Cambrai was divided in two equal parts and each half installed in either the right or left side of the choir of the church. An entry in the capitulary acts of February 4, 1473, shows that on only three days of the year did the singers come together to perform in the middle of the aisle: Maundy Thursday, Holy Saturday, and Pentecost…On all other days, they sang from either side, each half grouped around its own lectern, and performing from its own music book. A bizarre confirmation of the existing space between the two sides comes from an entry of September 9, 1493, that reprimands the lesser vicars for throwing meat and bones from one side of the choir to the other during the divine service

Emphasis mine. Via Unquiet Thoughts (whose music as the duet Mignarda I highly recommend).

Oh, look! It's the Gods of the Copybook Headings! They seem pissed.

Two new species of pseudoscorpions discovered in Grand Canyon-Parashant. GC-Parashant is still decidedly not well known to anyone, and it's no surprise there are still new things to be found out there.

An interview with Tim Powers, about the wellsprings of his ideas, his research methods and writing process.

Soviet geology: an exotic and romantic business:

Large sections of the country were still waiting to be explored and mapped. Foreign travel was still impossible for most Soviets, so idealistic youths were drawn to geology for the thrill of adventure and exploration. Some of them really thought they could find personal freedom, if not by going west, then in the distant corners of the wild east....

They mapped, carried loads of samples, fished and hunted, wrote poetry, drank vodka, and sang songs around the campfire. In fact, many Russian musicians and poets (Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky included) started out as geologists or worked as technicians in those parties. Few outside of Russia know that it was geologists who started an important movement in modern poetry in St. Petersburg in the 1960s, called the “Geological School.” Furthermore, geologist authors dominated a genre of unofficial, often politically risqué songs (“bard songs”). The songs were about cloud shadows in the tundra, windy mountain passes, shamans and dervishes in time-forgotten villages, apatite [sic..... unless they mean the mineral], camaraderie, lack of cigarettes, and nostalgia for home and love during long field seasons.....


Even until the late 1980s, saying you were a geologist to girls in St. Petersburg was a great pick-up line — often greeted with admiring smiles and questions about exotic places and wild excesses in the field. Yet when I told my father that I was going to become a geologist he said: “Do you want to be one of those inebriated loudmouths with backpacks and guitars who bellow songs on night trains?”

Apparently, the composer Giya Kancheli (recommended) came out of such a background.
 

Death Valley's moving rocks have finally been documented in action

Minoan priestess Barbie
(Scroll down)

Riding the brief pulse of the Colorado to the sea

Tibetan altitude adaptations via Denisovan DNA?

International Buffalo Bodypainting Festival: not false advertising, I'm happy to report!

The Mozart Effect in practice:

Progeny (age 2): "What's this song about?" [It was Guy Clark, for the record.]
Me: "I don't know, we have to listen and see."
Progeny: "It's about a guy getting attacked by a big snake!"

Not actually an unreasonable guess around here.

A problem with northern New Mexico written all over it: Go organic, cause a nuclear waste accident.

The Colorado River has reached the ocean!

People say American taxes are too complicated, but I have no idea what they could be talking about. Nope, no clue:

A very estimable python

A new class of regular polyhedra?

Abominable coffee drinks matched to their corresponding heresies

HT: Dreher

Dogs poop in alignment with the earth's magnetic field

Newly discovered sarcophagi of the Chachapoya, fascinating archaeology in a spectacular setting.

Via the excellent Bones Don't Lie.

How to coax a bullfrog into winning the Calaveras County jumping competition? Mimic a predator, of course.

Oarfish in California!

What to do next time you're bored on a plane? Take 15th-Century Flemish-style self portraits in the lavatory, of course!

Holy moly! An earthquake in Pakistan just created a new island! It's a small island, but still.... Now that I'm living in a place where I can see fault scarps cutting our very small and young alluvial fans, this makes my flesh crawl a bit.

Functioning mechanical gears found in insects

Malaysian pen-tailed tree shrews subsist on "a diet roughly equivalent to 100 percent beer".

The first color photograph of red sprite lightning

This is one righteously pissed off birder. Odious and Peculiar heartily approve!

Hat tip: Chas.

What it's like to be swallowed by a hippo

Also, sweet justice: Houston teen who found himself with a slew of severe injuries after the ashes from the cigar he was smoking mixed with the “combustible mixture” in his pocket while he and a friend were going to “blow up turtles.”

Pagan wild men of Europe: they remind me a bit of Kachina costumes in this neck of the woods. More here, though you'll have to navigate within the site on your own: look for Wilder Mann.

Via Chas, of course.

A scale-less Antarctic fish with gin-clear blood

Just because: Glacier Dragon!

Hence.

Images of a giant squid in its natural habitat! Who says there's no good news these days? They did it by means of near-infrared light: beautiful images of a beautiful animal, even if it's just a little one.

De Montaigne invents craigslist.

As on many things I like, I tend to glut myself on Interactive Fiction, then ignore it for months on end. But Bee is well worth anyone's time.

UPDATE: new link.

One of the perks of living in New Mexico (and we need a few!): a low profile on this map of natural disaster risk. Tornadoes are quite rare, earthquake risk very moderate, hurricanes sound kind of nice around here. We just have some hail and a couple volcanoes to live with, and our volcanoes are the mild type that might spit up a small cinder cone every few thousand years, not looming behemoths like Rainier or Shasta. The map doesn't include forest fires, which would give the Rockies a much stronger showing, but it's really only a relatively small number of homeowners down here for whom wildfire is a serious worry. Our main afflictions are drought, wind and idiocy, which I suppose I'll take over tornadoes and earthquakes.

RIP: Maurice Herzog.

I love that some web administrator for the USDA saw fit to illustrate a rather P.C. news release from the Forest Service with an image of the, errr.... striking One-Hung-Low pictographs from the Middle Fork of the Salmon:

My larger version:

NOAA answers the question "Why don't we nuke hurricanes?"

Via What If?

Dr. Seuss illustrates Anopheles mosquitoes

How was your Thanksgiving?