Hat tip to Walter Olson.

Unfortunately not everyone agrees on the probable location of the great khan’s tomb. (click on picture for larger image)

Motherboard has one of those stories that fires the imagination. We just have to hope they’re working on the right location.

Genghis Khan really, really didn’t want anyone to know where he was buried. The soldiers escorting his body to its final resting place killed everyone they passed, killed the people who built the tomb, and then were killed themselves. Some say Mongol troops grazed herds of horses over the site or even diverted a river over it to keep it hidden. The area where many suspect Genghis Khan is buried is one of Mongolia’s most sacred heritage sites—it’s name, Ikh Khorig, actually translates to “The Great Taboo.” For 800 years—until 1989—archeologists weren’t allowed in, and even then the first expedition was met with public protest.

“Mongolians detest any attempt to touch graves, or even wander around graveyards,” Mongolia Today explains. “According to ancient tradition, burial spots are forbidden areas in which no one is allowed.”

Still, and perhaps for that very reason, this region is really interesting for archeologists. That first three-year expedition identified 1,380 underground cavities that could be the graveyards or tombs of Mongolian nobles, potentially even predating Genghis Khan.

Albert Yu-Min Lin, from the Center for Interdisciplinary Science in Art, Architecture, and Archaeology at the University of California, San Diego, devised a way to hunt for Genghis Khan’s tomb without touching or toppling anything: Have anyone who’s interested in doing so tag potential sites of investigation from the comfort of their own homes, on images taken from the respectful distance of satellite orbit.

“Explorers” were welcome to map rivers and roads, and flag modern structures, as well as potentially ancient structures on thousands of ultra-high resolution satellite images of the region. There was a lot of ground to cover—6,000 square kilometers, but there were also a lot of volunteers. The system was launched in June 2010, and in just its first 90 days, 5,838 people had contributed more than 1.2 million tags. By the end of the year, over 10,000 participants had generated 2.3 million tags—contributing a total of 30,000 hours of human visual analytics to the images, according to the study’s initial results, just published in the journal PLOS One.

The results have given future explorers plenty to chew on, too. “Of the top 100 accessible locations identified by the crowd,” the study states, “55 potential archaeological anomalies were verified by the field team, ranging from bronze age to Mongol period in origin.”

Read the whole thing.

Stephane Charbonnier “Charb”: “I’d rather die than live on my knees.”

Meanwhile, after his murder by Islamic fanatics, the yellowbelly New York Daily News has on its cover this photo of Charb holding up a cartoon from which the Muslim imam has been pixilated but the hook-nosed rabbi left in.

The Daily Caller is publishing a growing list of all the mainstream media outlets so cowardly that they are declining to publish Charlie Hebdo cartoons. These include the Associated Press, NBC, MSNBC and CNBC, CNN, The Telegraph, the Jewish Chronicle, the New York Times, ABC, and CBS.

Let’s hear it, on the other hand, for the Berliner Zeitung, the Berliner Kurier, and La Tribune, the only European papers so far which did.

Never Yet Melted, some readers may remember, was banned by Google Adsense back in 2013 for republishing, as news, Charlie Hebdo cartoons. It didn’t even take a terrorist attack to get Google to censor Mohammed cartoons.

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I am moved to republish this:

Mattheus van Beveren, Mohammed, leaning on his Koran, Trodden upon by Angels Bearing the Pulpit, Liebefraukirke, Dendermonde, Flanders, late 17th century

Among the slain: from left, clockwise, Stephane Charbonnier, known by his pen name Charb, editor of Charlie Hebdo; Georges Wolinski; Bernard “Tignous” Verlhac; Lead cartoonist Jean “Cabu” Cabut; and contributor Bernard Maris.

The best current account is from the Daily Mail:

Four of France’s most revered cartoonists – Stephane Charbonnier, Georges Wolinski, Bernard ‘Tignous’ Verlhac and Jean Cabut – were among 12 people executed by masked gunmen in Paris today at the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

Two masked men brandishing Kalashnikovs burst into the magazine’s headquarters this morning, opening fire on staff, also shooting dead contributor Bernard Maris, 68.

Police officers were involved in a gunfight with the ‘calm and highly disciplined men’, who escaped in a hijacked car, speeding away towards east Paris. They remain on the loose, along with a third armed man.

Charbonnier, 47, known by his pen name Charb, was the editor of the weekly magazine, and once famously said ‘I’d prefer to die standing than live on my knees’. He also declared, in the face of animosity from extremists, ‘I live under French law, not Koranic law’.

