An intriguing feature of this sword is an as yet indecipherable inscription, found along one of its edges and inlaid in gold wire. It has been speculated that this is a religious invocation, since the language is unknown… Here’s what the inscription seems to read:
+NDXOXCHWDRGHDXORVI+
Some highlights from The year in media errors and corrections:
This post originally quoted photographer Tom Sanders as saying it takes him five years to get on the dance floor. It takes him five beers.
– Slate
– Columbia, S.C. Free-Times Weekly
And possibly the best from The Argus:
Can you tell where it is yet?
Swedish artist Nikolaj Cyon has created a map of Alkebu-Lan: how Africa might have looked if Europe hadn’t been a colonising power.
Basing himself on Unesco’s General History of Africa, Cyon built his map around historical empires, linguistic regions and natural boundaries. His snapshot is taken in 1844 (or 1260 Anno Hegirae), also the date of a map of tribal and political units in Unesco’s multi-volume General History
Cyon’s timeline diverges from history in the 14th Century where the Black Death has an even greater impact on the population of Europe, one so great recovery was impossible. He’s created a prezi detailing the background and process.
The interrogation dragged on for hours. Fulton remained outwardly calm, and denied everything. Inwardly, though, he felt sick. He’d been spying on the IRA for a decade and a half, and he knew that if Scap broke him—if he admitted anything—he’d be a dead man—own a hole,” in IRA slang.
So throughout the interrogation, Fulton sat stone-faced, blindfolded, and facing the wall. Double blind. He held tight to his secret: yes, he was a British spy.
But then, so was his interrogator.
Found via Kottke, Longform.org is collecting great pieces of long form journalism. This is taken from an article about British counter-insurgency in Northern Ireland during the Troubles that makes for an interesting read.
By early 1993, Fulton and his team of bombers had found something less clumsy than wires to use in bomb and rocket detonation. They rigged bombs with photo sensors, which they triggered by popping off camera flashes. The results were lethal. Trouble was, other lights—bright headlights, or a tourist’s disposable photo flash—could set off a bomb prematurely.
British intelligence services, in an effort to control IRA techniques through collaboration, secretly passed along a solution for the problem: a new technology—the infrared flash—that could be acquired only in America. Fulton’s handlers offered to facilitate an undercover IRA shopping mission to New York, and an MI5 officer flew across the Atlantic on the Concorde to make arrangements with American services in advance of Fulton’s arrival. “This was a terrorist organization operating in the United States,” Fulton told me, and it required cooperation. “It was a pretty big thing.”
Fulton traveled to New York with several thousand dollars, met secretly with his handlers, arranged the purchase, and returned to Northern Ireland, ready to create a deadly new weapon. The IRA embraced the innovation, and it worked so well that other terrorist groups soon took notice and adapted the infrared photo-sensor bomb to their own wars. Today, Iraqi insurgents wield it against British and American troops in Iraq
(via Rocketboom)
I was thinking just the other day (Halloween in fact) that Jesus must (technically) be the world’s most famous zombie and then today I spotted this:
(via Rocketboom)