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“The Walters [Art Museum] faced a daunting task: what arrived was a clump of folios, crushed, torn, punctured by worm holes, in the inflexible grip of old carpenter's glue, charred at its edges, and covered with mold and water stains.”
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“Archimedes was a lonely genius with few contemporaries who understood his ideas. In his letters, Noel finds "a faint note of exasperation. There was no one to write to, no reader good enough." They were yet to be born: "Archimedes would eventually be read by Omar Khayyam, Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, and Newton. He must have known he was writing for posterity." ”

end note

1. palimpsest

   A palimpsest is a twice-used book. In medieval times, vellum, on which texts were written, was very expensive. Thus, old, discarded texts were scraped off the vellum, which was then used as the support for another text. The new text was often written at right angles to the first text.



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the web address for the article above is
http://www.abelard.org/news/science0804.php#archimedes_palimpsest_200408

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old trees

“Carbon dating of the trees carried out at a laboratory in Miami, Florida, showed the oldest of them first set root about 8,000 years ago, making it the world's oldest known living tree, Umea University Professor Leif Kullman said.”
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“Although a single tree trunk can become at most about 600 years old, the spruces had survived by pushing out another trunk as soon as the old one died, Professor Kullman said.”

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the web address for the article above is
http://www.abelard.org/news/science0804.php#old_trees_140408

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variable words
prints as increasing A4 pages (on my printer and set-up)