The unionization of government

2009 was a historic year for Big Labor: for the first time in American history the majority of union members now work for the government, not the private sector.

It was not supposed to be this way. Big Labor’s biggest champion, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt wrote in 1937: “All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. … The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress.” Collective bargaining, the anti-trust exemption at the heart the labor movement’s power, was created to help workers seize their “fair share” of business profits. If a union ends up extracting a contract from a private firm that eats up too much profits, that firm will lose out to competitors. But while private firms face competition, governments don’t. So when a union extracts a generous contract from government, there is no check on that spending. Instead of being disciplined by more efficient competitors, the government just pays for higher spending with higher taxes.

Full article here.

Last flying B-29

By the end of World War II, nearly 4,000 Boeing B-29 Superfortresses had been built, most of them to rain bombs on targets across the Pacific Theater. Today, there's only one B-29 still flying, and she's nicknamed "Fifi". . .

Fifi's current assignment follows a long journey back from near obsolescence. To make her return to the skies, she required a four-year, multimillion dollar engine overhaul, and her owners had to navigate through a protracted spat with the Federal Aviation Administration for renewed clearance to fly. . .

Now, although she'll be flying at fewer events, Fifi can bring along nine paying passengers for a 30 minute ride ($995 to ride up front, $595 for a back seat) in addition to the six CAF crew members—including two whose sole job is to scan the wings and engines for smoke or fire. . .

Dave Miller, Fifi's crew chief, says it costs roughly $9,000 an hour to operate the plane. In November, Fifi will relocate to her new home at an airport in suburban Dallas.

From the Wall Street Journal.

Medieval church robbed in Sweden

National alerts were issued for several 'priceless' church artifacts stolen overnight on Sunday from Tidersrums church in southeastern Sweden's Kisa.

Among the missing items are an altar cross or crucifix, two candlesticks and three wooden sculptures from the 13th and 14th centuries.

The sculptures, which newspaper Östgöta Correspondenten described as "priceless" on its website on Monday, depict the Virgin Mary and St. Catherine.

Full story here.

£2m price for Roman helmet

A Roman helmet found in a field in Cumbria has been sold at auction for £2m.

The helmet was unearthed by a metal detector enthusiast in Crosby Garrett, near Kirkby Stephen, in May.

It had been expected to fetch up to £300,000 when it went under the hammer at Christie's in London.

The buyer has not been revealed so it is not yet known if Carlisle's Tullie House Museum's campaign to keep it in Cumbria was successful.

Sounds rather doubtful: judging from the reports to date, the fundraising was targeted at the auction house estimate, and nowhere near the actual selling price. From the BBC.

Ice boats still not ready for prime time

In the event of steel stocks running out in the 1940s, Geoffrey Pyke, an inventor, suggested that it was possible to make an unsinkable aircraft carrier using a material called pykrete, made of ice and wood pulp. . .

The BBC decided to put Pyke's theory to the test by mixing 5,000 litres of water with the hefty material hemp and freezing it in a 20 feet-long boat-shaped mould.

Read how it all turned out in the Telegraph. More on Pykrete at Wikipedia.

Undermining Angkor

The five-star hotels around the ancient temples of Angkor are oases of green; sleek new buildings ringed by tropical forests and sprawling lawns.

But the water used to keep them so is being sucked from groundwater under the city, threatening the stability of the centuries-old, world heritage-listed landmark.

Unchecked development, and the widespread, unregulated pumping of groundwater throughout Siem Reap city, has raised concerns that the temples, including the world's largest religious monument, Angkor Wat, could crack or crumble if too much water is drained away.

The temples and towers of the 402-square-kilometre Angkor site sit on a base of sand, kept firm by a constant supply of groundwater that rises and falls with the seasons, but which is now being used to supply a burgeoning city.

Full story here.

16th-century archway destroyed at Scone

An ancient archway at Scone Palace in Perthshire has been destroyed after a van crashed into it.

The historic 16th Century arch, which marked the spot of an Augustinian Abbey that once stood on the site, was hit by the van being driven by a contractor.

Full story here.

Foreigners at Stonehenge

Chemical tests on teeth from an ancient burial near Stonehenge indicate that the person in the grave grew up around the Mediterranean Sea.

The bones belong to a teenager who died 3,550 years ago and was buried with a distinctive amber necklace. . .

Analysis on a previous skeleton found near Stonehenge showed that that person was also a migrant to the area.

From the BBC.

No glass in pubs?

Dr Alasdair Forsyth, from the Glasgow Centre for the Study of Violence, told a conference that the use of glass as a weapon could be eliminated.

He wants retailers to consider moving to plastic alongside bars and clubs. . .

The precise number of violent attacks involving glass each year is unknown, although the crime surveys suggest it may run into six figures.

From the BBC. From an American perspective, the British embrace of blanket bans on potential weaponry seems peculiar indeed. I've noticed that the greater regulation of knives in the UK -- not just fighting knives: the net is cast indiscriminately -- has already led many UK eBay sellers to limit sales of blades -- even Georgian quill-cutters -- to overseas customers only.

