Technology Archives - Page 31 of 35

iSrael on the iPhone

iPhone users in Israel can now download an application that provides detailed information about tourist sites in Israel. The free application is called iSrael and has been developed by the Israel Ministry of Tourism. From the Jerusalem Post:

The application has three main sections: sites, tracks and accommodations. Each section can be navigated either by operating the “Around Me” option, which detects the user’s geographic location via GPS and arranges the information by distance from the user’s location; or by choosing the “By Region” option, which presents information according to the part of the country the user wishes to explore. Once a location is selected, users can choose from a list of sites according to their interests. The list includes themes such as archeology and history, nature and animals, holy places, national sites and parks and gardens. Choosing a category opens a list of all the relevant available attractions in the area and users can select a specific site out of the options offered. Clicking on a site opens a new page, which provides a photo and a description of the site as well as helpful information like contact details, hours of operation, a map of the area, a precise address and a link to the attraction’s website. The tracks section allows users to locate tours based on their interest and physical abilities. The section is divided into hiking tours, bicycle tours, vehicle tours and tours for people with disabilities. Each tour contains a description of the sites along the way and a map of the route. For now the selection is fairly limited, but Tourism Ministry officials said that more tours will be available as more are uploaded by the ministry and as other tourism bodies contribute suggested tours.

The full article is here.

Tagged Technology, Tourism

Flight Tours over Israel with Google Earth

Google Earth is a fantastic tool that combines high-resolution aerial imagery with a “flying” engine so that users can travel anywhere in the world in seconds. The problem is that most people don’t know where they’re going. Jay Baggett is on the way to solving this problem for students and teachers of the Bible. His new website, Land of the Bible, features more than a dozen video tours through the 3-D landscape of Israel and Jordan.

After you get an introduction on the home page, you can see a list of the flights in the left sidebar.

You’ll notice that Jay has plans to create many more in the future. If you want a short tour, you can start with “David & Goliath,” which begins David’s hometown in Bethlehem and brings you down to the Elah Valley and the stage for the famous battle. As the video proceeds, the “tour notes” on the right make it clear what you are seeing and why it is important.

Fly-over tour at landofthebible.com

For a longer tour, click “From Dan to Beersheba.” This is a great way to get a feel for the whole land and how one site is related to another. If you want to “pick up the pace,” you can always click the “fast-forward” button; each click doubles the speed of the video.

Most of the tours are located in the “Pilgrim’s tour of Israel and Jordan.” Since most visitors see similar sites on the same basic route, this tour will be useful to many tourists even if they were not on Jay’s trip last year.

The videos require a Google Earth plug-in and they do not seem to work in Firefox. This is a great tool and I look forward to seeing the new fly-overs as Jay finishes them.

Tagged Technology, Tourism

Visit Ancient Rome with Google

How many times have you rushed through an ancient site, taking as many pictures as you could, but when it was all done you didn’t realize exactly what you saw? And when it comes time to label your photos or describe them to a friend, you’re at a loss? Google Street View could be a useful tool in your attempt to “remember” what you saw and where. The ambitious program is venturing not only into European cities, but their ancient ruins as well. Pompeii was put online last year and now work is underway for the ruins of ancient Rome. Once it is complete, you’ll be able to retrace the steps of your tour and make sure that you don’t confuse the Arch of Septimus Severus with the Arch of Constantine. BBC News has a 2-minute video describing the project.

Arch of Constantine, Rome

Tagged Italy, Technology

iPad May Revolutionize Archaeology

Archaeologists working at Pompeii are ecstatic about the value of iPads in the recording process, according to this article posted at apple.com.

For Dr. Steven Ellis, who directs the University of Cincinnati’s archaeological excavations at Pompeii, perhaps the most significant discovery at the site this year was iPad. Ellis credits the introduction of six iPad devices at Pompeii with helping his team solve one of the most difficult problems of archaeological fieldwork: how to efficiently and accurately record the complex information they encounter in the trenches. Most archaeological researchers today collect data from their sites as others have for the past 300 years. “It’s all pencil and paper,” says Ellis. “You have to draw things on paper, or in preprinted forms with boxes. That’s a problem because all these pages could be lost on an airplane, they could burn, they could get wet and damaged, or they could be written in unintelligible handwriting. And eventually they have to be digitized or entered into a computer anyway.” Although portable computers offer a paperless solution, field archaeologists rarely use them in the trenches because their size, input limitations, battery life, and sensitivity to dirt and heat make them impractical in the harsh conditions of a dig. […]

Photo from apple.com article

Ellis, who estimates that iPad has already saved him a year of data entry, plans to increase the number of iPad devices from one to two per trench. “The recovery of invaluable information from our Pompeian excavations is now incalculably faster, wonderfully easier, unimaginably more dynamic, precisely more accurate, and robustly secure,” he says. Beyond the scope of his project, Ellis sees iPad as revolutionizing the 300-year-old discipline of archaeological fieldwork. “A generation ago computers made it possible for scholars to move away from just looking at pretty pictures on walls and work with massive amounts of information and data. It was a huge leap forward. Using iPad to conduct our excavations is the next one. And I’m really proud to be a part of it.”

