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It’s very hard to fix a date on most early Tibetan sources. Few of the manuscripts contain an explicit date, and there are often no clues implicit in the text either. Thus we end up placing these manuscripts in time spans that may be much wider than we would like. In the case of the Tibetan manuscripts from the sealed cave in Dunhuang, the range of possible dates begins with the Tibetan conquest of Dunhuang (786/7) and continuing to when the cave was sealed at the beginning of the eleventh century. Thus we have a span of, more or less, two centuries.

In an article in a new collection, I have developed a typology of writing styles practiced during the Tibetan empire, as we find them in the sources that we know come from the imperial period. The styles are (i) epigraphic, the style of the pillar inscriptions; (ii) square, a style used in copies of imperially sanctioned texts from Central Tibet; (iii) sutra, the style of the scriptoriums where hundreds of copies of sutras were made for the Tibetan empire; (iv) official, the style of official scribes, including a headed and headless form; (v) monastic, the informal style used by monks in their own activities of note-taking, commentary etc. There are of course general categories and there is a lot of variation within each style, but each is linked to a particular social context, and so has its own coherent identity.

Now, since there are (as Tsuguhito Takeuchi has previously pointed out) significant differences in style in the manuscripts written after the fall of the Tibetan empire, we should be able to use this typology to help decide whether an undated manuscript was written during the time of the Tibetan empire, or later. So the second part of the article looks at the post-imperial styles, which are much more varied, as one would expect when the imperially standardised systems of teaching writing had broken down. But I don’t want to overstate the usefulness of paleography for dating; some people do make great claims for it, and if they don’t show their methods this makes paleography look like a magic trick. So the article ends with a cautionary note:

While recommending that others put this typology to the test, I would also urge that paleography is best used in conjunction with the other tools available to us. Paleographical evidence should be supported wherever possible by other levels of analysis: on the one hand, analysis of the physical nature of the manuscript, such as paper composition and book format; and on the other, textual analysis, including orthographic and linguistic features of the text. If several of these tools are used together, the case for dating can be made with some confidence.

You can download the full article from the Author page or here.

*  *  *

And there are lots of other good articles in this volume:

Mark Aldenderfer,  Pre-Buddhist Era Phalliform Objects from Kyunglung, Far Western Tibet

Amy Heller, Preliminary Remarks on Painted Wooden Panels from Tibetan Tombs

Gertraud Taenzer, The ‘A zha Country under the Tibetans in the 8th and 9th Century: A Survey of Land Registration and Taxation Based on a Sequence of Three Manuscripts of the Stein Collection from Dunhuang

Zhu Lishuang, A Preliminary Survey of Administrative Divisions in Tibetan-Ruled Khotan   

Ronit Yoeli-Tlalim, Central Asian Mélange: Early Tibetan Medicine from Dunhuang

Brandon Dotson, The Princess and the Yak: The Hunt as Narrative Trope and Historical Reality in Early Tibet

Cathy Cantwell and Robert Mayer, Neither The Same Nor Different: the Bon Ka ba Nag po in Relation to Rnying ma Phur pa Texts

Tsuguhito Takeuchi, Glegs tshas: Writing Boards of Chinese Scribes in Tibetan-Ruled Dunhuang

Kazushi Iwao, On the Roll-Type Tibetan Śatasāhasrikā-prajñāpāramitā sūtra from Dunhuang 

Between buying Instagram and calling Facebook Home the "next version" of his social network, it's fairly clear Mark Zuckerberg's obsessed with the prime real estate on your smartphone. Israeli newspaper Calcalist is reporting that Zuckerberg and Co. are eyeing up crowdsourced GPS app Waze, which generates mapping data by pulling it from its users' devices in real time. The paper says that Facebook entered into discussions around six months ago, with prices in the $800 million to $1 billion range being mentioned -- and while that sounds like a big number, it's still only a dollar per user.

