Indiana Jones and the Mysterious Package

Fictional characters can turn out to be real, at least in part.

Seems the University of Chicago got a package addressed to Henry Walton Jones, Jr. Recognize the name? Would it help to cross out Henry and Walton and write in Indiana?

Yes, that Indiana Jones (not the dog).

Inside the package was a very official-looking journal lookalike for Abner Ravenwood, the Egyptologist, archaeologist, and U of Chicago professor who counted among his proteges Indiana Jones.


This package also contained photos of Ravenwood's daughter, Marion, who was certainly a person known to Indiana Jones.

How do we know all of this? Because someone opened the package, twice.


See, a guy in Guam put the journal and photos, your basic movie fan's collector's collection, up on eBay, and somebody in Italy bought it. Seller threw it all in a package, addressed to the buyer, and off it went,  until it got to Hawaii, where the original packaging came off.

Apparently, a helpful postal employee saw the University of Chicago, looked up the ZIP code, wrote it on the package, and put it back in the mail.

The seller has said that he will get another package off to the original buyer and that the U can keep the one that has been delivered to them.

Pay It Again, Sam: Casablanca Piano Sold on Film's 70th Anniversary

An anonymous buyers agreed to pay more than $600,000 for the piano used by Dooley Wilson in Casablanca.

Its keys are immortalized in cinema visuals. Now, the piano itself has changed hands.

The collector, who paid $154,000 a few decades ago, had offered it up for sale to mark the 70th anniversary of the release of the iconic film. Auction-watchers had expected a sale price of more than $1 million.

Wilson played Sam, the pianist who was a friend of bar owner Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart). Sam played the piano many times for both Sam and Ilsa Lund, Rick's now-and-again flame played Ingrid Bergman. Sam and his piano are instrumental in many scenes in the film, including the one in which Rick utters the famous line, "Here's looking at you, kid."

Just a bit of trivia, though. Hollywood lore to the contrary, Rick never utters the line "Play it again, Sam."

Noah's Ark Afloat in Holland

You'd have to figure that a Dutchman would know a thing or two about holding back the waters. Nevertheless, Johan Huibers has completed a 20-year construction odyssey resulting in a full-scale functioning model of Noah's Ark.

Just in time for the end of the world it is, although Huibers insists that the timing is coincidental. He's not actually planning to get into the big boat and sail away anytime soon, but he probably wouldn't mind giving a tour or two in the next week or so.

Measurements match up with the popular scheme advanced in the Bible, so there's lots of room for two or more animals of lots of different varieties. The stalls are ready and able to support animal life, although those stalls are filled with stuffed or plastic animals at the moment. But wait, real, breathing animals are onboard as well, and Huibers and his family are having to look after them. The curious can go aboard and pet dogs, ponies, sheep, birds, and rabbits. (My suspicion is that the number of any of those animals won't remain at two for long.)

He's also included hatches that can be closed and sealed off, on the order of the Titanic and other large ships, in case icebergs or humpback whales or other curious things come into contact with the big boat for more than a glancing blow.

Where's the boat? you ask. Why, it's moored in some water in Dordrecht, a city just south of Rotterdam, awaiting sailing orders.

Huibers began his quest in 1992, after he had a nightmare that included large-scale flooding of his home country. In the 20 years, the quest has evolved into including some modern comforts, just in case we modern people need to make use of "Johan's Ark." So he's included a restaurant and 50-seat movie theater. Will they be showing the movie 2012? Who knows?

JFK Portrait Discovered at Garage Sale

So you're at a garage sale, and you have a gut reaction that something on offer has more to it than immediately meets the eye. What do you do? If you're like Pam Dwyer, an Arizona woman, you pay a few dollars, get the knick-knack, and wait till you get home to investigate your hunch.

Dwyer certainly did that, and in between a picture of a horse and the frame it was in she found a portrait of John Kennedy. Yes, that John Kennedy, the one with F for the middle name, the President one.

Not too many of those are left lying around, certainly not hidden behind random horse pictures. Not too many of the ones that are left lying around are done by a forger, either. Yet that's what Dwyer found when she researched the artist, who did time for writing forged checks.

While behind bars, the "creative writer" took up stained glass windows and, apparently, drawing. Somewhere along the way, he produced the portrait that Dwyer found tucked away in a homely frame on offer in a garage.

An appraisal listed the value at between $2,500 and $5,000. She plans to sell.

Honest: Kitten Rescued from Inside Lincoln Statue

No doubt using up a few of its potentially nine lives, a kitten has managed to stay alive inside a statue of Abraham Lincoln long enough to be emancipated from its self-made trap.

The kitten, all of 3 weeks old, scurried its way into a replica of the Lincoln Memorial at the Clermont (Fla.) Presidents Hall of Fame but then got stuck. Museum officials scratched their heads as to how the kitten could have possibly gotten trapped inside the statue, but no doubt a small hole was available somewhere and the nosy kitten got stuck in — literally.

Anyway, the Humane Society and the local fire department were soon on the scene and had drilled a hole large enough for a person. A fire fighter dropped down inside the statue, retrieved the kitten, and delivered it back into the real world.

The kitten was hungry and dehydrated after being stuck inside the statue for three days. A local veterinarian took the kitten away for nursing duties but planned to put the adventuresome young feline up for adoption.

