First Things has a well written essay on death and destruction and the “problem” that poses for the believing Christian.

Some heretics have dared to suggest that some of the blocks in the Egyptian pyramids were cast in place with a kind of crude concrete. They are currently being rounded up and shot. You can read all about it in this Boston Globe article.

I am in no position to add anything intelligent to this argument, but this passage from the article really struck me….

Archeologists, however, say there is simply no evidence that the pyramids are built of anything other than huge limestone blocks. Any synthetic material showing up in tests – as it has occasionally, even in work not trying to prove a concrete connection – is probably just slop from “modern” repairs done over the centuries, they say.

This is either really bad reporting or the Archeolgoists have a really weak argument. How can you say out of one side of your mouth that there is no evidence for the opposing camp and out of the other side of your mouth that the evidence “probably” was caused by something else?

Other gems from the article…..

Nearly every prominent Egyptologist is adamant that the pyramids are made solely of giant blocks cut with crude copper or stone tools. They note that proponents of the concrete theory are chemists or materials specialists with little experience at ancient digs – lab researchers, not shovel-wielding field archeologists.

I am all in favor of people who get their hands dirty, but are archeologists really arguing that chemists or materials specialists have no special skills that archeologists do not? Do they really ignore the insights of all the other branches of science?

And one last gem…

Zahi Hawass, head of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, minced no words in assailing the concrete idea. “It’s highly stupid,” he said via a spokesman. “The pyramids are made from solid blocks of quarried limestone. To suggest otherwise is idiotic and insulting.”

Now that is my style of arguing.

Our essay of the week comes from our very own Ape Man. He uses some recent remarks by Obama as a spring board to offer up some thoughts on rural culture.

From the New York Times….

The report, from researchers at Oxford and the University of Exeter in England, is said to be the first evidence that a child’s sex is associated with a mother’s diet. Although sex is genetically determined by whether sperm from the father supplies an X or Y chromosome, it appears that a mother’s body can favor the successful development of a male or female embryo.

The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, shows a link between higher energy intake around the time of conception and the birth of sons. The difference is not huge, but it may be enough to help explain the falling birthrate of boys in industrialized countries, including the United States and Britain.

The reason food intake may influence the development of one sex of infant rather than another isn’t fully understood. However, in vitro fertilization studies show that high levels of glucose encourage the growth of male embryos while inhibiting female embryos.

Someone in the comments wondered if this meant that diabetic mothers had more male children.

Did you know that every new car is going to have a wireless network of sensors on it then can be snooped upon remotely? After reading this rant you will be left wondering what other things this brave new world has in store for us.

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.

Courtesy Vanderleun I came across this youtube clip…..

The guy is a nut. I don’t think he is using the proper safety gear most of the time and he is going way to fast.

Do a flicker search to get a better idea of what the place is like. This shot gives you an idea of what the entrance is like.

This is the Wikipedia article about EL Caminito del Rey