Day: August 2, 2002

Definitive Proof of Vinland Map Fraud

In the early 20th century somebody intent on bolstering the case for Norse charting and exploration of North America created a fake map that became known as the Vinland Map. The Vinland map was claimed to be a 15th century Norse map that clearly shows North America.

And it was a fake. Evidence that it was a fake has been long available since it contains a chemical — anatase — in the ink that could not have been synthesized until the 20th century.

Now a study published in Analytical Chemistry has put the nail in the coffin on map’s inauthenticity.

Like many old maps, the Vinland Map is done in black ink and the lines are surrounded by yellowish lines. In an authentic map, the yellowing is caused by iron compounds in the ink.

In hoaxed maps such as the Vinland Map, however, the ink used is modern and lacks those iron compounds. And, of course, it was made recently, so the forger draws in a yellow line. It turns out the anatase on the Vinland Map only occurs in the yellow lines. Somebody drew the lines in to make it appear to be old.

The map’s a fraud.

Source:

The Vinland Map shows its true colors; scientists say it’s a confirmed forgery. American Chemical Society, July 29, 2002.

Michigan’s Single Business Tax

Michigan is gearing up for primaries in a week or so, including for governor and other state offices (term limits prevent Republican governor, John Engler, from running again). A major issue that has emerged in the state races is the way Michigan taxes businesses: the single business tax.

Apparently the idiotic single business tax used to be quite common, but today Michigan is the only state left that uses such a backward system of taxation for businesses.

Some states tax business profits or income or some similar measure. In Michigan, we currently end up taxing total payroll. That’s right, the amount of tax a business pays is determined by the amount it spends on payroll.

So every time a company in Michigan adds a new employee, its taxes go up. Gee, couldn’t the legislature have found a better way to kill job creation?

Desktop Replacement Therapy

I needed a new computer and almost bought another desktop — until I took a good hard look at just how far laptops have come. I don’t think I’ll buy another desktop again except to use as a fileserver.

I’ve owned several laptops. In fact the first non-Apple machine I owned was a huge laptop/portable machine that sported not one, but two 3 1/2″ floppy drives. I also bought a couple of Toshiba Satellites over the years but was never satisfied with either machine. They were really toys compared to the desktops I owned.

A major drawback to laptops from my perspective has always been hard drive size. I have 9 gigabytes of personal files (and growing) and I want to take all of it with me, along with the necessary applications of course. The laptop I settled on has a 40 gig hard drive. Anything smaller and I probably would have opted for a desktop.

Of course the processor speed and memory has improved dramatically — I opted for a 1.5 ghz Pentium and 512 mb of memory which so far handles everything I can throw at it impressively. Even some games. Okay, Neverwinter Nights wouldn’t run, but I get impressive frame rates from Freedom Force. Next time around, I’ll get a machine with better 3D performance, but that wasn’t as much of an issue as speed and HD storage.

But it was the price that really got me — all of this plus a DVD/CD-RW, built-in WiFi, and a 15″ high res. LCD all for under $2,000. I was frothing like a Pavlovian dog ready to sell my soul for such a machine, and here all they wanted was a couple grand.

ArsTechnica’s Mozilla Review

ArsTechnica has a lengthy review of Mozilla 1.0 which gives the browser a rather lukewarm assessment.

The reviewer does have a point about some of Mozilla’s shortcomings. I’ve had a lot of the same problems ArsTechnica reports when it comes to installing plugins.

But those drawbacks are more than overcome by the tabbed interface, which ArsTechnica mentions, and the keyword support which it doesn’t. The tabbed interface is the best implementation of that in any browser I’ve used. Yes, it would be nice if Mozilla could be configured to automatically open new tabs when clicking on a link, but it can be configured to open new tabs when clicking on the middle button of a three-button mouse which works great for me.

Even more powerful are the keywords option. Once you’ve bookmarked a web site, you can go into the bookmark manager and assign each site a keyword. For example, to reach brian.carnell.com I just go to my web browser and type in “BC.”

But wait, there’s more. Mozilla also allows users to assign keywords to groups of sites. For example, I have a list of 12 web sites that are all related that I need to view every day. In Mozilla I just open those sites up once, bookmark that configuration and assign it a keyword. Talk about a time saver.

When Mozilla was being developed I was extremely skeptical that it would ever even come close to being as functional as IE. Now I would imagine web browsing without Mozilla’s excellent tools.