John Zweifel, curator of the museum, planned to adopt the cat and call him, what else, Abe.

Dutch Engineers Touting Glow-in-the-dark Highway

I like this idea of a glow-in-the-dark highway. It saves all kinds of things like money and lives.

So some Dutch engineers have come up with a scheme to make driving at night a whole lot easier, via a "smart highway." See, the outside lines on the highway glow by themselves, no high beams needed. I would say that you wouldn't need your headlights at all anymore, but I'm not sure the Dutch designers would agreed with that proposition, especially in the light of road safety and all. Still, it couldn't hurt to have more nighttime road lighting that doesn't come from another driver's high beams.

Another fun feature of the proposal is that it posits painted lines that could display snowflakes when the road is, well, snow-covered, or icicles when the road is icy. Now wouldn't that be useful information to have, if you hadn't figured it out already given the driving conditions.

But wait, there's more: The interior lines, dotted or otherwise, would recharge by soaking up sunlight. It's all part of a dynamic, user-friendly roadway that could even recharge using under-road coils powered by the very vehicles going by overhead. In the same energy-saving vein, the road "lighting" would switch to low-light mode when traffic ceases.

Tests are expected in the Netherlands next year. I'm hoping that we are en-light-ened soon.

Robotic Car Comes in 2nd on Track

Here we go again. Human bests, computer for now. Have we learned nothing Garry Kasparov? (He couldn't beat a computer, and now he's taking on Vladimir Putin. Good luck to him.)

The story is this: A robotic car developed at Stanford's Center for Automotive Research (which has the handy acronym of CARS) just lost out to a human-driven car in a test at the aptly named Thunderhill Raceway (which sounds like it belongs in a Bond movie anyway). The three-mile course had its share of twists and turns, 15 of them, in fact, ——and the guy driving the other car undoubtedly had lots of practice on the course, so the humans probably stacked the deck.

The result was that the human won, finishing in slightly less time than the robotic car. The victim of human deck-stacking this time around was Shelley, an autonomous vehicle kitted out quite proudly and loudly with a bevy of sensors that transmit road position, tire grip, and all manner of other necessary information to the computer-in-charge, so the car can effectively make real-time, split decisions about how to move the wheel and how much to stomp on the brake and things like that.

The stated goal was to improve on the utility of computer-driving cars. That's the idea, really. It wasn't about who won the race, or so the scientists say. After all, as with Deep Blue, it's only a matter of time until the computers win the race.

The race was run on Thunderhill Raceway in California between an Audi TTS that can drive itself and a racing car driver familiar with the circuit.

The human driver completed a lap around the circuit a few seconds faster than the robotic car.

The race was part of research to develop control systems that will help to make domestic cars more autonomous.

Voila! Nanotechs Turn Gold Red and Green

It's not exactly alchemy, but it's close,— maybe the modern equivalent.

Scientists in the U.K. have used nanotechnology to change the color of gold. What once had a gold tint now links red and green, to an extent.

Using principles of nanophotonics, the scientists embossed minuscule raised patterns on the surface of the gold, fundamentally altering the way the metal reacts to light. The trick is in how we perceive it, of course. To the human eye, the gold now looks like it has a reddish or greenish appearance.

The embossing was done on the magical metal of gold, but the scientists said that they could have just as easily used other more boring metals like silver or aluminum. The type of metal isn't a hindrance because the same technique would be used. It's not just red or green, either.

All of the colors of the rainbow are possible. As for the real world, the lead scientist is hopping to market the idea to those wanting to make jewelry or secure banknotes.

Family Heirloom a 4-billion-year-old Meteorite

It's not often that you find an ancient space artifact is propping up your homescape, but that's what has happened to a Kentucky couple, George and Donna Lewis. Turns out the 33-pound rock that they've been using as a doorstop is a rare meteorite estimated at 4.5 billion years old.

The date and material have been confirmed by testing done at Eastern Kentucky University. The rock is thought to be part of a known meteorite strike that created similar debris in Tazewell, Tenn., in the 1850s. Indeed, the doorstop in question was found in a cow pasture near the town of Tazewell in the 1930s and passed down two generations to Donna Lewis. Her grandfather, Tilmon Brooks, isn't around anymore to discuss the findings, or his find, but he would surely be pleased to know that he held onto something that could have great value, and not just of the sentimental kind.

The meteorite has not survived untouched. Somewhere along the way, someone painted it green. (It had been a garden ornament before the Lewises turned it into a doorstop.) That paint job hasn't diminished the rock's radioactivity, however, as George Lewis discovered when he did a hover with a metal detector.

The rock, weighing in at 33 pounds, is the second-largest known find from that Tazewell strike. The largest known meteorite from the strike weighs 100 pounds.

The Lewises' piece of space debris was on display at a recent Eastern Kentucky science fair, where several students were notably excited by the rock and its origin. The meteorite will remain in the public domain.

Bacon Barter Rolls Across the Country

Have bacon, will travel. That's the motto of a guy who seems to need a bit more publicity. He's an actor and a comedian, and I can't help but think that this just another publicity stunt, no matter how much I like the subject matter.

I have to be honest here: I love bacon. I love the smell of it, the taste of it, and the aftertaste of it. It's one of Nature's perfect foods. The fact that it is slightly less good for me than other foods I eat troubles me a tiny bit but not enough to keep me from munching on bacon strips on occasion.

