Climate

Masters of Math, From Old Babylon
If the cost of digging a trench is 9 gin, and the trench has a length of 5 ninda and is one-half ninda deep, and if a worker’s daily load of earth costs 10 gin to move, and his daily wages are 6 se of silver, then how wide is the canal?

Or, a better question: if you were a tutor of Babylonian scribes some 4,000 years ago, holding a clay tablet on which this problem was incised with cuneiform indentations — the very tablet that can now be seen with 12 others from that Middle Eastern civilization at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World — what could you take for granted, and what would you need to explain to your students? In what way did you think about measures of time and space? How did you calculate? Did you believe numbers had an abstract existence, each with its own properties? Read full story from nytimes.com

Obama signs order clarifying church-state relationship
President Barack Obama signed an executive order Wednesday clarifying the ground rules for religious groups partnering with the federal government through the White House’s controversial faith office.

The order says that religious organizations receiving federal funds must conduct explicitly religious activities in a time and place that are different from when and where they do government-financed work. Read full story from cnn.com

Sketch of King Richard II’s skull found among medieval tomb relics in museum basement
Relics from the tomb of medieval English king Richard II and sketches of his skull and bones have been discovered in boxes in the basement of the National Portrait Gallery.