Barrows

I was watching a U-tube lecture on European archeology.  They excavated a huge barrow in England.  Built back in prehistoric times, before writing, all we know about then comes from archeology.  It was a big structure, half underground, half above ground.  These things are often described as graves.  On this barrow, they excavated and found the bones of forty individuals.  Forty?  Not many for a barrow that big.  The place was big enough to hold a 1000 graves.  Especially when you think how difficult it must have been to build such a place in the stone age.  Few workers, a poor hunter gatherer economy, no metal tools, not even shovels.  It must have required powerful motivations to build those barrows.
   Barrows are traditional described as grave sites.  That U-Tube lecture makes me think that the barrows served other purposes. Tribal gathering places, sacred places where shamans asked the god for good weather, good hunting and good luck.  Places where seers predicted the future.  We cannot know at this remove in time.  I.m thinking those few graves were the graves of a few exceptional individuals, priests, kings, shamans, mighty warriors, buried in the barrow to bring good luck, bring a friendly spirit, and make a sacred place more sacred.  We still do this.  Look at Westminster where the British bury their kings and scientists and soldiers. 

Boeing's Number 1 Problem.

  Best selling 737 Max has been grounded for more than a year.  This is the brand new airliner that suffered two fatal crashes within a few months of each other.  The autopilot in both crashes failed, seized control of the plane and dove it into the ground, killing all on board.  After a year, the cause of the autopilot failure is known, fixes have been made, but the aircraft (and Boeing’s very survival) are still grounded.  The 737 MAX is Boeing’s bread and butter aircraft.  It’s the single aisle jetliner that does most of the flying. They were cranking out 57 a month ($100 mil apiece).  Production of all of Boeing’s other aircraft was only 20 per month. 

   FAA is still paralyzed with fear of another 737 MAX crash which would reflect badly upon them, and so they are slow walking all the paperwork.  The Corona virus epidemic has caused meetings to be replaced by teleconferences slowing matters still more.  Much more of this, and Boeing will have to declare bankruptcy. 

British history via U-tube.

  I watched a couple of decent, lengthy U-Tube presentations by “The Histocrat”.  The first one talks about humans moving into Britain a million years ago.  Over the last million years Britain has suffered several ice ages severe enough to drive all the humans out of Britain, and as many interglacial periods were the forests and the game and the humans came back.  With both the ice ages and the interglacials lasting 10,000 years or more.  Used to be, they only wrote about humans settling in Britain after the last ice age went out 10,000 years ago.  Apparently they have discovered a couple of sites in Britain that are much older since the last book I read was written.  They failed to describe just how these older sites were dated.  Carbon 14 dating only works back 30-40 thousand years.  A million years is too old for carbon 14 dating. 

   They did discuss the seas breaking thru the straits of Dover, creating the English Channel and cutting Britain off from the Continent.  And sinking Doggerland.  They were a little vague on just when this happened, and after it happened how did humans get across the Channel and onto English soil?  No discussion of when early humans, especially Heidelberg man and Neanderthal man might have developed boats.  It doesn’t take much of a boat; the Channel is only twenty miles wide and can be crossed in a birch bark canoe in good weather. 

   The second one, which started up automatically after the first one finished, picks up the story around 8000 BC with the Beaker Folk.  It claimed that DNA evidence shows a turnover in British population with the appearance of Beaker Folk graves.  They fail to describe how this DNA testing works and how many samples of DNA going back before 8000 BC they have.  Some discussion of introduction of copper and bronze into a flint using late Neolithic Britain.  The author clearly knows little about metal work, he describes bronze as “hard”.  It isn’t very hard.  Flint is much harder than bronze.  Bronze is tougher than flint; you can make a bronze sword that works.  You cannot make a flint sword; flint is brittle as glass and would break the first time you struck anything with it.  The author makes a big deal over copper versus bronze.  I don’t see that, bronze is a straight forward alloy of copper with 10% tin which gives a metal much tougher than plain copper.  But other than adding the tin, bronze works the same way as copper does.  You can cast it and sharpen it the same way as copper.  A copper smith doesn’t have to learn much to become a bronze smith.  The author discusses smelting copper from the ore (oxides or sulfides of copper).  Actually copper working got started with native copper.  There used to be nuggets of pure copper just lying around to be picked up.  They are mostly gone by now, but they were important back in the day.  The native copper can be hammered into shape, or melted and cast into shape, much simpler that figuring out how to smelt copper from ores.      