But back to the traveler: So this guy has vowed to go from coast to coast on a "bacon barter," using bacon as currency to get accommodation along the way. It's working for him so far, and it will probably work for him the rest of the way because he left with more bacon than he would ever need. 

It puts me in mind of similar ventures that other brave souls could make: What about a "barnyard barter," with eggs as the currency? How about a "soda barter," with Coke or Pepsi or root better or any number of other sodas as the currency? It doesn't have to be food, after all; the currency could certainly be liquid in nature, although I would definitely draw the line at alcohol. (I could see the appeal of olive oil, but that might be a hard sell for people who aren't avid cooks or health nuts (or both).

This guy may be on to something, actually, because he's making do without money and that can be good practice for when the money runs out and the banks close and the stock market crashes and people start hoarding water and bread and … 

Sally Ride, Pioneering Astronaut, Dies at 61

"More than anything else, our venturing into space has taught us to appreciate Earth — it’s revolutionized our view of our planet and our understanding of its complexity, and made us see the impact that we’re having on it."

That was Sally Ride, reflecting on the famous Earthrise photo and what it meant to her. Sally Ride was like that herself, in the way that she taught us to look at ourselves. 

The first American woman in space, Ride was a media darling when she blasted into space in 1983 aboard Challenger, itself now gone except in the annals of space exploration history. 

One longtime observer went so far as to say that Ride was "to the shuttle era what Neil Armstrong is to Apollo."

She was a top-rate scientist (with her specialties including laser physics), and her expertise with the robotic arm was in part why she was chosen to fly on that 1983 mission. She operated the arm in a satellite retrieval mission.

At 32, she was the youngest American in space. When she and the rest of the Challenger crew took off on June 18, 1983, she was just five years removed from answering a newspaper ad for astronauts. She rose through the ranks to become one of the industry's most-respected and pioneering figures.

She flew again in 1984 and then retired after Challenger exploded. Ride was on the panel that investigated the Challenger disaster and, indeed, was the only person to be on both disaster panels, taking part in the Columbia investigation as well.

Many photos of her aboard the two spaceflights show her smiling. Ride had a sense of humor as well. She good-naturedly answered the loads of silly questions forced on her by journalists who couldn't wait to find out what color shoes she would be wearing in space. A keen athlete, she considered a career in tennis before deciding to focus more on physics (and English – she also claimed an English degree with a specialty in Shakespeare). No less a champion than Billie Jean King urged Ride to go pro, but she chose science instead and, when asked years later why she made the choice, said, "A bad forehand."

She accepted her role in life, as a role model for other young girls, and continued to promote science education, especially for girls, throughout the rest of her life. 

In her post-NASA days, Ride was a science fellow, a physics professor, a director of the California Space Institute, and the founder of a company. This last was Sally Ride Science, which provides science-oriented programs and materials to schools.

And yet the one thing that she wanted to do above all else, and the reason that she doggedly pursued a career as an astronaut, was fly. Trained as a pilot, she dreamed of going into space. She got her wish, twice.

Not even 30 years after her historic flight, Sally Ride is dead, the victim of pancreatic cancer. She will be missed but remembered, for her spirit, her smile, and her part in making history.

Monitor Your Home Through the Cloud

A big home improvement company will soon offer computerized home security systems via the Cloud. It's the latest innovation in technology for your smartphone or tablet or (Remember these?) computer.

The system is apparently called Iris (Isn't that Siri backwards?), but it doesn't require you to scan your eye or anything as a password. That's too bad, actually, because that could be a clever ad slogan if somebody could find a way to tie it in with idea of keeping an eye on your home.

At any rate, you soon could be able to monitor and change settings on your home alarm system, your home thermostat, and even your home lights (inside and out). It all works via a cloud-based system that you control through cloud access. Nominally, it's an opportunity to get a smartphone alert if something activates your home alarm system. But it also should allow you to switch the lights on from the garage or turn on the heater while you're on the way (if you've forgotten to set the timer). Presumably, you could also turn off lights that you've left on. This kind of thing could also come in handy if you had access to individual electrical outlets — so you could turn off the iron that you happened to leave on when you rushed out of the house.

But I'm also thinking that this could be an opportunity to have a bit of fun with your housemates or your family or your kids or your pets or whoever else lives in the house with you. If you can access all of these systems from the cloud, then all you need is a Cloud connection. So conceivably, you could be sitting in the home office, door closed, fire up the home computer, and dim the lights in the room where the kids are playing — things like that. Surely that's only the beginning of all kinds of fun. The downside of that, of course, is that you don't want to repeat the experience of the Boy Who Cried Wolf.

Seriously, though, this is a good step forward in our ability to monitor home security and use technology to improve our lives.

Pluto Still a Planet, as This New Moon Proves

If Pluto isn't a planet, then why does it have so many moons?


The Hubble Space Telescope has provided evidence of yet another satellite orbiting the erstwhile Ninth Planet in our Solar System. This one is unimaginatively titled P5, presumably an abbreviation for Pluto's 5th Satellite. It follows by a year the discovery of another moon, P4, also discovered by Hubble.


