Ancient Egyptian City Spotted From Space

Ancient Egyptian City Spotted From Space

By Heather Whipps, Special to LiveScience

posted: 05 June 2007 09:40 am

The Great Aten Temple at Tell el-Amarna, Middle Egypt. Even though the northern enclosure wall of the temple is buried beneath a modern cemetery, using Quickbird high resolution satellite imagery, it is still possible to see the buried wall. Credit: Sarah H Parcak, University of Alabama at Birmingham

Satellites hovering above Egypt have zoomed in on a 1,600-year-old metropolis, archaeologists say.

Images captured from space pinpoint telltale signs of previous habitation in the swatch of land 200 miles south of Cairo, which digging recently confirmed as an ancient settlement dating from about 400 A.D.

The find is part of a larger project aiming to map as much of ancient Egypt's archaeological sites, or "tells," as possible before they are destroyed or covered by modern development.

"It is the biggest site discovered so far," said project leader Sarah Parcak of the University of Alabama at Birmingham. "Based on the coins and pottery we found, it appears to be a massive regional center that traded with Greece, Turkey and Libya."

Another large city dating to 600 B.C. and a monastery from 400 A.D. are some of the four hundred or so sites that Parcak has located during her work with the satellites. The oldest dates back over 5,000 years.

Egypt contains a wealth of already identified archaeological tells like these, but even they represent only about 0.01 percent of what is out there still uncovered, Parcak said.

Most of the ancient settlements still buried are at risk of being lost to looting and urban sprawl. Residential sites, where the Egyptian empire's millions of citizens lived during its heyday, are especially vulnerable, archaeologists say.

"There are thousands of settlements that Egyptians don't even know are there," Parcak told LiveScience. "Nothing will ever destroy the Pyramids or the Temple of Luxor, but these huge settlement sites where we get a lot of information are being threatened. And that's how we find out how people lived."

The satellite technology lets archaeologists such as Parcak—the first to use space imagery in Egypt—identify points of interest on a large scale.

"Basically, I'm trying to distinguish the ancient remains from the modern landscape," she said. "A site is going to appear very differently from space." Archaeological sites absorb moisture in a different way, she explained, and tend to be covered with specific types of soil and vegetation.

The subtle differences would take much longer to identify on the ground, said Parcak, so Egypt's government uses her catalog to identify sites and excavate there before development takes over and destroys the site for good.

CNN Gets Called on Their Shit - By a Liberal Even!!

SCREW CNN (w/ graphics) [PG edition]

by lokiloki

Thu Oct 19, 2006 at 09:51:48 AM PDT

Which is the worse sin, presenting biased news and commentary, or providing total fluff and non-news and masquerading it as actual news?

Why is it that Americans don't know, say, where England is, or who, like Bush circa 2000, the leader of Pakistan is? Blame it on the News. And, specifically, blame it on CNN. Sure, intrepid folks COULD go to NPR or BBC, but for the vast majority of Americans, they simply can't, don't have the time, don't know about it...

CNN is a scourge. It leads our nation to stupidity. Unlike FOX, which we KNOW is bad, I've always had a bit of a soft spot for CNN, perhaps because Ted Turner founded it and it was a maverick in its time... but no longer. Now it is a fawning imbecile who spews gossip and trivia and sensationalism like it is all-important.

Don't believe me? Let's take a look at their home page (from yesterday's "above the fold" CNN home page):

CNN HOME PAGE

Okay, now let's find all of the advertising, including cross-selling and up-selling to other CNN shows and services. Here's what we get:

CNN Advertising

• lokiloki's diary :: ::
• 
  

And now lets find all of the dog-bites-man sensationalism, gossip, trivia, and other non-news.

CNN Sensationalism, TMZ-like crap, YouTube-like crap

One notable thing is that this year CNN has really shifted to try and be like YouTube AND TMZ, a video channel and a gossip site respectively. They have stories on Madonna, porn, rappers being shot, crazy wedding cakes, and the like.

And now the actual news... wait for it...

CNN Actual News

That is the SUM TOTAL of actual news presented on the above-the-fold CNN home page. And it is not even clear to me that these items are news. The only international story is about the ANC. What gives?

This is what their home page would look like if it was presented with just news:

Our population is being dumbed down, literally, with Madonna, wedding cakes, crazy dogs doing tricks, people getting shot and then killing some other dude. How can we compete as a nation when CNN, that fawning imbecile, and the other purveyors fill our heads with trivia dredged from People magazine, TMZ, YouTube, or the local police blotter? ?

And the rest of the world? Let's look at China? We hear a lot about how they are censored, and no doubt they are. But let's take a look at one of their top news sites, Xinhua.

Xinhua home page

And then let's remove all of the advertising, sensationalism, and other stuff. What are we left with...

Xinhua home page purged

You could do the same thing in pretty much ANY other country, from France, to Germany, to UK, to Cuba... and what you get on their top news sites is... actual news!

In the US, we are subjected to the trifecta of trivia -- CNN, MSNBC, and FOX. WHO CARES about partisan slant when the REAL PROBLEM is that we get no actual news!

Thanks, and tell us where you get your news... (me, BBC)...

