ChrisT
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May 11, 2005
Tut Was Not Such a Handsome Golden Youth, After All
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
Artists and scientists drawing on a detailed examination of King Tut's mummy have reconstructed the face of the young ruler as he might have looked in life: an unusually elongated skull, a narrow face, pronounced lips and possibly a receding chin.
Pictures of Tutankhamen's reconstructed face and head were released yesterday by Dr. Zahi Hawass, secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Cairo. The new photos presented an apparently more realistic depiction of Tut than the stylized image of him on his golden burial mask.
"The shape of the face and skull," Dr. Hawass said in a statement, "are remarkably similar to a famous image of Tutankhamen as a child, where he is shown as the sun god at dawn rising from a lotus blossom."
The reconstructions were based on the most thorough examination yet of Tut's mummy, including 1,700 three-dimensional images taken in January with computed tomography, or CT scans. The pictures of the skull, bones and soft tissues, more revealing than ordinary X-rays, were the latest of the Tut mummy's encounters with curious scientists and their modern technology since its discovery in 1922.
Tutankhamen died at 19, too soon to have given much thought to the hereafter. But he must have shared his royal predecessors' belief in an afterlife befitting rulers of ancient Egypt, an eternity with all of life's pleasures enjoyed in the company of the gods. Still, his has been an afterlife he could never have imagined.
The discovery of Tut's tomb in the Valley of the Kings at Luxor was one of the archaeological sensations of the 20th century. The treasures buried with him have drawn throngs to exhibitions, making him the most celebrated of pharaohs. His mummy was X-rayed twice, more than three decades ago, and the results heightened speculation about his untimely death: whether he died of natural causes or was murdered.
Now three independent teams of artists and scholars, one French, one American and one Egyptian, have used the CT images to reconstruct Tut's face, which Dr. Hawass said was the best preserved part of the mummy. The French and Egyptian teams were told the subject was Tutankhamen; the American team was working blind.
The teams essentially agreed on the proportions of the skull, the basic shape of the face and the size and setting of the eyes. They differed on the shape of the nose and ears, which have not held up well. The American and French versions showed a weak chin, while the Egyptians gave Tut a stronger one.
Dr. Hawass said the Egyptian team's version "looks the most Egyptian."
Before the artists began their work, Egyptian and international experts in anatomy, pathology and radiology, led by Dr. Madiha Khattab, dean of medicine at Cairo University, spent two months analyzing the CT images.
They concluded, for example, that Tut's elongated skull was a normal anthropological variation, not a result of disease or congenital abnormality. They noted his thin face and pronounced overbite - buck teeth. Egyptologists said overbites ran in his family, like the Hapsburg lip of more recent royal history.
Tut also had large lips, a receding chin and a small cleft in the roof of his mouth. The examiners said the cleft palette did not appear to have affected his external expression in any way.
All in all, the science team said, Tut appeared to have been in good health until he died. Judging from the bones, he was well-fed and there were no signs of malnutrition or disease in childhood. His teeth, except for an impacted wisdom tooth, were in excellent condition. He was slightly built and probably stood 5½ feet tall.
So why did Tut die so young, around 1325 B.C.?
An X-ray in 1968 revealed a hole at the base of Tut's cranium. Some Egyptologists suspected he was murdered, possibly by his successor, Ay.
On a recent visit to the University of Pennsylvania, however, Dr. Hawass said the scientists who analyzed the CT images found no apparent evidence of foul play. They said the damage to the cranium was apparently caused when the mummy's discoverers pried the burial mask from the head.
"No one hit Tut on the back of the head," Dr. Hawass said, though he conceded that he could have been poisoned. But to establish that would require other lines of analysis. He also speculated that the broken leg that Tut is known to have suffered days before he died could have become infected and contributed to his death.
The application of CT imaging to mummy research is becoming widespread. Egypt is scanning all the royal mummies in the Cairo Museum. Last week Stanford performed CT scans on the mummy of an Egyptian child. Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, Calif., recently conducted similar research on seven mummies on loan from the British Museum.
Not coincidentally, the re-examination of the Tut mummy and the release of the images of the reconstructed head coincided with promotions of a new exhibition, "Tutankhamen and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs." It opens June 16 at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and will later move to Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Chicago and Philadelphia.
The show was organized by the Egyptian antiquities council and the National Geographic Society, which will feature the Tut reconstruction in the June issue of its magazine.
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The A-dot-C
in Spray
Flame away!
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get a room
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not to hitchhike this thread or anything...but has anyone seen "Kung Fu Hustle". That's the movie I really want to see.
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DeLay is the worst - absolute worst
. Where does he get off wanting to impeach judges because they didn't rule the way he wanted. Delay's run amok IMO Go back to exterminating Texas -
Grizzly or Polar or Brown Bear?
Great White or Hammerhead Shark?
Apples or Oranges?
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well the NYTimes is a pretty Bush-bashing paper - esp Maureen Dowd. It's prob the reason I'm addicted to it.
