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Life is one fool thing after another whereas love is two fool things after each other.
Oscar Wilde

Irish poet, novelist, dramatist and critic, 1854-1900

A cemetery of secrets

The Sunday Times has an article about a discovery archaeologists made in York: A large Roman cemetery dating from the early 3rd-century.

Ordinarily, Roman cemeteries are much like any other kind. They hold a roughly equal mix of men and women, with infants, children, adolescents, young and older adults all in their natural proportion. It soon became clear that this one was very, very different. Fifty-six skeletons or part skeletons were recovered, of which only seven were adolescent or younger. The rest were all prime-of-life adult males, none older than 45. More than this: by the standards of their time, they were giants, mostly around 174cm (approximately 5ft 10in) tall, at a time when the average was 5cm less. They were powerfully built, too, with arm bones showing evidence of extreme physical exertion. And they were not local — a couple from Britain, several from the Mediterranean, one from the Alps, one even from Africa. How could this be explained? [continue]

Via mirabilis_ca.

Are you tone deaf?

If you find Rachmaninov a racket, you might just be suffering from congenital amusia, or put simply, you're tone deaf. However, help may now be at hand as a team of UCL researchers are investigating the nature of the problem at both psychological and neurological level. Try their online test to see if you can tell the paired tunes apart. More...