Mom Hand-Creates Bag End Doll House [Gallery]

Mom Hand-Creates Bag End Doll House [Gallery]

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Maddie Chambers first read The Hobbit when she was 10 and then The Lord of the Rings about a year later. Since then, she has read the LOTR trilogy over 20 times.
When her twin sons were 1, she took a college course about “the importance of play” and at the end of the term, each student had to submit a toy. She first decided to make a little hill with a front door and call it Bag End, using her Warhammer scenery components. Then, Bag End took off and she kept trying to make it bigger and better!
The result is a complete Bag End “doll house” of sorts — with nearly EVERYTHING made BY HAND by Ms. Chambers herself!

[For more details about the mini Bag End, click here for Chambers's WordPress page!]

Read more at http://www.geeksaresexy.net/2012/11/05/mom-hand-creates-a-bag-end-doll-house-gallery/#bSWu1UTCTcfbtU0k.99

Archaeologists comment on second skeleton found in Grey Friars dig — University of Leicester

Archaeologists comment on second skeleton found in Grey Friars dig — University of Leicester
Archaeologists comment on second skeleton found in Grey Friars dig

Posted by pt91 at Oct 30, 2012 04:25 PM | Permalink

Filed under: Magazine:Staff, Magazine:Research, Magazine:Student, Richard III, University of Leicester, Archaeology

Experts speculate on female remains uncovered in University of Leicester-led Search for Richard III

Early stages of excavation; the burial was found towards the north (farthest) side of the shallow excavated section.

In September, the University announced that it had discovered two sets of human remains at the site of the church of the Grey Friars. One set is currently being subjected to rigorous laboratory tests. Now, the experts have provided some theories as to whom the second set, of disarticulated remains of a female, could have belonged to.
The team have suggested that the remains could be of a woman with connected to the church, and a likely candidate would be Ellen Luenor, a possible benefactor and founder of the church with her husband, Gilbert.
Richard Buckley, lead archaeologist of the Grey Friars project and co-director of the University of Leicester Archaeological Services, said that at some point in the past, the bones had been disturbed and subsequently reburied. He said the skeleton may have been dug up by a gardener when the site was the garden of a mansion house in the 17th century. The remains were then reburied at a higher level than the church floor.
Archaeologist Deidre O'Sullivan said: "The founders of the friary may well have been buried in the east end of the friary church and it is not impossible that the disturbed skeleton is one of these. But we don't know this for sure, and may never do so although there are still a couple of trails to pursue. If a further stage in the project develops, and more of the church is excavated, we will be in a better position to make an informed comment about the friary founders."
The University team have yet to examine this second set of disarticulated remains but say it is unlikely that they will ever know its identity for certain

Dungeon Bastard - Ask The Bastard - Dwarf Style

French toast!!!!

Tolkien estate, film unit bans use of word ‘hobbit’ - Taipei Times

Tolkien estate, film unit bans use of word ‘hobbit’ - Taipei Times

Tolkien estate, film unit bans use of word ‘hobbit’

MY PRECIOUS:A public lecture planned for New Zealand about primitive humanoids nicknamed ‘hobbits’ has been told it cannot use that term

The Guardian

It was, perhaps, inevitable that Homo floresiensis, the 1m tall species of primitive human discovered on the Indonesian island of Flores, would come to be widely known as “hobbits.” After all, like J.R.R. Tolkien’s creation, they were “a little people, about half our height.”
However, a New Zealand scientist planning an event about the species has been banned from describing the ancient people as “hobbits” by representatives of the Tolkien estate.
Brent Alloway, associate professor at Victoria University, is planning a free lecture next month at which two of the archeologists involved in the discovery of Homo floresiensis in 2003, Mike Morwood and Thomas Sutikna, will speak about the species. The talk is planned to coincide with the premiere of The Hobbit film, and Alloway had planned to call the lecture “The Other Hobbit,” as Homo floresiensis is commonly known.
However, when he approached the Saul Zaentz Co/Middle-earth Enterprises, which owns certain rights in The Hobbit, he was told by their lawyer that “it is not possible for our client to allow generic use of the trade mark HOBBIT.”
“I am very disappointed that we’re forbidden by the representatives of the Tolkien Estate to use the word ‘Hobbit’ in the title of our proposed free public event … especially since the word ‘Hobbit’ is apparently listed in the Oxford English Dictionary [and hence apparently part of our English-speaking vocabulary], the word ‘Hobbit’ [in the Tolkien context] is frequently used with apparent impunity in the written press and reference to ‘Hobbit’ in the fossil context is frequently referred to in the scientific literature [and is even mentioned in Wikipedia on Homo floresiensis]. I realize I’m in unfamiliar word proprietry territory [as an earth scientist] … so I’ve gone for the easiest option and simply changed our event title,” Alloway said.
The event is now called “A newly discovered species of Little People — unravelling the legend behind Homo floresiensis.”
“Certainly, this name change won’t diminish the curiosity of the New Zealand public nor our collective enthusiasm for the Hobbit — whichever form you might be interested in knowing more about — the movie/book fantasy version or the fossil version found in Flores,” Alloway said.