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oh and thanks for the lesson on media bias
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Sorry the word he used was "overturned"
Read it yourself:
April 21, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Roe's Birth, and Death
By DAVID BROOKS
Justice Harry Blackmun did more inadvertent damage to our democracy than any other 20th-century American. When he and his Supreme Court colleagues issued the Roe v. Wade decision, they set off a cycle of political viciousness and counter-viciousness that has poisoned public life ever since, and now threatens to destroy the Senate as we know it.
When Blackmun wrote the Roe decision, it took the abortion issue out of the legislatures and put it into the courts. If it had remained in the legislatures, we would have seen a series of state-by-state compromises reflecting the views of the centrist majority that's always existed on this issue. These legislative compromises wouldn't have pleased everyone, but would have been regarded as legitimate.
Instead, Blackmun and his concurring colleagues invented a right to abortion, and imposed a solution more extreme than the policies of just about any other comparable nation.
Religious conservatives became alienated from their own government, feeling that their democratic rights had been usurped by robed elitists. Liberals lost touch with working-class Americans because they never had to have a conversation about values with those voters; they could just rely on the courts to impose their views. The parties polarized as they each became dominated by absolutist activists.
Unable to lobby for their pro-life or pro-choice views in normal ways, abortion activists focused their attention on judicial nominations. Dozens of groups on the right and left have been created to destroy nominees who might oppose their side of the fight. But abortion is never the explicit subject of these confirmation battles. Instead, the groups try to find some other pretext to destroy their foes.
Each nomination battle is more vicious than the last as the methodologies of personal destruction are perfected. You get a tit-for-tat escalation as each side points to the other's outrages to justify its own methods.
At first the Senate Judiciary Committee was chiefly infected by this way of doing business, but now the entire body - in fact, the entire capital - has caught the abortion fight fever.
Every few years another civilizing custom is breached. Over the past four years Democrats have resorted to the filibuster again and again to prevent votes on judicial nominees they oppose. Up until now, minorities have generally not used the filibuster to defeat nominees that have majority support. They have allowed nominees to have an up or down vote. But this tradition has been washed away.
In response, Republicans now threaten to change the Senate rules and end the filibuster on judicial nominees. That they have a right to do this is certain. That doing this would destroy the culture of the Senate and damage the cause of limited government is also certain.
The Senate operates by precedent, trust and unanimous consent. Changing the rules by raw majority power would rip the fabric of Senate life. Once the filibuster was barred from judicial nomination fights, it would be barred entirely. Every time the majority felt passionately about an issue, it would rewrite the rules to make its legislation easier to pass. Before long, the Senate would be just like the House. The culture of deliberation would be voided. Minority rights would be unprotected.
Those who believe in smaller government would suffer most. Minority rights have been used frequently to stop expansions of federal power, but if those minority rights were weakened, the federal role would grow and grow - especially when Democrats regained the majority.
Majority parties have often contemplated changing the filibuster rules, but they have always turned back because the costs are so high. But, fired by passions over abortion, Republican leaders have subordinated every other consideration to the need to overturn Roe v. Wade. The Democrats, meanwhile, threaten to shut down the Senate.
I know of many senators who love their institution, and long for a compromise that will forestall this nuclear exchange. But they feel trapped. If they turn back now, their abortion activists will destroy them.
The fact is, the entire country is trapped. Harry Blackmun and his colleagues suppressed that democratic abortion debate the nation needs to have. The poisons have been building ever since. You can complain about the incivility of politics, but you can't stop the escalation of conflict in the middle. You have to kill it at the root. Unless Roe v. Wade is overturned, politics will never get better.
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I was a little surprised to read an op-ed piece in this morning's NYTimes calling for the repeal of Roe v. Wade (!) but David Brooks did make a good case for taking the abortion debate back to the state level. (possibly he's their token conservative? or centrist?)
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Reminds me of a "Car Talk" show of about two weeks ago...
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April 18, 2005
OP-ED COLUMNIST
A Radical in the White House
By BOB HERBERT
Last week - April 12, to be exact - was the 60th anniversary of the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. "I have a terrific headache," he said, before collapsing at the Little White House in Warm Springs, Ga. He died of a massive cerebral hemorrhage on the 83rd day of his fourth term as president. His hold on the nation was such that most Americans, stunned by the announcement of his death that spring afternoon, reacted as though they had lost a close relative.
That more wasn't made of this anniversary is not just a matter of time; it's a measure of the distance the U.S. has traveled from the egalitarian ideals championed by F.D.R. His goal was "to make a country in which no one is left out." That kind of thinking has long since been consigned to the political dumpster. We're now in the age of Bush, Cheney and DeLay, small men committed to the concentration of big bucks in the hands of the fortunate few.
To get a sense of just how radical Roosevelt was (compared with the politics of today), consider the State of the Union address he delivered from the White House on Jan. 11, 1944. He was already in declining health and, suffering from a cold, he gave the speech over the radio in the form of a fireside chat.
After talking about the war, which was still being fought on two fronts, the president offered what should have been recognized immediately for what it was, nothing less than a blueprint for the future of the United States. It was the clearest statement I've ever seen of the kind of nation the U.S. could have become in the years between the end of World War II and now. Roosevelt referred to his proposals in that speech as "a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all regardless of station, race or creed."
