This week’s essay of the week was selected under some protest from some of our staff. It was felt that 60 page essay “The Prehistoric Origins of European Economic Integration” was just too much to ask anyone to read.

But such complaints where brushed aside. The essay is 60 pages double spaced which means it is more like 30 pages single spaced. And besides, people should stretch themselves every now and again.

The essay is full of fascinating tidbits that will interest anyone who has much knowledge of the bible (thought the bible is scarcely mentioned in the essay and illuminating it was furthest thing from the authors mind). But if there is anyone overarching lesson to be taken from the essay, it is how slender our knowledge of antiquity is and how the self confidence assertions of scholars should be taken with a large grain of salt.

This is not the point the author was trying to make. Rather, the overarching theme of the essay is that the peoples of antiquity were far more numerous, wealthy, and literate then scholars have previously supposed. But when one reads about how few finds it took to upend previously held beliefs, ones glimpse the precarious foundation of modern knowledge of antiquity

Its an article of faith amongst most people that grid can be hacked by any half way competent hacker, so I am not sure this is really news. Still, it is nice to know that some things that everyone knows are really true. This from Network World…..

Cracking a power company network and gaining access that could shut down the grid is simple, a security expert told an RSA audience, and he has done so in less than a day.

Ira Winkler, a penetration-testing consultant, says he and a team of other experts took a day to set up attack tools they needed then launched their attack, which paired social engineering with corrupting browsers on a power company’s desktops. By the end of a full day of the attack, they had taken over several machines, giving the team the ability to hack into the control network overseeing power production and distribution.

Winston Churchill is one of those secular saints that everyone is taught to love. Everyone knows that Winston Churchill was one of the good guys of World War II. And almost nobody has read the speeches that made him famous.

There is absolutely no excuse for this state of affairs. The speeches of Churchill were given only 70 odd years ago and they are perfectly understandable today. When you read them, you understand something about the man and his times that you could not get from reading a dozen chapters in various history books on his time period.

Take Churchill’s speech on the Munich Agreement for example. It is one thing to read in the history books about how Churchill opposed the Munich Agreement and it is quite another to read the actual speech in which he opposed that appeasement. In the history books, Churchill comes across as a man who was on the right side of the argument. But when you read the man’s actual speech he comes off as eerily prophetic (appropriately enough, it ends with a quote from the book of Daniel). If you had infallible prophetic vision of what the future would hold, you could have hardly come up with a better speech then the one Churchill gave.

Why does this matter? Because hearing the prophetic nature of Churchill’s speech and contrasting it with the speech that Neville Chamberlain gave is receive a lesson on the human nature that is far more powerful than any text book recap. Especially when you listen to the cheers that greeted his speech.