The article gives more details and includes a number of photos of the iPad in action.

Tagged Excavations, Italy, Technology

Balsam Plants Living Again at En Gedi

A few years ago, scientists succeeded in raising a date palm tree from a 2,000-year-old seed found at Masada. Now botanists are attempting to revive the balsam plant. From an article published last week in Haaretz:

Saplings of the balsam plant that have been cultivated in Kibbutz Ein Gedi’s botanical garden for the past two years are a first test of the possibility of bringing the legendary bush, which flourished in the Second Temple period, back to the Dead Sea region, two scholars told a Jerusalem audience yesterday.
Speaking at a conference organized by the Elad association in Jerusalem’s City of David, Prof. Zohar Amar and Dr. David Iluz of Bar-Ilan University described their research into the plant’s identity.
Since the 1970s, there have been several failed attempts to acclimate the plant believed to be balsam, one of ancient Palestine’s most economically significant plants, to modern-day Israel. But the staff of Ein Gedi’s botanical garden are optimistic that the current effort will succeed.
The plant is mentioned dozens of times in ancient sources, from the Bible to the Talmud, as well as in Greek and Roman writings. The most prestigious perfume known in the ancient Near East was produced from it, and it was also known for its healing qualities.
The balsam plantations in the Dead Sea area were under direct royal control, and the methods of cultivation and production were a closely guarded secret and a powerful political tool. For example, the balsam groves in Jericho became a bone of contention between Cleopatra of Egypt and Herod the Great. During the Bar Kokhba Revolt, in the second century CE, Jewish fighters uprooted the plants so they would not be captured by the Romans.

The story continues here. There is quite a bit of variety in the translations for balsam, but you may recall some of these:

Genesis 37:25 (HCSB) Then they sat down to eat a meal. They looked up, and there was a caravan of Ishmaelites coming from Gilead. Their camels were carrying aromatic gum, balsam, and resin, going down to Egypt.

2 Samuel 5:23 (NIV) so David inquired of the Lord, and he answered, “Do not go straight up, but circle around behind them and attack them in front of the balsam trees.

Song of Solomon 5:13 (NAS)
“His cheeks are like a bed of balsam,
Banks of sweet-scented herbs;
His lips are lilies
Dripping with liquid myrrh.

HT: Joe Lauer

Tagged Dead Sea, Technology

Restoring Israel’s Antiquities

Haaretz has an interesting story this weekend on the work of a ceramics restoration specialist in the Israel Antiquities Authority. Her job is to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.

Many years before the corruption allegations, something entirely different was uncovered at the Holyland project site in Jerusalem: traces of several ancient communities, including shards of two clay vessels. The piles of potsherds were delivered to the table of Elisheva Kamaisky, a ceramics restoration specialist for the Israel Antiquities Authority, who reconstructed the jugs in a gentle work of piecing together a complex jigsaw puzzle.
“I love the earliest periods because they didn’t use tools then. No two vessels are the same. I’m full of awe in front of their technical abilities. In the Roman period mass production starts, and then if you’ve seen one vessel you’ve seen them all,” she says. “The beautiful thing about ceramics is that the same techniques are used today. True, we have electric furnaces and control the heat better, but the basics are the same in the most ancient jug and the ceramics NASA uses to coat its spaceships.”
Kamaisky is one of the Antiquities Authority’s six-member restoration team who reconstruct objects and implements of the material culture in the country since human habitation began. They receive potsherds, threadbare cloths, metallic weapons, golden coins, delicate glassware and more. Unlike their colleagues in the rest of the world, Israeli law bars them from working with human remains.
Archaeologist Zvika Greenhut says restoration work is important “because it’s the only way you can see the entire picture. For example, in one dig I worked on in Motza we found a room full of pitcher shards. But only when we started piecing them together did we understand that the room couldn’t possibly hold all these vessels. There were two possibilities: Either they were all stored one inside each other, or there were shelves that held them but didn’t survive into our time. It was clearly a storeroom and this means something about that culture.”

The full story is here.

HT: Joe Lauer

Restored Iron Age cooking pots, Eretz Israel Museum

Tagged Excavations, Technology