Ranga’s Blog

Evidence for a forgotten ancient language which dates back more than 2,500 years, to the time of the Assyrian Empire, has been found by archaeologists working in Turkey. Researchers working at Ziyaret Tepe, the probable site of the ancient Assyrian city of Tushan, believe that the language may have been spoken by deportees originally from the Zagros Mountains, on the border of modern-day Iran and Iraq.

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The evidence for the language they spoke comes from a single clay tablet, which was preserved after it was baked in a fire that destroyed the palace in Tushan at some point around the end of the 8th century BCE. Inscribed with cuneiform characters, the tablet is essentially a list of the names of women who were attached to the palace and the local Assyrian administration.

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[According to] Dr John MacGinnis, from the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, University of Cambridge … “[a]ltogether around 60 names are preserved … [of which] [o]ne or two are actually Assyrian and a few more may belong to other known languages of the period, such as Luwian or Hurrian, but the great majority belong to a previously unidentified language.”

Source: University of Cambridge, Archaeologists Discover Lost Language (May 10, 2012) (emphasis added); see also Caroline Morley, Unknown Language Found Stamped in Ancient Clay Tablet, New Scientist (May 10, 2012).

Source: Stephan Pastis, No Comics Section, Pearls Before Swine (May 15, 2012).

Source: Bob Thaves, A Meal Break in Night Court, Frank & Ernest (May 12, 2012).

Source: Ray, Steps Involved in Writing an Email, Dog House Diaries (May 8, 2012).

Recently, there have been instances of travelers’ laptops being infected with malicious software while using hotel Internet connections. In these instances, the traveler was attempting to setup the hotel room Internet connection and was presented with a pop-up window notifying the user to update a widely-used software product. If the user clicked to accept and install the update, malicious software was installed on the laptop. The pop-up window appeared to be offering a routine update to a legitimate software product for which updates are frequently available.

The FBI recommends that all government, private industry, and academic personnel who travel abroad take extra caution before updating software products on their hotel Internet connection. Checking the author or digital certificate of any prompted update to see if it corresponds to the software vendor may reveal an attempted attack. The FBI also recommends that travelers perform software updates on laptops immediately before traveling, and that they download software updates directly from the software vendor’s Web site if updates are necessary while abroad.

Source: Internet Crime Complaint Center, Intelligence Note (May 8, 2012) (emphasis added).

Mesozoic sauropods, like many modern herbivores, are likely to have hosted microbial methanogenic symbionts for the fermentative digestion of their plant food. Today methane from livestock is a significant component of the global methane budget. Sauropod methane emission would probably also have been considerable.

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To estimate methane production we follow the relationship … for modern non-ruminant herbivores, where Methane (litres per day) = 0.18 (body mass in kg)^0.97. … [Using] a conservative estimate of the adult mass of the medium sized sauropod Apatosaurus louise, colloquially known as ‘Brontosaurus’ [as 20,000 kg] … gives methane emission of 2675 litres per day for one animal, equivalent to about 1.9 kg per day[.] … Scaling up, assuming a global vegetated area of 75 x 106 km² (equivalent to half the total land area), gives global methane production from sauropods of 520 Tg (520 million tonnes). This is comparable to the total modern-day methane emission (Figure 1).

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[O]ur calculations suggest that sauropod dinosaurs could potentially have played a significant role in influencing climate through their methane emissions. Even if our 520 Tg estimate is overstated by a factor of 2, it suggests that global methane emission from Mesozoic sauropods alone was capable of sustaining an atmospheric methane mixing ratio of 1 to 2 ppm.

Source: David M. Wilkinson et al., Could Methane Produced by Sauropod Dinosaurs Have Helped Drive Mesozoic Climate Warmth?, 22(9) Current Biology 292-93 (May 8, 2012) (citations omitted, emphasis added) [PDF]; see also Michael Marshall, Sauropod Farts Warmed the Planet, New Scientist (May 7, 2012); John Timmer, Belching Dinosaurs May Have Helped Keep Their World a Hot One, Ars Technica (May 8, 2012).

Finally, electronic filing at the Federal Circuit:

Pursuant to Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure 25(a)(2)(D) and 25(c), and Federal Circuit Rule 25(a), the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has authorized the filing and service of documents by electronic means.

See: Admin. Order Re Electronic Case Filing (Fed. Cir. Apr. 24, 2012) [PDF].

There are about 1.3 billion cows in the world today. That makes just a bit of a change from 10,500 years ago, when the first population of domesticated cattle was likely just eighty head. That’s the new finding from a team of British, French, and German researchers, who extracted DNA from cow bones found at an Iranian archaeological site that dates to not long after the domestication of cows.

They discovered that the differences between these ancient DNA sequences and those of modern cattle were so minute that the only way to explain them would be if the original cattle population was extremely small, with about 80 cattle the most likely number. As the researchers explain in Molecular Biology and Evolution, since the domestication process was spread out over a thousand or so years, that’s the equivalent of only adding two new cattle each generation.

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Eighty initial cattle would have given their human breeders pretty much no margin for error in terms of maintaining genetic diversity, and yet the billion cows alive today reveal just how remarkably well they succeeded in growing the population. The fact that all cattle seemingly descend from a single domestication event is also unusual—for most other domesticated animals like horses or dogs, there’s good evidence to support multiple domestication events, even if some lineages ultimately died out. But we know from the analysis of the ancient Iranian cattle bones that all cows throughout history likely only came from this one population.

The reason for all this is likely that the wild ancestors of cows, known as aurochs, were nearly too wild to domesticate at all. Though the archaeological record makes it clear that aurochs roamed throughout Europe and Asia, it seems that either most domestication attempts failed or most people just thought the better of trying to tame these creatures.

Source: Alasdair Wilkins, DNA Reveals That Cows Were Almost Impossible to Domesticate, IO9 (Mar. 28, 2012).

A statue of a robotic cyborg from a movie set in Detroit’s future is one step closer to having a present-day home. Hollywood robot statue designer Fred Barton’s life-sized model of RoboCop is being scanned at a studio in Canada so it can be cast in bronze with otherworldly proportions.

“The statue’s definitely coming,” said Jerry Paffendorf, who spearheaded the controversial 2011 campaign to raise money and find a home in Detroit for the statue. “The only thing that’s up in the air is the timeline and where it’s going to go.”

MGM is “quite entertained and interested” and has officially licensed the project, Paffendorf said.

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Organizers are looking into several locations for the statue, including private land near the Michigan Central Depot. The land is owned by Imagination Station, according to Paffendorf, who works for the nonprofit.

Source: Holly Fournier, RoboCop is Coming to Detroit, It’s Just a Matter of When, Detroit News (Apr. 4, 2012).

I updated cleanchrome over the weekend and added (1) a new option (-l) to list old versions of Chrome that are currently installed; and (2) a manpage. The latest version of cleanchrome is available at:

• https://grommit.com/~ranga/pgms/cleanchrome/cleanchrome-0.1.5.tgz
• http://www.csua.berkeley.edu/~ranga/pgms/cleanchrome/cleanchrome-0.1.5.tgz

See also: cleanchrome.pl (Jan. 20, 2012).