Cabut, 76, also called Cabu, was Charlie Hebdo’s lead cartoonist, Wolinski an 80-year-old satirist who had been drawing cartoons since the 1960s and Tignous a 57-year-old contributor to the publication.

The gunmen reportedly asked for the cartoonists by name before shooting them dead and yelling ‘the Prophet has been avenged’. …

[T]here were unconfirmed reports that one of the gunmen said to a witness: ‘You say to the media, it was Al Qaeda in Yemen.’ …

Mr Charbonnier, who once said ‘a drawing has never killed anyone’, was included in a 2013 Wanted Dead or Alive for Crimes Against Islam article published by Inspire, the terrorist propaganda magazine published by Al Qaeda.

In 2012 he said: ‘I don’t feel as though I’m killing someone with a pen. I’m not putting lives at risk. When activists need a pretext to justify their violence, they always find it.’

Charbonnier said that he didn’t fear reprisals. After publishing naked pictures of the Prophet in 2012, he said: ‘I have neither a wife nor children, not even a dog. But I’m not going to hide.’

He added: ‘It should be as normal to criticize Islam as it is to criticize Jews or Catholics.’

Georges Wolinski, who lived in Paris, was married twice, first to Jacqueline Saba, with whom he had two children, Frederica and Natacha, and then in 1971 to Maryse Bachere. They had one daughter together, Elsa-Angela.

Cabu’s drawings first appeared in a local French newspaper in 1954. He was conscripted to the Army for two years for the Algerian War, but that didn’t stop his creative talent, which was put to use in the army magazine Bled and in Paris-Match.

In the 1960s, 70s and 80s his career flourished, with the artist co-creating Hara-Kiri magazine, working on children’s TV show Recre A2 and eventually working on Charlie Hebdo as a caricaturists.

His most controversial moment came in 2006 when his drawing of the Muslim prophet Muhammad appeared on the cover with the caption ‘Muhammad overwhelmed by fundamentalists’ with a speech bubble containing the words ‘so hard to be loved by jerks’. …

Victim Bernard Maris was an economist who contributed to the newspaper and was heard regularly on French radio

As well as the AK47 assault rifles, there were also reports of a rocket-propelled grenade being used in the attack, which took place during the publication’s weekly editorial meeting, meaning all the journalists would have been present.

When shots rang out at the office – located near Paris’ Bastille monument – it is thought that three policemen on bicycles were the first to respond.

‘There was a loud gunfire and at least one explosion,’ said an eye witness. ‘When police arrived there was a mass shoot-out. The men got away by car, stealing a car.’

Survivor and Charlie Hebdo cartoonist Corinne ‘Coco’ Rey was quoted by French newspaper L’Humanite as saying: ‘I had gone to collect my daughter from day care and as I arrived in front of the door of the paper’s building two hooded and armed men threatened us. They wanted to go inside, to go upstairs. I entered the code.

‘They fired on Wolinski, Cabu… it lasted five minutes… I sheltered under a desk… They spoke perfect French… claimed to be from al Qaeda.’…

‘They were wearing military clothes, it wasn’t common clothing, like they were soldiers.’

Once inside the gunmen headed straight for Charbonnier, killing him and his police bodyguard first, said Christophe Crepin, a police union spokesman.

Minutes later, two men strolled out to a black car waiting below, calmly firing on a police officer, with one gunman shooting him in the head as he writhed on the ground, according to video and a man who watched in fear from his home across the street.

The witness, who refused to allow his name to be used because he feared for his safety, said the attackers were so methodical he first mistook them for France’s elite anti-terrorism forces. Then they fired on the officer.

‘They knew exactly what they had to do and exactly where to shoot. While one kept watch and checked that the traffic was good for them, the other one delivered the final coup de grace,’ he said. ‘They ran back to the car. The moment they got in, the car drove off almost casually.

Full article.

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French policeman murdered.

According to Twitter analytics tool Topsy, there have been more than 70,000 tweets using the JeSuisCharlie: hashtag so far today.

Social media are exploding with world-wide indignation over the massacre in Paris. This evening, Parisians are marching at the Place de la République, “for freedom of the press, democracy, and the Republic.”

A Parisienne demonstrates in solidarity with those killed. Photograph: Seán Clarke.

Three Islamic gunmen armed with fully-automatic AK-47s walked into the Paris offices of the French satire magazine Charlie Hebdo around midday today and opened fire, killing at least twelve people. 10 journalists and two police officers were killed, and another five people were seriously injured. The shooters were picked up by a getaway car driven by a fourth terrorist. The killers then drove to Porte de Pantin in north-east Paris, where they abandoned the first automobile and hijacked another car.

Guardian story.