UPDATED: CNN USED to be better... I was browsing the Internet Archive... for some reason the earliest record for CNN is 2000. That's a bit weird. In 1996 and thereabouts CNN was good... and even in 2000, as seen below, it was better. (I like the headline particularly.)

[By the way, another thing about today's journalism... have you noticed how the media tends to inflate conflict... instead of a headline that reads, for example, "So-and-so disagreed with so-and-so", nowadays they will use terms like "slam", "blasts", "smackdown", and other aggressive terms that presumably excites readers to click, but does a disservice to reality. (And I will admit to this too... after all, if the title of my diary wasn't "fuck CNN" would you have read it?)] (Update: On the "slams" comment. Take a look at this Google search. No doubt some are appropiate, but the artificial conflation of a disagreement to a full-bore fight is not reality: for example, "U.S. slams ban on its chickens".)

UPDATE AGAIN: Here's the thinking that News execs consider when designing news:

In the end, Yahoo kept world news prominent on the front page because users feel secure knowing that it's easily accessible, even if they don't often click it. Conspicuous placement also went to entertainment, which draws heavy traffic from people seeking a diversion at work.

With "market forces" essentially designing what information we're presented, we must consider the value of public financing for true news vehicles.

Tags: china, usa, cnn, xinhua, media, MSM, Recommended (all tags)

Some of My Favorite Photos

Category: Life












People Litter










Mexican Billboard







A Look Into the Real Audiences of the General Media (CBS)




The Jewish guy cracks me up...can you find him?











I like the perspectives of information that effect our lives in this graph.



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Inspiring Picture

I'm Not Offended - I'm Amused!!

"Amateur" charge infuriates blogosphere

By Eric Auchard
Tue Jun 5, 7:07 AM ET

BERKELEY, California (Reuters) - Internet culture, often portrayed as the vanguard of progress, is actually a jungle peopled by intellectual yahoos and digital thieves, according to a Silicon Valley entrepreneur-turned-dissenter.

Andrew Keen, a 47-year-old Briton who founded dot-com era music startup Audiocafe, argues that basic notions of expertise are under assault amid a cultural shift in favor of the amateurism of blogs, MySpace and other popularity-driven sites.

"Millions and millions of exuberant monkeys ... are creating an endless digital forest of mediocrity," Keen writes in a book published Tuesday. (LOL!!!! I Love the format!! ~ Samantha)

His views have infuriated bloggers and others, especially in Silicon Valley, who argue he is an elitist intellectual, a conservative pining for a return to old ways, and a writer who cannot keep his facts straight.

The villains in Keen's narrative are a "pajama army" of mostly anonymous writers who spread gossip and scandal, "intellectual kleptomaniacs," who search Google to copy others' work and the "digital thieves" of media content in the post- Napster era.

For a technology industry used to basking in the glow of self-promotion, Keen's work is shocking for its unforgiving view of Silicon Valley's utopian aspirations.

The book "is designed as a grenade," Keen, a native of north London who now lives in California, said at a recent debate with bloggers and journalists in Berkeley. "It is not designed to be particularly fair or balanced."

The title of his polemic, "The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing our Culture," attacks what he calls the "cut and paste" ethic of Web users, who he says are robbing professionals of their livelihoods.

The Web allows anyone to post their most intimate thoughts, views or even outright lies, without any editing, under the assumption that the crowd will correct any mistakes. Keen calls for efforts to balance out the Web's powers of instant publishing against society's need for accountability.

COUTERATTACK

Some of the biggest names in Internet publishing are hitting back against Keen, including video blogger Robert Scoble, media critic Jeff Jarvis, citizen journalism advocate Dan Gillmor and blog pioneer Dave Winer.

Jarvis, on his blog BuzzMachine, refers to Keen's thinking as "Snobs.com." He recently asked readers to advise him whether he should bother to debate Keen or shun him. The outcome was that the two have agreed to debate online.

But some would-be detractors find themselves sticking up for Keen, at least for his ideas, if not his bombastic tone.

Clay Shirky, a lecturer on new media technology at New York University, came spoiling for a fight with Keen at a recent online politics conference in New York. Instead, Shirky says he found himself defending Keen.

"So much of the conversation about the social effects of the Internet has been so upbeat that even when there is an obvious catastrophe ... we talk about it amongst ourselves, but not in public," Shirky wrote in a blog post afterward.

INTELLECTUAL-FREE ZONE?

Keen, for his part, rejects any notion that he is a modern Luddite out to break the machinery of the Web. He keeps up a regular dialog with friends and opponents at his blog at http://andrewkeen.typepad.com/.

He points to intellectual influences such as German-American political theorist Hannah Arendt, known for her work on the nature of totalitarianism and the "banality of evil," and Jurgen Habermas, the German philosopher who defined the concepts of the private and public spheres in politics.

"The price we pay for the growth in egalitarianism offered by the Internet is the decentralized access to unedited stories. In this medium, contributions by intellectuals lose their power to create a focus," Habermas said in a 2006 speech.

Keen first staked out his views in a 2006 magazine article in the Weekly Standard magazine, and in online debates since then has won some supporters, who say they too have second-thoughts about the Web's ultra-democratic ethos.

"If I ever need surgery, I damn sure hope my surgeon is one of the elite in his field," one disgruntled blogger wrote.