Subsidizing the higher education bubble

More to chew on, from Glenn Reynolds:

One point that I haven’t blogged, but that is worth mentioning here: The government decides to try to increase the middle class by subsidizing things that middle class people have: If middle-class people go to college and own homes, then surely if more people go to college and own homes, we’ll have more middle-class people. But homeownership and college aren’t causes of middle-class status, they’re markers for possessing the kinds of traits — self-discipline, the ability to defer gratification, etc. — that let you enter, and stay, in the middle class. Subsidizing the markers doesn’t produce the traits; if anything, it undermines them.

17th-century denim, in art

Workaday staple and fashion favorite, blue jeans have conquered the planet. But were they born in the textile mills of New Hampshire, on France's southern coast or the looms of north Italy?

Art historians believe they have found a piece of the centuries-old puzzle in the work of a newly discovered 17th-century north Italian artist, dubbed the "Master of the Blue Jeans," whose paintings went on show in Paris this week.

Running through his works like a leitmotif is an indigo blue fabric threaded with white, with rips revealing its structure, in the skirts of a peasant woman or the jacket of a beggar boy.

From Discovery News.

London Bridge is falling down?

On April 6, 1580, a magnitude 5.5 earthquake centered under the Strait of Dover rattled England and sent a seismic jolt through London, 86 miles away. Two people were killed in the shaking.

Now seismologists say the great city is overdue for another quake. Same place, same magnitude. But this time, much more damage.

Earthquakes like to strike the same place over and over again. Before the 1580 earthquake, another similar tremor shook the area in 1382.

Full article here.

Roman-German battlefield discoveries

Until only two years ago, northern Germany was believed to have been a no-go area for Roman troops after three legions were wiped out by German tribesmen in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in AD 9.

The revelation that two centuries later a Roman force mounted a punitive raid deep inside the tribal areas in AD 235 has changed all that . . .

The debris from the battle is scattered over a wooded hill, the Harzhorn.

An archeological dig there this summer turned up 1,800 artefacts. A single spot on the hill had been pounded by torsion catapults, one of the most advanced weapons in the Roman arsenal, and 70 bolts from these armour-piercing weapons were still lying in the ground.

Battlefield archeology is much more sophisticated than it used to be:

Among the techniques used by the archaeologists to sketch a map of the battle is tracking the studs that fell off Roman sandals as the troops climbed the Harzhorn on foot. They are believed to have overcome their opponents before continuing on their way.

That belief is partly based on the absence from the soil of buckles, which were typically left behind on battlefields when victors ripped armour off slaughtered Roman legionaries.

Full article here.

Last of the sin-eaters

A most peculiar custom, this:

Sin-eaters were generally poor people paid to eat bread and drink beer or wine over a corpse, in the belief they would take on the sins of the deceased.

Frowned upon by the church, the custom mainly died out in the 19th Century.

It was prevalent in the Marches, the land around the England-Wales border, and in north Wales, but was rarely carried out anywhere else.

Believers thought the sin-eater taking on the sins of a person who died suddenly without confessing their sins would allow the deceased's soul to go to heaven in peace.

Full article here.

Bog evidence for early medieval Irish-Egyptian link

Irish scientists have found fragments of Egyptian papyrus in the leather cover of an ancient book of psalms that was unearthed from a peat bog . . . The papyrus in the lining of the Egyptian-style leather cover of the 1,200-year-old manuscript, "potentially represents the first tangible connection between early Irish Christianity and the Middle Eastern Coptic Church", the Museum said. . .

Raghnall O Floinn, head of collections at the Museum, said the manuscript, now known as the "Faddan More Psalter", was one of the top ten archaeological discoveries in Ireland.

Full article here. Wikipedia article on the psalter here. Note that Egyptian inspiration for Hibernian interlace decoration was first posited decades ago, though evidence one way or the other was always equivocal.

Re-creating ancient linen armor

Linothorax: the preferred armor of Alexander's armies:

In order to determine how wearable this armor was, and how effective it would have been in protecting its wearer from arrows and other battlefield hazards, Aldrete and Bartell reconstructed several complete sets of linen armor using only material that were only available in the ancient world. . .

Tests included shooting the resulting patches with arrows and hitting them with a variety of weapons including swords, axes and spears.

"Our controlled experiments basically dispelled the myth that armor made out of cloth must have been inferior to other available types. Indeed, the laminated layers function like an ancient version of modern Kevlar armor, using the flexibility of the fabric to disperse the force of the incoming arrow," Aldrete said.

From Discovery News.

More at the UWGB Linothorax Project website, including photos and videos, and some notes from June at Rogue Classicism.

Hellenistic wall paintings revealed near Petra

Conservation experts almost gave up when they first saw the severely damaged wall paintings they had come to rescue in the ancient city of Petra.

Cloaked for centuries in grimy soot from bedouin camp fires, the blackened murals appeared beyond repair.

But three years of restoration revealed intricate and brightly-colored artwork, and some of the very few surviving examples of 2,000-year-old Hellenistic wall painting.