Pluto was discovered by Clyde Tombaugh way back in 1930. Its largest moon, Charon, was discovered in 1978. For many years, the one planet-one moon tradition was accepted worldwide. But some dastardly elements of the astronomical community got together, got enough funding and influence, and got Pluto downsized.


Pluto, you'll remember, was demoted to dwarf planet status in 2006, to the hue and cry of science teachers bemoaning the impending purchase of new eight-planet Solar System models for their classrooms. Oddly, in the same year, Hubble found two other moons orbiting Pluto. These were given the names Nix and Hydra. 


Now that Hubble has found even more satellites, surely the promotion of Pluto can't be far behind. These should be big times for the Little Planet That Used to Be. A NASA spacecraft will finally reach flyby status in 2015. That's just three short years away. Surely in that year, we will discover enough evidence to prove that Pluto is indeed a planet. Just because it's smaller than other objects orbiting the Sun doesn't mean it isn't still a planet. The Pluto nay-sayers would be hard-pressed to come up a comet or some other form of heavenly body that has so many things orbiting it. 


Pluto the Planet in 2015!

Cooperstown's 'Mona Lisa' Found in Ohio Attic

Talk about not knowing what you have.

In a dusty cardboard box stored under a wooden dollhouse for decades was a treasure trove of extremely rare and valuable baseball cards, so much so that estimates are that the collection in total could bring $3 million at auction.

The cards now belong to a Ohio guy who knows a bit about baseball, but it was his grandfather who collected about 700 cards and kept them all in pristine condition. And pristine they are, part of the E98 series, one of the more famous of the card series in baseball's less recent past, with half of the 30 players appearing on plaques on walls in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Unlike other, more dog-eared members of this series, these are mint. Among the shining lights in this newly discovered Ohio collection are cards representing Christy Mathewson, Connie Mack, Cy Young, Ty Cobb, and Honus Wagner.

One enthusiast compared it to finding the Mona Lisa in your attic.

The cards originally belonged to a man who died in the 1940s. When the man's wife died, one of their daughters continued to live in the house. When she died last year, she left everything to her 20 nieces and nephews, the youngest of which was put in charge of the estate. It was during a recent clean-out that the guy found the gems.

Once the guy and the family figured out that they had something valuable on their hands, they sent some of the cards off to a professional authentication company, which rated the cards very highly indeed. On a scale of 1 to 10, the company rated the Ty Cobb card a 9 — and there were 16 in the collection. And, for the first time ever, the company gave out a 10, a rating of perfect condition, to a Honus Wagner card. Wagner, of course, is the Holy Grail of baseball players, having used his considerable influence to get his cards pulled from the market. The biggest price ever paid for a baseball card was for a Honus Wagner: $2.8 million, in 2007. Honus was also a hit for some nuns, who gained the system for more than $200,000 in 2010.

As for the owners, they are dividing everything among equally, with all but a few vowing to sell the cards and take the money.

Telescope to Give Early Warning on Deadly Asteroids

It's not exactly space sharks with laser beams, but it could be the first step.

A nonprofit foundation formed a decade ago has announced its intention to build a telescope to detect Earth-targeted asteroids. The head of the foundation is Rusty Schweickart, who should know a thing or two about things outside Earth's orbit. The Apollo 9 astronaut is chairman emeritus of the foundation, which aims to raise in the hundreds of millions of dollars in order to fund the telescope project, to be titled Sentinel. The chairman and CEO of B612 is former shuttle astronaut Ed Lu, who septa long periods of time abroad the International Space Station.

After the success of SpaceX, private groups might find it a bit easier to raise money and find success in space. B612 is pointedly not asking for NASA for help, although it the foundation says it will work with a face familiar to NASA: Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., which worked on teams that produced both the Kepler and the Spitzer telescopes.

The telescope would be an infrared one and would orbit the Sun, on a trajectory similar to the planet Venus. Launch date is planned to be in 2017, and the minimum lifespan for the telescope is between five and six years. During that time, scientists hope to identify hundreds of thousands of uncharted asteroids, the idea being that we will have a long time to mobilize Bruce Willis or whoever needs to be involved to deal with any potential threat.

The B612 Foundation takes its name from the Earth name for the home of The Little Prince. In the novel by Antoine de Saint Exupery, the Prince says he comes from Asteroid 325 but that Earth people call it B-612. 

Chasing ET with Tweets

Tweets in Space!

That's the plan for the National Geographic Channel, as part of its promotion for a TV show about the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Channel staff will gather up tweets sent to #chasingufos on June 29 and blast them into space via Puerto Rico's Arecibo Radio Telescope.

It's all part of an effort to get people to watch a TV program about something that happened 35 years ago. The event was the "Wow" signal, a 72-second transmission from space received way back in Year 1 of Star Wars movie releases (1977). Some lucky astronomer had his receiver trained to a certain frequency and got a big surprise when a very unusual signal turned up. (For the record, it was 6EQUJ5. SETI geeks will be familiar with this.)

Anyway, back to TV, so this publicity stunt (and I am NOT being paid for this blog post) is to air on August 15, the day in 1977 when the Wow signal got noticed here on Earth. The tweets will enter space on the same day.

So, on to the unknowns: We don't know what the frequency meant (still don't), we don't know where it came from (the telescope that "saw" it isn't around anymore), and we don't know how to find it again. The whole thing could be just an interstellar belch. But it might not be. It just might be ET phoning home. 

