Et in arcadia ego.

[zotz]

A few months ago there was a news article about some ex-Bletchley park people considering a mysterious inscription on a monument in Staffordshire, reputedly containing information about the Holy Grail. Well, they don't think so. This is entirely unsurprising. The Holy Blood And The Wholly Specious has a lot to answer for, even if it has managed to indirectly pay for the Roslin Chapel's restoration.

There's a page about the Poussin in question here.

Rather more practically, here's an article about a possible treatment for rabies, previously 100% fatal once it became symptomatic (bar one single person in the sixties, I believe).

Comments

[steer.livejournal.com]

Good word. I don't know if you remember the Simon Singh book and TV series "The code book" which had a cryptographic challenge and a cash prize. I set about solving them. For one exercise, I assumed that the code was of a certain type and started to break it using that assumption. I'd got about a quarter of a message about A stargate opening, something about the time being right and a message being sent -- apocalyptic stuff. The key with which it was encoded seemed to be a bunch of gibberish three letter words though which made no sense. Eventually I discovered that the code was a different type and I'd been seeing these messages in the random noise. This probably says something about my subconscious but I am not sure what.

[zotz]

Probably just that you're normal, I'm afraid.

Yes, it's an excellent word. recently popularised by Bill Gibson in Pattern Recognition.