Month: November 2014

Archaeology Magazine Gets Confused

I felt a little rush of joy this evening when the following headline appeared in my Twitter feed: “A book of ancient Egyptian spells has been translated.” Naturally, I clicked through, but I was swiftly disappointed. A glance at the article revealed that the book in question has nothing to do with ancient Egypt. It’s actually about a Coptic spellbook from 700 or 800 AD!

Calling a Coptic manuscript ‘ancient Egyptian’ is like calling Dante’s Divine Comedy a work of ancient Roman literature. It’s a lazy attempt at shorthand that ultimately obfuscates rather than enlightens since Coptic civilization had little in common with its pharaonic predecessor.

An Introduction to Ghost Stories

Several years ago, The Physicist and I wandered into our local game store and left with a little game called Ghost Stories. Although we lost horribly the first few times we played, we were hooked. Ghost Stories can be a bitch to win, but it’s also a lot of fun. The premise of the game is game is that a group of Taoist monks (the players) are fighting to save a village from the depredations of the malevolent Wu-Feng and his legion of ghosts. Since a new ghost typically appears each turn, players face an uphill battle to keep the enemy at bay. Thankfully, you’re not completely alone. You can seek aid from the villagers, but a helping hand can have consequences…

I wrote a handy introduction to Ghost Stories for Urban Gaming Elite’s ‘Unplugged’ section. Why don’t you mosey on over to UGE and check it out?

Elevator Pitch Olympics

Last week, I wrote an article for Xconomy.com about the Wisconsin Early Stage Symposium’s Elevator Pitch Olympics. Eighteen entrepreneurs gave ninety-second presentations to a panel of judges, who then rated the entrepreneurs’ performance on a scale of one to five.

The winner, Tyrre Burks of Team Interval, hopes to create a digital platform that will serve as a universal health record for student athletes. He faced stiff competition, though. Steve Visuri of FloraSeq, wants to create a stool bank to facilitate fecal transplants, while Ben West of Concinnity is trying to make it easier for doctors to file reports for the Physician Quality Reporting System (the process is so byzantine that many doctors have opted out of it entirely; according to West, 800,000 physicians miss out on approximately $4 billion annually).

I thought it was interesting that many of the entrepreneurs were reluctant to brag about their credentials, even when it would have helped their pitches. One gentleman wants to develop a drug to treat canine diabetes and then use the profits to fund research in human diabetes. He gave a decent pitch, but he neglected one tiny detail: he’s a famous pancreatic transplant surgeon at the University of Wisconsin. At the end of the competition, the judges stressed that entrepreneurs need to overcome their Midwestern modesty if they want to be noticed by investors. 🙂