An Unexpected Briefing #airnzhobbit

12-year-old uses Dungeons and Dragons to help scientist dad with his research | Not Exactly Rocket Science | Discover Magazine

12-year-old uses Dungeons and Dragons to help scientist dad with his research | Not Exactly Rocket Science | Discover Magazine

12-year-old uses Dungeons and Dragons to help scientist dad with his research

Alan Kingstone, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, had a problem: all humans have their eyes in the middle of their faces, and there’s nothing that Kingstone could do about it. His 12-year-old son, Julian Levy, had the solution: monsters. While some monsters are basically humanoid in shape, others have eyes on their hands, tails, tentacles and other unnatural body parts. Perfect. Kingstone would use monsters. And Julian would get his first publication in a journal from the Royal Society, one of the world’s most august scientific institutions.
In 1998, Kingstone showed that people will automatically look where other people are looking. Other scientists have since found this gaze-copying behaviour among many other animals, from birds to goats to dolphins. It seems fairly obvious why we would do this—we get an easy clue about interesting information in the world around us. But what are we actually doing?
There are two competing answers. The obvious one is that we’re naturally drawn to people’s eyes, so we’ll automatically register where they’re looking. Indeed, one part of the brain – the superior temporal sulcus – is involved in processing the direction of gazes. The equally plausible alternative is that we’re focused more broadly on faces, and the eyes just happen to be in the middle. After all, we see faces in inanimate objects, and we have a area in our brains—the fusiform face area (FFA)—that responds to the sight of faces.
One evening, Kingstone was explaining these two hypotheses to Julian over dinner. “A colleague had said that dissociating the two ideas — eyes vs. centre of head — would be impossible because the eyes of humans are in the centre of the head,” Kingstone said. “I told Julian that when people say something is impossible, they sometimes tell you more about themselves than anything.”
Julian agreed. He thought it would be easy to discriminate between the two ideas: just use the Monster Manual. This book will be delightfully familiar to a certain brand of geek. It’s the Bible of fictional beasties that accompanied the popular dice-rolling role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons. Regularly updated, it bursts with great visuals and bizarrely detailed accounts of unnatural history. It has differently coloured dragons, undead, beholders… I think one edition had a were-badger. Parts of this blog are essentially a non-fictional version of the Monster Manual.
Levy knew that the Manual contained many nightmarish monsters whose eyes are not on their faces. If people still looked at the eyes of these creatures, it would answer the question. Kingstone loved the idea. He persuaded Julian’s teacher to give him some time away from school to test his ideas for himself, and she agreed.
Levy asked 22 volunteers to stare at the corner of a screen, press a key to bring up one of 36 monster images, and let their eyes roam free. All the while, he tracked their eye movements with a camera (which he’s modelling in the photo above).
The recordings showed that when volunteers looked at drawings of humans or humanoids (monsters with more or less human shapes), their eyes moved to the centre of the screen, and then straight up. If the volunteers saw monsters with displaced eyes, they stared at the centre, and then off in various directions. The volunteers looked at eyes early and frequently, whether they were on the creatures’ faces or not.
This isn’t just an academic exercise, says Kingstone. “If people are just targeting the centre of the head, like they target the centre of most objects, and getting the eyes for free, that’s one thing. Bu if they are actually seeking out eyes that’s another thing altogether,” he says. It means that different parts of the brain are involved when we glean social information from our peers. It might also help to explain why people with autism often fail to make eye contact with other people, and which parts of the brain are responsible.
In the meantime, the paper describing the results—delightfully entitled “Monsters are people too”—has been published in Biology Letters. Kingstone wrote it with postdoc Tom Foulsham, but Levy did the rest. He prepared the images, trained himself to use the eye-tracker, ran the experiment, and coded all the data. Accordingly, at the current age of 14, he’s the first author on the paper.
Reference: Levy, Foulsham & Kingstone. 2012. Monsters are people too. Biology Letters http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2012.0850

