Oddest book title

• Winner of the Diagram Prize for oddest book title, as reported in Australia's ABC News Online, goes to 'The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification by Julian Montague.
  Montague himself says he is surprised to have won the accolade.
  "I was so deeply into the project that I was a little number to the fact that the title could surprise other people," he was quoted by Britain's The Independent newspaper as saying.
  
  

Textfiles and right turns

• Jason Scott is a beautiful writer. Even if you have no interest in the subject matter (the early BBS scene, the demoscene, etc, which is actually damn interesting), reading his essays is still a joy. Here is a lovely piece on early software crackers (from this essay):
  And with these skills came two types of personality; the quiet get-it-done utilitarian software cracker, and the Oompah-Band-Playing Showboater, who would be more than happy not just to crack the software but tie it into a little bow, fixed up and optimized, and better than when you found it initially. At the risk of a totally silly analogy, imagine a car thief that returns your car a day later with better shocks and fuel efficiency. And photos of all the women he picked up in your car. Including your daughter. That's hubris, that's in-your-face. It's rude, crude, but it contains panache.
• Me and UPS both avoid left turns.
  

Random numbers, flickr photos

• Best regards for First Day of the Writing of the Book of the Law, and blessings upon our Holy Prophet.
• It seems that if one asked to pick a number between 1 and 20, 17 is the number most often chosen, by far:
  ...the number 17 was picked much more often -- almost 18 percent of the time, compared to the 5 percent you might expect from this sample.
  and interestingly, prime numbers are also picked disproportionately often.
• I've just uploaded a few more snapshots of the 1988 Cape Town Castle excavations to flickr:
  and a previous uploaded snapshot from the restaurant at Tsitsikamma National Park:
  

Eat the sorcerer

• Dieneke's Anthropology Blog has a summary of a couple of posts on cannibalism. The first is from the Smithsonian magazine, and regards the Korowai of New Guinea, and their practice of consuming people suspected of being khakhua (malevolent male sorcerers):
  ...Bailom shakes his head. "Human flesh tastes like young cassowary," he says, referring to a local ostrich-like bird. At a khakhua meal, he says, both men and women—children do not attend—eat everything but bones, teeth, hair, fingernails and toenails and the penis. "I like the taste of all the body parts," Bailom says, "but the brains are my favorite."
  He also mentions this story from Eitb24, the 'Basque News and Information Channel', regarding cannibalism among the Aztec. A caravan of about 550 Spanish were captured at what is now known as Tecuaque:
  The caravan was apparently captured because it was made up mostly of the mulatto, mestizo, Maya Indian and Caribbean men and women given to the Spanish as carriers and cooks when they landed in Mexico in 1519, and so was moving slowly.
  The prisoners were kept in cages for months while Aztec priests selected a few each day at dawn, held them down on a sacrificial slab, cut out their hearts and offered them up to various Aztec gods. Some may have been given hallucinogenic mushrooms or pulque -- an alcoholic milky drink made from fermented cactus juice -- to numb them to what was about to happen.
  ...
  On hearing of the massacre, Cortes renamed the town Tecuaque -- meaning "where people were eaten" in the indigenous Nahuatl language -- and sent an army to wipe out its people. When they heard the Spanish were coming, the Zultepec Aztecs threw their victims' possessions down wells, unwittingly preserving buttons and jewelry for the archaeologists.
  

Early modern Homo sapiens from China

Exciting analysis of early modern Homo sapiens remains from Tianyuan Cave, China. From the BBC:
Researchers found 34 bone fragments belonging to a single individual at the Tianyuan Cave, near Beijing.
...
Radiocarbon dates, obtained directly from the bones, show the person lived between 42,000 and 39,000 years ago.
...
The Tianyuan remains display diagnostic features of modern H. sapiens. But co-author Erik Trinkaus and his colleagues argue, controversially, that the bones also display features characteristic of earlier human species, such as relatively large front teeth.
The most likely explanation, they argue, is interbreeding between early modern humans emerging from Africa and the archaic populations they encountered in Europe and Asia.

Strange Maps and LARPing

• Blog recommendation: Strange Maps. It's a wonderful blog, with maps by turns weird, scary, historically fascinating, or just unusual.
• LARPs are getting a bit of attention: an article in the Christian Science Monitor no less.
  

They've been saying it for years

• Of interest to conspiracy buffs and eschatologists, comes the news from the Winston-Salem Journal ('Your guide to life in Northwest North Carolina') that animal sacrifice may soon resume on the temple mount:
  In a donated apartment concealed among the narrow streets of the Jerusalem suburb of Nahlaot, 13 Orthodox Jewish men meet every Tuesday to debate matters of Jewish law. They are the management team of a larger developing Sanhedrin, or religious court, in Israel.
  They plan to sacrifice sheep on the Temple Mount on the day before or one month after Passover, which will start at sundown April 2. Either date is permissible under Jewish law. "If the government will not resist," said Rabbi Dov Stein, 68, a member of the group, "we will do it."
  ...
  The Passover sacrifice will draw the attention of some religious Jews as well as evangelical Christians who see both the restoration of the Sanhedrin and sacrifice as part of end-times prophecy. Other Orthodox Jews want to distance themselves from this group, which they consider extremist.