Mar. 5, 2013).

Mini-Lego versions of Abu Simbel and the Sphinx:

Source: Kristi “McWii,” Lego Abu Simbel, flickr (Feb. 7, 2013); Kristi “McWii,” Lego Sphinx, flickr (Feb. 7, 2013).

The Court finds that the ordinance fails to provide due process guarantees to any person
receiving a Notice of Liability, from The Village of Elmwood Place. … [W]hen a speed monitoring device records a violation, a motorist is mailed a Notice of Liability. If the owner of the vehicle wants to contest the liability. he or she must pay $25.00 to the Village of Elmwood and request a hearing before a hearing officer and there is no assurance that the fee will be returned if the appeal is successful. However, the hearing is nothing more than a sham! The so called witness for Elmwood Place testifies from a report produced by the company that owns the speed monitoring unit. This witness has no personal knowledge of the speeding violation and therefore, their testimony is based solely on hearsay. The accused motorist has no ability to cross-examine the witness because the witness was not present when the violation occurred. There is no opportunity to obtain any discovery about the device or to subpoena any witnesses that may have knowledge of the device. In fact, the device is calibrated once a year; even though it may have been subjected to 12 months of varying amounts of rain, snow, sun, storms, ice, wind and lightning. Moreover, the device was not calibrated by a certified Police Officer, but rather it was calibrated by Optotraffic, the corporation that owns the device. Remember, Optotraffic has a financial stake in this game. I used the term “game” because Elmwood Place is engaged in nothing more than a high-tech game of 3 CARD MONTY. It is a scam that the motorists can’t win.

Pruiett v. Village of Elmwood, Case No. A1209235, Decision, at 5-6 (Ohio C.P., Mar. 2013) [PDF].