Through some serious number-crunching, scientists have narrowed to three the possible origin locations of the Wow signal, so they'll be blasting the tweets to all three, just in case. 

The project managers insist that it's all about the crowd-sourcing, in that they promise to send out any and all tweets posted on that day and bearing that hashtag. This would be a far cry from the gold-disc standard of virtual noise that went out on the Voyager spacecraft because all of that material was chosen by closed committee.

The hope is that the sheer volume of noise created by the tweet blast will be enough for anyone who happens to be listening or otherwise hurtling within earshot an opportunity to sit up and take notice. 

Stay tuned.

Mike Tyson Takes a Shot at Broadway

You'll have only one shot at this, so get your credit card ready … for Mike Tyson on Broadway.

In the euphemistically titled Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth, the famed boxer will present his side of the story, his story, as written by him and his wife. Tyson himself will be delivering the lines, so it's about as first-person as you can get.

The website promoting the show promises a "riveting one-man show." Not so sure how riveted I'd be, but I'm not a huge boxing fan, either. Still, it might be entertaining to see just full of himself Tyson can be. I do recall that he used to give rather festive interviews, especially after he won his fights (which he managed to do a whole lot of during his career).

I am a fan of the show's director, Spike Lee, who says that Tyson is a "great storyteller." Well, that might be true, as far as it goes. Whether his stagemanship surpasses his showmanship and ringmanship remains to be seen.

The show, which ran in Las Vegas earlier this year, runs on Broadway for just six night, from July 31 to August 5.

At 90 minutes, the show is sure to be longer than some of Tyson's fights.

Juicy new treat: bacon sundae

Yes, I eat healthy foods. Yes, I know it's good for me to do so. No, I'm not a junk food junkie. But bacon sundae? I'm there.

Burger King is introducing this sweet-and-savory beast of a dessert item, and I can totally see the benefit: it's all taste buds.

It's vanilla soft serve ice cream topped with fudge and caramel. But they don't stop there. No, they add bacon crumbles (so it's sort of healthy, like a salad with Bacon Bits). But they don't stop there, either. You get a full-on strip of bacon to go with it. (You can dip the bacon in the sundae, as if the bacon is a cookie, if you want; or, you can just crunch it plain.)

I'm down with the fact that it's 510 calories in all. That doesn't bother me, nor does the fat content of 18 grams or the sugar content of 61 grams. In fact, nothing bothers me about this dessert at all. (For the record, I like Bacon Chocolate, too.)

The company swears that they're pulling this in their menu until September 3. Until then, it's full speed ahead into bacony sundae goodness.

A Crypt Fit for The King, or You

Seems a bit creepy to me, but I can't afford it anyway. 

Someone, however, will get the chance to be interred in the tomb that once housed Elvis. At least, that's the intended purpose of the crypt that once held the King for all of two months before he was reburied at Graceland.

(Let me just say here for the record, too, that this whole business of Elvis being dead is a vicious rumor designed to foment discord among the faithful. But that's another story.)

Anyway, a guy named Darren Julien, who makes his living auctioning off famous things once belonging to famous people, has put up for auction a whole new lot of stuff, in a big sell-off in June titled "Music Icons." One of those celebrity possessions is the actual tomb, which is still in the actual Kingly mausoleum in Memphis's actual Forest Hill Cemetery. 

(For those of you who believe this) Elvis was buried there next to his mother, the great Gladys, until such time as Graceland was ready to receive long-term internees. Since Gladys (and her son, if you choose to believe this line of thinking) was/were moved out of the crypt, it has remained empty. So there's plenty of room for you or whoever happens to be the highest bidder at the end of the auction.

So circle June 23 on your calendar if you want a piece of the action. Bidding starts at $100,000. If you do win it, no need to wait to occupy it. You could certainly outfit it yourself, and you might even see Elvis one day.

End of the World Postponed, Again

The world isn't going to end after all, at least not this December.

That's the word from a group of archaeologists who have found a Mayan calendar that doesn't end at 2012. No, if early reports are anything to go by, it will take these brave diggers a few generations just to untangle the delicate bob and weave of the complexity of this newly discovered calendar. (The Maya couldn't make things easy, could they?)

See, this intrepid bunch of doomsday-naysayers (not really, but I couldn't resist the phrase) were digging in and around and under the ancient city if Xultun, which is in present-day Guatemala, the northeastern part, when they found traces of ancient paint. That's not so much of a surprise, except that the ancient paint was on a depiction of a Maya king and another nearby painting wasn't a painting at all but a calendar.

This calendar had the usual cycles and cycles and more cycles that we're used to seeing on these sorts of things. So the baktun (400-year cycle) that ends on December 21 isn't the last one after all. It's just the one that ends on that day. The next one begins on the next day. Experts in this sort of historical timekeeping had long speculated exactly that, but the doomsayers among us had rushed to their judgement (day) long before that. And really, what sells better than the End of the World?

So, go ahead and book your Christmas holidays because you will be around to enjoy them. (And, if this is some sort of conspiracy by the Deniers, then you won't have to worry about forfeiting all that Christmas cash anyway because you — and the cash — won't be here.)

Woman, 80, Lands Plane When Husband Pilot Collapses

An 80-year-old woman overcame her own frailness and lack of flight time to land a small plane when her husband pilot collapsed.

