Came across this on a blog called futilitycloset, it’s full of quirky goodness but this just needed more investigation.
The Mystery Slab of Beth She’Arim
Huge glass slab made circa 400AD
Making large sheets of glass is hard. Making a 2m by 3½m by 45cm slab of glass is awesomely hard to make. Even now this would be a big project. But the details of when, where and the theories on how this one was made are quite fascinating.
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St.Davids Day, 1 March 2010, is the national Saints day for Wales. “Dydd Gwyl Dewi hapus!” simply transliteraties as “day saint David happy” and is the traditional greeting as you wave your daffodils and wolf down a few dozen welsh cakes.
Happy St.Davids Day /Dydd Gwyl Dewi hapus!
Saint David’s Day
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This was my response to a comment on a Hacker News thread. I’ve added proper links and rounded off a few rough edges and presented it here as it’s rather OT there. The issue I’m addressing mainly is whether it is fair, as Pat Robertson has claimed, to say that Haitians made a “deal with the devil” when they initiated the bloody revolution against their French oppressors.
My heart yearns for peace for those Haitians afflicted with such great loss at this time and I urge you to give wisely of your charity to help as you see able. UK Donations to the Disaster Emergency Committee can be made through BT.com; other countries try Google’s Haiti relief page.
Haiti’s political foundations
“the superstitious claim that the misery in Haiti is a direct result of a pact with the devil”
[excerpt from the Original Comment; my response follows]
I’ve heard this name Pat Robertson a few times on the ‘net. I assume he’s in the USA? Can anyone give an audio/video link to his talk where he suggests Haiti’s slaves shouldn’t have overthrown their French masters as they did?
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TIL about testing DNS (link to Google’s DNS primer) to find the fastest nameserver for your computer to shave those precious milliseconds off your DNS resolution time.
DNS/nameserver benchmarking for fun and profit
For the unitiatiated DNS resolution is the time it takes for a domain name to be matched to its current IP address; this allows your computer to communicate with a computer on the ‘net using the retrieved IP address.
I used “namebench” which has been developed at Google by one of their smart cookies, Thomas R Stromberg, in the famous 20% time that Google gives.
Namebench results from a TalkTalk UK account using OpenDNS
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