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TIMELINE OF PAST EVENTS

Mohammed Overcome by the Fundamentalists

8 February 2006: Charlie Hebdo republishes the Danish Mohammed cartoons, adding its own “It’s a Drag Being Loved By Idiots” cartoon as a commentary on the cartoon controversy.

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“Charlie Hebdo Must Be Veiled!”

7 February 2007: Charlie Hebdo and its’s publication director Philippe Val went on trial before the Correctional Tribunal of Paris
facing accusations by Islamic Organisations of France and the Grand Mosque of Paris that reprinting the cartoons was a violation of French laws prohibiting “publicly slandering a group of people because of their religion.” The charge carried a possible six-month prison sentence and a fine of up to $28,530.

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22 March 2007: Charklie Hebdo & Philippe Val acquitted.

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Translation: “One hundred lashes if you don’t die laughing!”

2 November 2011: Charlie Hebdo intended to commemorate the Islamic victory in the elections in Tunisia by temporarily renaming itself “Sharia Hebdo” and appointing the Prophet Mohammed “guest editor” and putting his portrait again on the cover.

The “Sharia Hebdo” edition had not even appeared, when during the night the paper’s Paris offices were fire-bombed and its web-site attacked and taken down.

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Captions: “Untouchables 2 — Must Not Mock”

Captions: top: “The film which embarrassed the Muslim world.” Mohammed says: “And my buttocks. Do you like my buttocks?” below: “Mohammed a star is born!”

19 September 2012: France closed 20 embassies and Charlie Hebdo’s web-site was shut down and its offices surrounded protectively by riot police after the magazine published its raunchiest Mohammed cartoons yet.

Newby Parton is a freshman at Princeton. Coming from an old-fashioned region of the country, he habitually pronounces wh-, in the Gothic manner, as hw-. He consequently came in for a bit of mockery at school.

The light of Ivy League learning falling upon Mr. Parton’s provincial mind, he was thus led to editorialize agin’ these kind of cussed aggravatin’ microaggressions. So he was.

Each time I grow a bit more self-conscious. Very few people like to have their speech mocked.

Now, I am sure the others never mean their offense. Therefore, I will play along and let them have their laugh. You wouldn’t know it from my columns, but I avoid confrontation when I can. Besides, this is not very important to me. I am a male and I am white, so I get less than my fair share of discrimination. I am ashamed to say that I have complained when I have had such fortune, but I must confess that I did. A friend of mine whom I quite like had put me through the “Cool Whip” routine, so I waited awhile and texted her this: “Making fun of regional speech is a microaggression.”

Again, I am ashamed of that text. But I learned a lot from her response. “Better put that on TM,” she said, referring to the Tiger Microaggressions page notorious for posting inoffensive “aggressions.” There came no apology or retraction. She really did not understand that she had caused any offense, even after I had plainly told her so. That is fine with me, and I don’t blame her one bit. If I were her, I am afraid I would not have understood either.

I mean it when I say I am afraid. I am afraid that I have spent eighteen years not understanding when I have said something offensive. I am afraid that I have unwittingly hurt the feelings of people so accustomed to microaggression that they did not bother to speak up. I am afraid that I would not have taken those people seriously if they had made a stand. And I am afraid I will do it all again. I am afraid because microaggressions aren’t harmless — there’s research to show that they cause anxiety and binge drinking among the minority students who are targeted.

The whole thing.

Somehow when I reflect on all this, it occurs to me that Owen Johnson‘s Tennessee Shad must inevitably have encountered mockery at the hands of Yankees for his regional accent at Lawrenceville School a bit over a century ago. But the Shad would have responded by whipping the asses of his tormentors (and simultaneously carefully purging his own speech of provincial features), instead of whining about it and promising to be PC holier-than-thou himself in the college newspaper.

Membership in the community of fashion elite these days inevitably seems to require a certificate of gelding accompanying the college application.

Via Katherine Timpf.

For the morbid, those yearning to be horrified, or the merely curious, the New York Post reviews, Working Stiff, the memoir of New York Medical Examiner Judy Melinek (written with T.J. Mitchell).

Some of the deaths described are Darwin Award winners, others (like the chap tossed down an open manhole who landed in a pool of boiling water) are absolutely bloodcurdling to contemplate, while others are merely anecdotally intriguing.

There was the subway jumper at Union Square, for example, whose body was recovered on the tracks of the uptown 4 train with no blood — none at the scene, none in the body itself. She’d never seen anything like it, and only CME Hirsch could explain: The massive trauma to the entire body caused the bone marrow to absorb all the blood.

“Everyone in the room agreed,” Melinek writes, “that I had the coolest case of the day.”