Helen Collins and her husband, John, were flying from Florida to Wisconsin. John said his neck was sore earlier that day, but he insisted that he was fine for flying. Toward the end of the flight, he collapsed. That left Helen to fly the plane.

Helen dialed 911 and explained her situation. A pilot on the ground at Cherryland Airport talked her through the landing procedures that she vaguely remembered from when she herself flew planes, about 30 years ago. (She had flown solo but never something as large as the twin-engine Cessna she was now in charge of.)

The plane was running out of fuel, and one engine was sputtering. Undeterred, Helen soldiered on. 

Another pilot in a similar plane joined Helen in the sky, and the two of them got Helen's plane on the ground intact, despite a rather bumpy landing that resulted in broken landing gear. Her son Richard was waiting for them. (Their other son, James, also a pilot, had volunteered to help with the flying, but John insisted on flying by himself.)

John, 81, died. He was the chief executive of the family manufacturing business in Sturgeon Bay, Wis., and had been flying for more than 30 years, including volunteer stints for Angel Flight, an emergency hospital fight service.

Helen was released from a local hospital after being treated for injuries including a crushed vertebra. She had undergone two open-heart surgeries in recent years but showed no signs of heart trouble during her emergency landing.

Have Batmobile, Will Travel 24 Hours Straight

The purpose of the car might be to promote fuel efficiency, but you can be forgiven for having other thoughts, such as, "Does Christopher Nolan know about this?"

We're talking about the DeltaWing, an experimental car from Nissan that looks suspiciously like something about a Batman picture. The word from Nissan was that they were just improving efficiencies, etc., but we all know the truth, don't we? Why would you model your car so much on the Caped Crusader's favorite vehicle ("Chicks dig the car" if you weren't affiliated with a vaguely legalistic crime-fighting syndicate? 

Nissan says that the 4-cylinder, 1.6-liter engine-powered car will take part in the Le Mans 24 Hour event and use half the gasoline of the other cars doing the event. Sure. We know that the real purpose of the DeltaWing in that scenario is to unmask the Joker, who is rumored to be driving a car from Italy.

Nissan says that behind the DeltaWing wheel will be Marino Franchitti from Britain and Michael Krumm from Germany. Right. We know who will really be behind the wheel cranking out the 300 bhp for more than 3,000 miles. 

Say It in Style: Haikus Accompany Street Safety Signs

In a true melding of words and images, the New York City Department of Transportation has posted traffic signs that feature safety warnings in graphic and haiku form.

Two of the 12 signs are in Spanish; the other 10 are in English. All are designed to get noticed and get their warnings heeded. The images are large and startling, engaging your concentration enough to look in more detail, to the words below the images. And it is there that you find the haikus.

They are evocative yet simple, some with a touch of humor. For example, this one shows a woman obscured by darkness. She is clearly both in and out of the vision of anyone looking her direction. The text is thus:

She walks in beauty
Like the night. Maybe that's why
Drivers can't see her.

The words begin like a noble poem and end like a gentle barb.

A bicycle safety sign illustrates the common occurrence when a cyclist has to confront a suddenly opened car door. The image is descriptive enough without words, but the words give it even more poignancy (with a wry sense of humor and wordplay).

Car stops near bike lane
Cyclist entering raffle
Unwanted door prize

The signs are the product of the imagination of John Morse, who has done a similar thing in Atlanta. 

Morse is a collage artist known for his work The Color Spectrum in Fruits and Vegetables. 

He is sure to be more well-known now.

Tiny Tim Gets Modern Diagnosis

In one version of A Christmas Carol, the published one, Tiny Tim Cratchit doesn't die of his afflictions; rather, he lives on, thanks to the generosity of a reformed Ebenezer Scrooge.

If Tiny Tim, however, hadn't been able to live on, what would he have died of, specifically? After all, in the version of the story that is developed before Scrooge's near-miraculous conversion, Tiny Tim is on a slippery slope to an early demise. 

In the latest of real-world speculation on the causes of fictional maladies, an American doctor has a new theory for what afflicted poor little Cratchit. The doctor, from Tennessee, asserts that Tiny Tim suffered simultaneously from rickets and tuberculosis.

Rickets, a bone disorder caused mainly by vitamin D deficiency, was a common enough affliction in the 19th Century, especially in poor populations like the one obviously inhabited by the Cratchit family, which lived in a London that was full of sunlight-hampering pollution and was also close-knit but in an awful way. The disorder, which can also be caused by lack of calcium or phosphate, makes the bones soft and weak and prone to breaking. Such bones need support, and the notable means of that kind of support in 19th Century England was the kind of leg braces that Tiny Tim wore, according to Dickens. An astonishing 60 percent of children in working-class families had rickets, and boys who looked just like Tiny Tim was described would have been all too painfully common.

Tuberculosis, often called the "white plague," was deadly in the 19th Century. A young boy suffering from rickets would naturally have had an immune system that could more easily be ravaged by something like TB. (Dickens would have known firsthand how deadly TB could be: his nephew died of it.)

