Alex Dominguez,"Accelerator Used to Decipher Archimedes," AP, 22 May, is a fascinating story about the use of highly focussed x-rays to reveal the text of a 10th century CE copy of Archimedes' 3rd century BCE Greek scrolls. The 10th century manuscript is hidden to the naked eye under a 12th century CE prayer book. The"Archimedes Palimpsest" includes the only surviving copies of his"Method of Mechanical Theorems" and"On Floating Objects."

Elisabeth Carnell at another boring academic has a blog calls our attention to this Guardian article on the unveiling of England's oldest alterpiece, the 750 year old Westminister Retable. After a painstaking 20 year restoration effort, it is now on display at the National Gallery.

At Blogging Them Out of the Stone Age [War Historian at our blogroll on the right], our colleague, Mark Grimsley, is developing a theme,"A Good Day to Die." It begins with the well known photograph of the sit-in by John Salter, Joan Trumpauer, and Ann Moody in Jackson, Mississippi. A crowd of hostile white people is taunting and abusing them. You can pick up and follow the sequence of Mark's postings here.

As post-modernists, the Cliopatriarchs seem to be fairly evenly divided between Revisionist Historians and Theory Sluts, so I offer the following reports without prejudice:

Christopher Hitchens gives theorists in our English departments a rather sound thrashing in"Transgressing the Boundaries," New York Times, 22 May. To my mind, it's well earned, but that's no gossipy reflection on my slutty colleagues.

After the death of Paul Ricoeur, our colleague, Nathanael Robinson offered us a convenient net-bibliography here at Cliopatria. At Rhine River, he gives us"A Ricoeurian License Plate," a meditation on French Canada and historical memory.

Congratulations to The Weblog's Adam Kotsko. His translation of Jacques Derrida's"Literature in Secret: An Impossible Filiation" has been accepted by the University of Chicago Press for inclusion in a new edition of Derrida's The Gift of Death. If you must begin a doctoral program in the humanities these days, a publication by University of Chicago Press is a great beginning.