Participants in the rally for the independence during the National Day of Catalonia on September 11, 2012 in Barcelona, Spain. (PHOTO: nito / SHUTTERSTOCK)
2. Sell reasonably priced copies of your new flag.
Read 10 Steps to a Breakaway State: A Secessionist’s Guide
We must add: Think of a badass acronym for your independence movement, not something that makes people giggle and nudge each other.
The Voynich Manuscript. Photo from the NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive.
Its name sounds like the title of a Robert Ludlum thriller, and it has bamboozled generations of spies. An emperor reputedly once owned it, the Jesuits later acquired it and Yale University now has the infuriating thing. For those in the know, all that is needed is to roll one’s eyes and mutter about the Voynich Manuscript, which was discovered (or, technically, rediscovered) a century ago this year.
Wisely, Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library decided to be open about so controversial an item, and the entire manuscript has been [external] posted online for scrutiny. There, one finds an object that initially does not seem to merit the fuss.
Scott Van Wynsberghe: Deciphering the mysterious Voynich Manuscript
History is written by the victors, and Senator Juan Ponce Enrile has just published his memoir. The senator has had many enemies, but he has outfoxed them all—by defeating them outright, by turning them to the Enrile side, or by outlasting them.
LOOPER starring Juan Ponce Enrile, our column at InterAksyon.com
Not safe sex, as the church would have us believe, but climate change.
Click on image to enlarge
Some view even this notion as too simplistic. Karl Butzer of the University of Texas at Austin, who has studied the collapse of civilisations, thinks the role of climate has been exaggerated. It is the way societies handle crises that decides their fate, he says. “Things break through institutional failure.” When it comes to the Akkadians, for instance, Butzer says not all records support the idea of a megadrought.
In the case of the Maya, though, the evidence is strong. Earlier this year, Eelco Rohling of the University of Southampton, UK, used lake sediments and isotope ratios in stalactites to work out how rainfall had changed. He concluded that annual rainfall fell 40 per cent over the prolonged dry period, drying up open water sources. This would have seriously affected the Maya, he says, because the water table lay far underground and was effectively out of reach…
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While reading the galleys of Ambeth Ocampo’s forthcoming book Looking Back 5: Rizal’s Teeth, Bonifacio’s Bones in order to compose a blurb (“Ambeth Ocampo does it again! Couldn’t put it down! 5 stars!”), we were reminded of his piece addressing certain rumors about our national hero. We heard the “father of Hitler” legend from one of Ambeth’s earlier books; the Jack the Ripper theory is more recent.
Textbook history states that Rizal was in London from May 1888 to January 1889, spending time in the British Museum Library copying Antonio de Morga’s Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas (1609) by hand because there were no photocopying machines at the time. Jack the Ripper was active around this time and, since we do not know what Rizal did at night or on the days he was not in the library, Rizal is now suspect.
The argument is that when Rizal left London, the Ripper murders stopped. They say that Jack the Ripper must have had some medical training, based on the way his victims were mutilated. Rizal, of course, was a doctor. Jack the Ripper liked women, and so did our own Rizal. And this is so obvious that many overlooked it. Jose Rizal?s initials, JR, perfectly match those of Jack the Ripper!
For someone who wrote a great deal on the most ordinary things, Rizal only made passing reference to Jack the Ripper in an essay on the Guardia Civil he wrote in the April 30, 1890 issue of La Solidaridad. Can this be added to the flimsy but growing list of circumstantial evidence to suspect Rizal?
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