Full story here.

Bomb test photographers

They risked their lives to capture on film hundreds of blinding flashes, rising fireballs and mushroom clouds. . .

While many of the scientists who made atom bombs during the cold war became famous, the men who filmed what happened when those bombs were detonated made up a secret corps.

Their existence and the nature of their work has emerged from the shadows only since the federal government began a concerted effort to declassify their films about a dozen years ago. In all, the atomic moviemakers fashioned 6,500 secret films, according to federal officials.

Read the rest in the NY Times.

Medicine of the ancients

In 130 BC, a ship fashioned from the wood of walnut trees and bulging with medicines and Syrian glassware sank off the coast of Tuscany, Italy. Archaeologists found its precious load 20 years ago and now, for the first time, archaeobotanists have been able to examine and analyse pills that were prepared by the physicians of ancient Greece.

DNA analyses show that each millennia-old tablet is a mixture of more than 10 different plant extracts, from hibiscus to celery.

"For the first time, we have physical evidence of what we have in writing from the ancient Greek physicians Dioscorides and Galen," says Alain Touwaide of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC. . .

The concoctions have also thrown archaeobotanists a few curve balls. Preliminary analyses of the ancient pills suggest they contain sunflower, a plant that is not thought to have existed in the Old World before Europeans discovered the Americas in the 1400s.

From New Scientist.

A bomber a day keeps the Nazis away

With the country under attack and the war effort in full swing, worrying about world records might have seemed like a strange thing to do.

But after months of nightly bombing raids by the Luftwaffe, the Ministry of War was keen to show the world - friend and foe - that Britain could dish it out as well as take it.

And so, in collaboration with the RAF, the ministry issued a challenge to one of the factories churning out planes for Bomber Command - to build an operational Wellington bomber in record-breaking time, faster than the existing record of 48 hours set in California.

And they beat their target time of 30 hours, finishing the plane in under 24. I like this part:

Work had progressed so fast the pilot had to be awoken from his slumber for its maiden flight. "I hope to God they haven't missed anything," he muttered.

From the BBC.

Two faces of Elizabeth I

Analysis by the National Portrait Gallery of two renowned portraits of Elizabeth I has shown they were painted on wood from the same two trees. . .

The two paintings will be shown for the first time together in 25 years for one week only when they go on display at the National Portrait Gallery in London between 13 and 19 September. . .

The titles of the two works - Pelican and Phoenix - stem from the jewels worn by the queen in each portrait.

Researchers also found that a tracing of the pattern of the Phoenix portrait matches the Pelican portrait in reverse, making it even more likely they were painted around the same time.

From the BBC.

Protecting yourself against bedbugs

By knowing what to look for and taking a few easy precautions when you travel, you can easily reduce the probability of bringing home one of these nasty bugs -- or kill them before they have a chance to infest your house.

From the Wall Street Journal.

Film fungus

Cinematographic film has a layer of gelatin on its surface. This emulsion layer is where the image is formed but also provides ideal food for fungi like Aspergillus and Penicillium.

If the fungus forms a layer of mould on a film it produces enzymes which allow it to use the film as food and to grow. . .

While all film is potentially at risk, it is film that has been stored in damp conditions that is most likely to become infected in this way. . .

Mark Bodner is responsible for conservation and preservation of the collections at the North West Film Archive . . .

"It's getting worse. It's a kind of newish thing. I've been here (NWFA) for 23 years. This has really only taken up over the last eight to ten years. What might have been perfect six years ago has now been affected by mould."

From the BBC.

Victorian terraforming

A lonely island in the middle of the South Atlantic conceals Charles Darwin's best-kept secret.

Two hundred years ago, Ascension Island was a barren volcanic edifice.

Today, its peaks are covered by lush tropical "cloud forest".

What happened in the interim is the amazing story of how [Darwin], Kew Gardens and the Royal Navy conspired to build a fully functioning, but totally artificial ecosystem. . .

Dr Dave Wilkinson is an ecologist at Liverpool John Moores University, who has written extensively about Ascension Island's strange ecosystem.

He first visited Ascension in 2003.

"I remember thinking, this is really weird," he told the BBC.

"There were all kinds of plants that don't belong together in nature, growing side by side. I only later found out about Darwin, Hooker and everything that had happened," he said.

Full story here.

Ancient tetracycline

Chemical analysis of the bones of ancient Sudanese Nubians who lived nearly 2000 years ago shows they were ingesting the antibiotic tetracycline on a regular basis, likely from a special brew of beer. The find is the strongest yet that antibiotics were previously discovered by humans before Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928. . .

Tetracycline is produced by a soil bacteria called streptomyces, which is how it was discovered by modern society in the 1940s. Streptomyces thrives in warm, arid regions such as that of ancient Nubia, and likely contaminated a batch of beer. . .

“What they were making wasn’t like a Bud Light but a cereal gruel,” Armelagos said. “My students said that it was ‘not bad,’ but it is like a sour porridge substance. The ancient people would have drained the liquid off and also eaten the gruel.”

Full story here.