The modern doctor also asserts that Dickens' statement that Scrooge's money helped save Tiny Tim's life is further proof of the rickets-TB theory. The idea is that the Cratchit family's having more money would have enabled them to not only move out of the cramped, clouded conditions of working-class London that denied Tiny Tim of vital things like sunlight (a natural source of Vitamin D), but also would have afforded the family the ability to buy something like cod liver oil, a Vitamin D-rich product, and also buy more nutritious food. (Scrooge's Christmas-day turkey was just the start.)

Our latest modern doctor is not the first to suggest a diagnosis for poor old Tiny Tim, nor will he be the last. He did disagree with earlier doctors who diagnosed Tiny Tim with polio or cerebral palsy, though.

So, where does that leave us? Did Tiny Tim suffer from rickets and/or tuberculosis? Who knows? He was a fictional character, after all, no matter how many people can quote "God bless us, every one." Dickens, although he had many real-world examples to draw from, didn't leave behind any written notes stating categorically what made Tiny Tim the way he was. 

We are left to our conjecture.

Bravo for Boasting

Good for him. It's about time someone did some boasting.

Him is Matt Kemp, an outfielder for the Los Angeles Dodgers. The boasting is his prediction that he will, this year, become the first person ever to hit 50 home runs and get 50 stolen bases in the same season.

That's quite a boast, which is, I say, good for him.

If he does it, he will surpass A-Rod, who has come closest (42 HR, 46 SB in 1998). But, in my mind, Kemp (who hit 39 homers had 40 SBs in 2011) will far surpass most of the rest of the baseball fraternity, simply by stating his goal and not couching it in some sort of vague language that is all too often the butt of jokes in sporting newsrooms: "We just take it one game at a time," "We still have a lot of work to do," "I'm just happy to be part of a team," etc.

The common mythical wisdom is that one player's boasts will end up plastered all over the other team's players' lockers, providing motivation to show up the boaster by beating his team soundly and thoroughly. And although I will admit that that can and does happen, I am of the firm belief that it is not at all the prime mover anymore that it used to be. 

Today's professional athletes are, well, professional. They want to get bigger and better contracts, so they are motivated to go out every day and excel, no matter who the opponents are and no matter what those opponents have said beforehand.

It is certainly the case that some players get pumped up more for certain games and certain rivalries; but even in those instances, an entire team doesn't perform at a monumentally high level, no matter what kind of messages are posted on their lockers. Especially in a team sport, it is extremely for the entire team to perform at a very high level for an entire contest, let alone an entire week or month or season. It just doesn't happen, even in the shortest of professional seasons.

If Matt Kemp wants to tell the world that he's going to hit 50 home runs and steal 50 bases, then by all means let's allow him to do that. If he does it, that's great, he's in the record books. If he doesn't do it, then that's fine as well because he will be proved, for this season again at least, the great-but-not-superhuman player that he is.

This sports fan, at least, won't be chastising him for making such a bold prediction. It's a welcome change from the traditional drivel that gets uttered all too often these days still.

Rejected: Hoop Dreams Dashed by Waiting Too Long to Shoot

For the record, I'm not a basketball player. I dabbled in it a bit when I was younger, but I certainly didn't play it in college or as a professional. But I am a fan, having watched more than my fair share of basketball over the years, and I think this guy is on to something.

This guy is a physics researcher at a certain Midwestern university. This guy has recently published a paper detailing the results of a crunch-the-numbers study he did focusing on NBA players and the shots that they take at the end of the game. Specifically, this guy wanted to know if the players were waiting long enough or too long or not long enough before taking that final shot, with the game on the line. (Obviously, we're talking about game-winners here, not a 10-point lead.)

It's a balancing act, of course, between the need to take or defend the lead and the need to keep the other team from getting the ball. If your team has the ball and is ahead, then you probably want to hold the ball as long as you can, to defend the lead. The NBA and college games have a shot clock, though, so the Four Corners offense is not an option. Still, you want to take some time off the clock, so the opposing team doesn't have forever and a day to set up a dynamite play that will result in the winning shot.

It's a more straightforward proposition when your team is behind in the scoring: Your team has to score or they lose. That tends to up the ante a bit, but the tendency is still there to dawdle, as it were, running time off the clock to ensure that if it's not literally the last shot, it's the last effective shot.

But such play has a price, and it is this: The more the time remaining wanes, the more intensity the defensive team shows and the more pressure is on the team with the ball, even if they have the lead. With the game on the line, players on defense pick up their tired arms, pick up the speed of their footfalls, and elevate their minds and bodies in a surge of victory-fueled adrenaline. Thus, as the final buzzer gets closer, it actually gets harder for the team with the ball. Nearly every basketball arena has at least two massive play clocks now, so the players all know how much time is left in the game. 

Little time remaining leaves little room for error, exacerbating an already growing squeeze by the suddenly energized defensive team; as such, it can actually be harder for the team with the ball to get a decent shot off because they've little or no time for Plan B. 

It's all well and good to draw up the perfect play and execute it to perfection, but the ball still has to go in the hoop (if you're behind). Somebody still has to make a shot. The less time the team has, the harder the shot is to hit because the player will subconsciously put pressure on himself or herself, and that's even more of an obstacle. And if you miss, you have to get the rebound, reset, and go through it all again — or else you get a wild shot off the rebound and you're still stuck with too little time.