8 1/2 inches of fresh global warming in May

 8 1/2 inches of fresh global warming fell on my deck last night.  May is late in the season for snow like this.  It ought to push back leaf day if the trees have any common sense.

Cops and Courts should handle Campus Sexual Harrassment

Betsy DeVos, Trump's education secretary , has just released new federal guidance to the nation's colleges and universities.  Hence forth they have to allow accused students a little bit of due process before expelling them.  Good first step.  BUT...
Rape is a serious crime.  Used to be a death penalty offense.  We have backed off on the death penalty, but it is still a serious crime.  I don't like students getting judged by a bunch of college admins for serious offenses like rape.  That's what we have police and courts for.  And American courts are pretty good on due process, far more so than lefty college admins.  When someone complains to the college of campus rape or sexual harassment, the college should offer her (or him) a ride to the police station, and a ride back.

Train buffs for Trump.

  

Today’s campaign mailing offered a real electric model train, all painted up as a Trump campaign train. It looked kinda cool.  I like Trump and I like trains.  I have an HO train layout running around the walls of the down stairs guest room.  I guessed this trophy model train was HO scale.  The picture showed HO style couplers.  A lot of looking did turn up “HO” in an obscure place in the mailing.  I sort of expected a deal for the train like this “Make a sizable campaign contribution and we will send you this cool troy.”  No such luck.  After reading and re-readng the offer, I think if you send in the paper work they will bill you and if you sent the toy train operator (not the Trump campaign!) a check, they will send you the locomotive.  Send them two more checks and they will send you the two passenger cars that make up the full train.  No where did it say how much each check had to be. 

   After all the reading and re-reading of the mailer, I decided NO Sale, and put the mailer into File 13.

Terminator Dark Fate 2019

    It’s been a long time (36 years) since the first Terminator movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Hamilton.  Terminator Dark Fate still has Arnold and Linda Hamilton.  Linda has aged, nearly as much at Carrie Fisher aged in the last Star Wars flick.  We have a large cast but none of the other actors names mean anything to me.  Grace, played by Mackenzie Davis is a human with superpowers rather than a cyborg, Dani Ramos played by Natalia Reyes has Sarah Connor’s old role from the first Terminator movie.  They both do good jobs; this movie ought to help both of their careers. This flick got an R rating, mostly over a few F-bombs dropped here and there.  The plot is familiar, a super being, Grace, is sent back from the future to guard a good looking young chick, Dani Ramos, from an unstoppable Terminator sent back from the future to kill her.  .The movie starts out in Spanish, with English subtitles, which was a little off putting.  There is a lot of combat thru out the movie.  It is so violent that it is hard to believe that the characters can survive all the banging around.  There are some plot holes, such as the time they are riding on the top of a freight train, headed toward the US border, and suddenly, poof, they are in a nice clean new white pickup truck. 

   They spent $185 million to make this and it has made $261 million world wide since it was released in November last year.  Somebody goofed on the publicity, I never heard of it before seeing it on Netflix.  If I had known there was another Terminator movie in the theaters I probably would have gone and seen it.

   The cyborgs are no longer the bright shiny liquid metal from Terminator 2; rather they are made from soft and squishy black tar.  Yuck.  I liked the liquid metal better.

    Overall this was a meh movie, nowhere as entertaining as Terminator 2 was 30 years ago.   No good one liners.  No romance, neither Grace nor Dani gets a guy.  Sarah Connor wants to kill Arnold’s T800 character.  I remember Sarah saying nice things about the T-800’s fatherly relationship with young John Connor toward the end of Terminator 2.  She must have had some attitude adjustment for the worse in the two (or more?) Terminator flicks between this one and Terminator 2.