Rewriting history?

According to the online edition of The Independent, the boffins at Oxford have successfully applied modern imagery analysis techniques to decoding ancient Greek and Roman texts found on a rubbish heap in Egypt:

The original papyrus documents, discovered in an ancient rubbish dump in central Egypt, are often meaningless to the naked eye – decayed, worm-eaten and blackened by the passage of time. But scientists using the new photographic technique, developed from satellite imaging, are bringing the original writing back into view. Academics have hailed it as a development which could lead to a 20 per cent increase in the number of great Greek and Roman works in existence. Some are even predicting a “second Renaissance”.

I'm sure this is a great development, and not to take anything away from anyone, but I'm equally sure there's an enormous amount of work to be done piecing together what will amount to a killer jigsaw puzzle of text fragments.

Then again, with all the computing iron lying around loose in the world... hey! maybe someone will cobble together a distributed computing platform (along the lines of the SETI-at-home project) to analyze the uncovered scraps. And maybe one of the perks would be to allow participants to look at the pieces they're processing?

Just musing.

Cheers...

An afternoon filled with colorful invective...

I'm using Word, of course.

What the strength analysis hath given in terms of simplicity of wording, it hath taken away with a vengeance in terms of formatting and graphics. Word has crashed on me more times than you can expect to occur in your typical demolition derby, and for some reason, has decided to abandon rules for displaying pages (pages that are supposed to be shown in landscape mode are shown in portrait, though the setting for the page says landscape).

And silly lamb that I am, I keep forgetting to hit Ctrl-S after, say, every third keystroke. As stupid as that sounds, it's the only way to get anything accomplished with this miserable software.

This is getting tedious.

Cheers...

P.S. I'm beginning to think I was a little too generous with the crack about "every third keystroke" (not often enough). Then again, once I realized - silly bumpkin! - that the paste operation was the key to my problem ("Paste a text box or graphic, crash the app."), life became easier... kind of. Farblegarg.

Back to our regularly scheduled life...

Except it seems everything is about 6 hours late.

I had such plans for today!

Then again, I did wash the dishes that had accumulated in the kitchen, I did a load of laundry (and even put it in the dryer afterward), and I did cook a crockpot dinner in addition to finishing the strength analysis. I even went for a short walk, until I decided it was too cold and windy to be outside without something more substantial enclosing my torso.

The good news is that I'm certainly not behind overall, translation-wise. The strength analysis is done, the graphics ultimately pasted into the target file by first pasting them from the source document into Photoshop Elements and then copying them from PE to the target file. Go figure. Necessity finds a way.

That means I don't have to work on the strength analysis tomorrow, which ought to give me enough leverage on the acoustics assignment to not have to particularly push tomorrow, as long as I get around 2500-3000 words done. Then Tuesday, I'll need to finish the acoustics and start on the 4000 source words of, er, geology due Thursday by midday.

Just thinking out, um, loud... ah, if you consider the noise of my fingers hitting the keys.

In other news, the melody of "Эй, донцы-молодцы" (a Russian folk song, I believe, about the Don Cossacks) refuses to quit resonating between my ears. How did it get there, and more important: How do I make it leave? Perhaps my blood pressure is too high?

Cheers...