It would be far better, in this writer's opinion, for the team with the intention of scoring to make sure that they get one or two good looks and actually make the basket, ensuring the lead, rather than trying to run out the clock, and then end up running out of time for anything but a desperation shot. After all, once you have the lead, the other team still has to score in order to tie or go ahead. Then, the pressure is on them.

It's a bit more straightforward if you have the lead and the ball, since you can run the clock all the way down without scoring at all, although again the preference should always beto score, since that increases the lead, in some cases putting it out of reach.

Anyway, back to this guy. So he crunched a lot of numbers and adapted a lot of formulas and produced a lot of graphs and made a lot of words and numbers out of the hypothesis that there is indeed a "waited too long" threshold. His calculations convinced him that NBA players who wait too long cost their teams an average of 4.5 points a game. And in some cases, those 4.5 points are the difference between a win and a loss.

Basketball features no such 4.5-point shot, of course, so you have to remember that that figure is the result of a lot of number-crunching and that other results were 1 point, 2 points, 8 points, etc. It's an average, the result of statistical analysis, but it points to a trend, which is that players are holding on to the ball a bit too long and, in some cases, their (in)actions are costing their teams wins.

If you want to read the whole thing, it's here. 

I'm going with my gut: shoot the ball already, and play good defense. It's the only way to score.

Legos Go Clean, Green

Eco-friendly Legos? Why not?

They're called Earth Blocks, and they're made of such usual suspects as tree bark and cedar dust and more exotic materials like green tea and — wait for it — coffee beans.

Yes, these new-age toys are made from natural materials, with the slight exception of the tiny bit of polyprolene used to keep all the bits together. You won't find a wide variety of colors, as in traditional Lego pieces, because these Earth Blocks are the same color as their elements. A bonus is that they smell a bit like what they're made of — so the coffee beans will be a special treat for those who are never too far from needing a caffeine fix.

You'll have to careful to keep these Earth Blocks away from liquids, like water or spilled juice and the like. That's one element that might make them not the perfect toy for the very young. 

And the shapes are a bit limited, given today's propensity for multi-shape building blocks, although those of us who grew up with nothing but the traditional shapes will feel right at home.

All in all, an eco-friend's dream come true for sustainable toys. As with other such options, however, you'll pay a bit more: $27 for 50 blocks. That's a lesson of a different kind for the young ones.

Small Spanish Village Wins $950 Million Lotto

Computers were made for such things: What are the odds of an entire village winning the same lottery prize?

Yet that's exactly what happened in Sodeto, Spain, where the residents entered the annual nationwide lottery and won. The prize for "El Gordo" was $950 million, and the distribution, after the government took its chunk, ended up being the equivalent of $130,000 for each winning ticket bought by residents of the planned community in the northern part of the country. Some people bought a handful of tickets and so got more money than their neighbors did, but all seem to be taking the good fortune in stride.

Sodeto, which has been around only since 1950, has an agricultural focus and is not exactly where you would expect to find a whole lot of commercial activity going on. But that is what is happening, as word spreads of the village's winnings.

The population is only a couple hundred these days, but you wouldn't know it by glancing around town. Salesmen and bankers have descended on the town, offering deals surely being described as "historic" and "too good to pass up."

The one disappointing result, if it could be called that, is that one member of the community didn't buy a ticket that day. Not to be outdone, the one non-winning man promptly sold some land to a neighbor who was among the winners. He wasn't too upset about not winning the money, apparently.

Creepy, Crawly Adaptability: Spider Webs Get Tough and Tougher

When I was much younger, I was afraid of spiders. I suppose that's true of many kids. Some spiders, after all, can kill you. 

It wasn't so much the logical fear that got me, though. No, I was afraid of a movie spider. My brother took great delight in reminding me just how terrifying that giant spider in that B-movie really was. (I think it was a tarantula. I think the movie might have been titled Tarantula.)

To me, the fact that that giant spiders was getting the better of humans for the better part of a two-hour movie was enough to convince me that spiders were smarter than people. (Remember, I'm much younger in this scenario.) All these years later, I remember the movie (vaguely) but don't dwell on the fear (much).

Now comes word that the stuff that spiders spin is itself smart. Imagine the horrors that could descend on the imaginations of a generations of youngsters!

We already know that, irritatingly, spider webs can withstand the kind of gale-force winds and heavy rain that bring down trees and power lines. The strands of the web can come together as one, protecting the spider in its element.

A study in Nature magazine asserts that the silk that makes up a spider's web is extremely adaptable, even under the most extraordinary of circumstances. Throw a rock through a big web (as we kids used to do) and you succeed in ripping apart some of the web, but the remaining strands stretch and then re-form, stronger than ever (again with the nightmare scenario!). Further, the scientists found that removing up to one-tenth of the threads at a spread of locations around an established spider web resulted in the web's ability to carry even more weight (up to 10 percent) than before.

By the way, no arachnids were harmed in the completion of this study. The scientists used computer models and unpopulated natural webs.

The idea is a simple one, really, and it also, assert the scientists behind the study, can have crossover implications for the construction of manmade materials. (Imagine something made out of steel that would work the way a spider web works — giving under certain pressure but able overall to sustain what would otherwise be a crushing blow).

This could be quite exciting, really, for the various construction industries, if the people doing the theorizing and the testing can get past their spider-induced fears. About the only way I could do it would be to substitute Spider-Man for spider in the paperwork. At least that would let me sleep at night.