Among these rights, he said, are:
"The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation.
"The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation.
"The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living.
"The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad.
"The right of every family to a decent home.
"The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health.
"The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident and unemployment.
"The right to a good education."
I mentioned this a few days ago to an acquaintance who is 30 years old. She said, "Wow, I can't believe a president would say that."
Roosevelt's vision gave conservatives in both parties apoplexy in 1944 and it would still drive them crazy today. But the truth is that during the 1950's and 60's the nation made substantial progress toward his wonderfully admirable goals, before the momentum of liberal politics slowed with the war in Vietnam and the election in 1968 of Richard Nixon.
It wouldn't be long before Ronald Reagan was, as the historian Robert Dallek put it, attacking Medicare as "the advance wave of socialism" and Dick Cheney, from a seat in Congress, was giving the thumbs down to Head Start. Mr. Cheney says he has since seen the light on Head Start. But his real idea of a head start is to throw government money at people who already have more cash than they know what to do with. He's one of the leaders of the G.O.P. gang (the members should all wear masks) that has executed a wholesale transfer of wealth via tax cuts from working people to the very rich.
Roosevelt was far from a perfect president, but he gave hope and a sense of the possible to a nation in dire need. And he famously warned against giving in to fear.
The nation is now in the hands of leaders who are experts at exploiting fear, and indifferent to the needs and hopes, even the suffering, of ordinary people.
"The test of our progress," said Roosevelt, "is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."
Sixty years after his death we should be raising a toast to F.D.R. and his progressive ideas. And we should take that opportunity to ask: How in the world did we allow ourselves to get from there to here?
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I'm in the low paying but good benefits sector...
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Against Me!
Alkaline Trio
Anti-Flag
Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers
Avail
Bad Religion
Beastie Boys
Big D & the Kids' Table
Bob Marley & the Wailers
Bouncing Souls
Chris Murray
The Clash
Common Rider
The Coup
The Dave Brubeck Quartet
Dave Holland Big Band
The Distillers
Ella Fitzgerald
Filibuster
Fugazi
Gang Starr
The Honor System
Hot Water Music
Jawbreaker
Joe Strummer & the Mescaleros
John Coltrane
Jurassic 5
Lars Frederiksen & the Bastards
The Lawrence Arms
Less Than Jake
Miles Davis
Minor Threat
NOFX
One Last Thing
Only Crime
Operation Ivy
Pennywise
The Pietasters
Poor Righteous Teachers
Pretty Girls Make Graves
Rage Against the Machine
The Ramones
Rancid
The Readymen
Robert Belfour
Screeching Weasel
The Slackers
Slapstick
Slow Gherkin
Small Brown Bike
The Smiths
The Specials
Tito Puente y Su Orquestra
I *love* Ella Fitzgerald!
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It was like an "A" ride at Disneyland back when they used to have tickets. DC is like the Disneyland of the East Coast.
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On April 14 ...
1865: President Lincoln was shot and mortally wounded by John Wilkes Booth. He died the next day.
I've been to the "House where Lincoln died" in Washington DC. That was a really small bed for such a big man!
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Alice in Chains
Aqueduct
Cage of Mind
Deathcab for Cutie
Foo Fighter
Freezepop
Green Day
Interpol
Modest Mouse
Nirvana
Pearl Jam
Radiohead
Sno Patrol
THe Decemberists
The Postal Service
The Prodigy
THe Shins
THe SPinanes
The Who
(and for the record it's not my iPod - it's my sons. But he stole my car this morning so I stole his iPod
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perhaps you put on muscle lifting those weights - remember muscle weighs more than fat
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Not at all. THat was equally as historic - if not more so!
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There is actually a woman here at work who remembers that day. She said that people were crying in the streets. THey took it harder than the death of JFK - and she remembers both!
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60 years ago today, on April 12, 1945, Franklin D. Roosevelt, the greatest president of all time, dropped dead of cerebral hemorrhage.
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Rats! Paul Krugman, a prof at Princeton and an op ed columnist for the NYTimes had a really great piece on this subject about a week ago but you have to order it now
EDITORIAL DESK | April 5, 2005, Tuesday
An Academic Question
By PAUL KRUGMAN (NYT) Op-Ed 760 words
Late Edition - Final , Section A , Page 23 , Column 6
ABSTRACT - Paul Krugman Op-Ed column examines charge by conservatives of liberal bias in university hiring and promotion; says claims that liberal bias keeps conservatives off college faculties almost always focus on humanities and social sciences, but fact is that Republicans are almost as rare in hard sciences; says conservatives claiming alienation of universities should wonder if some of fault lies not in professors, but in themselves; wonders how scientists could support party whose leader, Pres Bush, claims that 'jury is still out' on theory of evolution...
Bush to Blair: We Fixed Intelligence
in Spray
Posted
400 dead in the last two weeks alone (soldiers and Iraqi civilians)