Finding a bullet for a gunshot wound, meanwhile, can be particularly baffling. Melinek says her favorite is “bullet embolus”: “A slug enters the beating heart at just the right spot and with precisely enough momentum to get flushed into the circulatory system, then surfs through smaller and smaller vessels until it gets stuck somewhere far removed from its point of entry.”

In one case, a man was shot in the chest, but the bullet was found in his liver.

During her tenure, the most popular suicide spot in New York City was the atrium in Times Square’s Marriott Marquis hotel. Melinek autopsied two jumpers: One, a 26-year-old man, leapt from the 43rd floor.

His right arm and left leg were recovered on the 11th floor, his other two limbs on the seventh floor, and part of his skull wound up in the elevator shaft.

Her other jumper, also a man, jumped from the 23rd floor. One leg was found on the 10th floor, his torso on the ninth.

“I suspect these people imagine they are going to plummet gracefully down and land with a melodramatic thump in the lobby,” Melinek writes, “but I never saw that result. The ones I saw had pinballed off a variety of jutting structures on the way, each impact causing damage to a different plane of the body. Not graceful at all.”

Read the whole thing.

Ted Scheinman, a few months back, penned a special tribute to Psmith, P.G. Wodehouse’s protagonist most notable for coolness and competence.

[T]he author calls Psmith his only character based on a single, clear referent. “Lord Emsworth, Jeeves, and the rest of my dramatis personae had to be built up from their foundations,” Wodehouse writes, “but Psmith came to me ready-made”:

A cousin of mine, who had been at Winchester, happened to tell me one night of Rupert D’Oyly Carte, the son of the Savoy Opera’s D’Oyly Carte, a schoolmate of his.

Rupert D’Oyly Carte was long, slender, always beautifully dressed and very dignified. His speech was what is known as orotund, and he wore a monocle. He habitually addressed his fellow Wykehamists as “Comrade,” and if one of the masters chanced to inquire as to his health, would reply “Sir, I grow thinnah and thinnah.”

In dress an Edwardian dandy, in speech some strange admixture of Socrates, Pseudolus, Swift, Keats, and Groucho Marx, Psmith fiddles on the idioms and cultural assumptions of the previous age in rhythms that baffle and thereby outmatch any members of the ancien régime who stand between him and leisure — or who offer an irresistible target. By the time a schoolmaster, or a bank manager (Psmith in the City), or a Manhattan mobster (Psmith, Journalist) has recovered from the intimidating distractions of Psmith’s mien, the battle is already won. It is nearly too fitting that Psmith’s model was a D’Oyly Carte, and thereby directly associated with the money and production-apparatus behind Gilbert and Sullivan’s operettas. Psmith mocks the Victorians by his very existence; he skewers them with a rapier as sharp as anything in the G&S armory. …

There is a permanent adolescence in Wodehouse, adolescence itself being a daily rebellion against social strictures and top-down unpleasantness in general. At day’s end, it is Wodehouse’s central irony that the last wave of Victorians made this permanent adolescence possible. Psmith, in turn, maintains his signature cool by “never being surprised”: his mantra, requisitioned in true socialist fashion from Conan Doyle, is “never to confuse the improbable with the impossible,” and though Psmith enjoys describing his nervous constitution as “delicate,” it is this philosophical refusal of surprise that sustains him. Psmith and Wodehouse’s revolutionaries are not lobbing bombs or knocking down the Bastille. They are the blithe boys who never grew up, buoyed on imperial wealth and the residue from half-remembered codes — the “feudal spirit” and all that rot — who, barring the monsoon, buzz over to the Drones Club most days to play indoor cricket with yesterday’s bread rolls for balls.

Hat tip to Walter Olson.

Haynes King, Jealousy and Flirtation, 1874, Victoria & Albert Museum.

Every once in a blue moon, Quora has an amusing and informative answer to a question.

Asked for a small act which might prevent WWII, Jon Davis responds:

I’d give a flower to a very particular young lady at a very particular moment in time.

This would have to be a very particular young lady, of course. Given the consequences of the choice, it had better also be a very particular flower. But either way, I would give a flower to a lady.

This young woman would a be very important girl in history, because at the time I would meet her, she should rightly be meeting someone else. If I were to succeed in gaining her attention, the attention of one girl history only remembers as a footnote, and even that for only a few short minutes, history would never have been the same.

As I said, this girl must be special, so special that there is no other girl like her in the world. She must be the Duke of Cleveland’s daughter. The time would have to be around 1837.

Read the whole thing.

Image Diver: Detail from Warmond Castle in a Winter Landscape, Jan Beerstraten, 1661-1665