St. Michan's Mummies | Atlas Obscura | Curious and Wondrous Travel Destinations

St. Michan's Mummies | Atlas Obscura | Curious and Wondrous Travel Destinations
St. Michan's Mummies

An Irish church where you can shake hands with an 800 year old mummy

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Category Memento Mori, Mummies, Catacombs, Crypts, & Cemeteries, Curious Places of Worship

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Down a set of dimly lit narrow stone steps, in a vault underneath the church, lay dozens of coffins, and one mummy ready to shake your hand. The mummies in the basement of St. Michan's church in Dublin, Ireland, are really only available for viewing because of a loophole in the rules of the church.
The St. Michan church has an interesting history even without the mummies. The foundation of the church was built in 1095 to serve the remaining and ostracized Vikings, who were still in Ireland after the rest had been killed or kicked out by Wolf the Quarrelsome and other Irish forces in 1014. The church was rebuilt in 1686, and a large pipe organ was installed in 1724, on which Handel is said to have first played the Messiah. But all along, as the church changed, the crypt stayed the same: slowly mummifying all that lay within it.
There are a number of theories as to why the corpses in the basement have been preserved over time. One is that the basement contains limestone, making the basement particularly dry and therefore good for mummification. Another is that the church was built on former swamp land, and that methane gas is acting as a kind of preservative of the bodies. Other theories involve the presence of oak wood in the soil, or the building materials used in the church.
Regardless of the reason, whatever is preserving the mummies, is also disintegrating their coffins. After a certain amount of time the wood falls away and a well preserved mummy comes tumbling out. This is where the loophole comes in, for though it would be inappropriate for the Church to break open caskets looking for mummies, when the mummies reveal themselves, so be it.
The mummies have indeed revealed themselves. While there are caskets strewn about and in small nooks in the wall -- some coffins are falling apart enough to reveal an arm or leg -- the most visible mummies are "the big four," four mummified corpses which have no lids on their coffins and are displayed together. (Only two of the six crypts are open to the public for viewing.) On the right is, a woman, simply called "the unknown," and well, there isn't much more to say about her. The middle one is known as "the thief" and is missing parts of both feet and a hand, some say the hand was cut off as punishment. It is believed the "thief" later converted and became a priest or respected man, which is why he is buried in the church. (Or possibly, he was never a thief at all and lost the hand in some other way...) Next to him on the left lies a small woman, thought to have been, and known as, "the nun."
But the true star here is the coffin set apart from the others and belonging to an 800 year old mummy called "the crusader." Though it may be apocryphal, it is believed that he was a soldier who either died in the crusades, or returned and died shortly thereafter. (This assumes that these were the 4th crusades the only ones that match with a date of 800 years old. Curiously, the forth crusades turned into a kind of piratical free for all, ending in the sacking of Constantinople, without the permission of the church. It may be that the "Crusader" would be better known as "the thief.")
The Crusader was quite tall for the time -- six and a half feet tall, a giant back then -- and his legs have been broken and folded up under him to fit him into his small coffin. His hand stretches out of the casket slightly and visitors were once encouraged to give it a shake. Today, you are still allowed to touch his hand, but only lightly on his long dead finger, lest you wrench his whole hand off.
The crypt is also holds the coffins of the Sheare brothers who were executed by the British -- and as was discovered recently drawn and quartered as well -- for the Rising of 1798, as well as mathematician William Rowan Hamilton, the many Earls of Kenmare, and supposedly -- though others claim him too -- the remains of Robert Emmet, the Irish rebel killed by the British in 1803.
The crypt is said to have been visited by a young Bram Stoker, inspiring a certain morbid streak that would later serve quite well for the author.

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