Filed under: GPS, Internet, Software, Mobile, Facebook

Comments

Via: Reuters

Source: Calcalist (Translated)

Noiser writes "The Israeli pop singer Aya Korem published her new song "Computer Engineer" as a website that shows translation to the Perl programming language along with the lyrics. Perl is quite a good match, given that the Perl community has a long tradition of publishing "Perl poetry", and this song proves that this tradition is very much alive. No Flash is required to view the website, so if you are an HTML5 geek, have no worries."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

puddingebola writes "Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols has a piece of commentary discussing Microsoft's profit from their patent claims on Android. From the article, 'To some, Windows 8 is a marketplace failure. But its flop has been nothing compared to Microsoft's problems in getting anyone to use its Windows Phone operating systems. You don't need to worry about Microsoft's bottom line though. Thanks to its Android patent agreements, Microsoft may be making as much as $8 per Android device. This could give Microsoft as much as $3.4 billion in 2013 from Android sales.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sparrowvsrevolution writes "The promise of a fully 3D-printable gun is that it can spread via the Internet and entirely circumvent gun control laws. Two days after that digital weapon's blueprint first appeared online, it seems to be fulfilling that promise. Files for the printable gun known as that 'Liberator' have been downloaded more than 100,000 times in two days, according to Defense Distributed, the group that created it. Those downloads were facilitated by Kim Dotcom's startup Mega, which Defense Distributed is using to host the Liberator's CAD files. And it's also been uploaded to the Pirate Bay, where it's one of the most popular files in the filesharing site's uncensorable 3D printing category."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

While the debate remains bitterly divided over what Iron Man 3 was missing and why anyone who believes that Iron Man 3 was missing anything is a hypercritical snob who should be shunned from polite society and/or the Internet, we can likely all agree on one thing: It was missing a sex tape, because there wasn’t a sex tape. But as director Shane Black and writer Drew Pearce discussed in a spoiler-heavy podcast for Empire, there once was a sex tape that factored into Iron Man 3, only to be cut from the screenplay draft for reasons unknown, but which we’ll attribute to pressures from Marvel to save it for The Avengers sequel.

Black explains, “Pepper, in one draft, slept with [Aldrich] Killian because he was so pheromonally enhanced with this Extremis that she couldn’t resist him. And she was angry with Tony, and so she ...

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Truffle deflection

I've never, ever understood guys who are like, "sluts are gross, I don't want to date someone who's slept around" because...why? Although maybe I view sex a lot like leveling up in Pokemon; you learn new techniques as you do it, and occasionally evolve into a Wartortle. Wouldn't you rather date a Charizard than a Charmander? Charizard knows Fire Blast, and that's super hot. Wow, this analogy got away from me.

Original Source

I…. what?

In its trademark applications, Disney wanted exclusive domain for goods including "fruit-based snack foods", "Christmas-tree ornaments and decorations", "decorative magnets", "non-medicated toiletries" and "frozen meals consisting primarily of pasta or rice", as well as for education and entertainment purposes.

Original Source

David Bowie’s last music video had him cavorting with Tilda Swinton, but for his new clip, the Thin White Duke has doubled his celebri-quotient. “The New Day” features a robed Bowie crooning to a bar full of clergy and whores, including bishop Gary Oldman and stigmata-prone prostitute Marion Cotillard. Directed by Floria Sigismondi, the clip was written and conceived by Bowie and is just about as dark as that notion suggests. Watch below and repent.

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The Internet is full of interesting things to read outside of The A.V. Club—no, really! In our periodic Read This posts, we point you toward interesting or noteworthy pieces that caught our eye.

One of the most notable features of classic game Shadow Of The Colossus is the lack of enemies besides the 16 colossi, which leaves the rest of the game world open for exploration without fear of combat. The game is approaching a decade in age, which has given a dedicated group of players time to find every last Easter egg, glitch, and hidden area scattered throughout the world’s Forbidden Lands.

Craig Owens’ fascinating look at the Colossus community went up at Eurogamer this week—it traces the history of the search, from its beginnings as a Sisyphean quest for an additional colossus through current players using hacks to explore leftovers from the beta stages ...

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I have become intimately familiar with the sounds of my PlayStation 3 turning on. There’s a chirp from the unit, the murmur of the fan, and then a single note, played by an orchestra as if it’s warming up. I think the note is A. Let’s go with A.

It doesn’t really matter, because that last sound has come to signify the many ways at which I’m failing at my job. I’m a full-time freelance writer, which means I work from home and am required to be my own taskmaster of sorts. This means that I have the luxury to never set my alarm clock. Huzzah! But to compensate, I have constructed a convoluted system of calendar reminders and emotional self-flagellation. I’m my own boss, and my boss is a micromanager.

That system only goes so far. Without any larger structure, and lacking ...

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A regular episode of Zach Galifianakis’ web series Between Two Ferns is always cause for excitement, but the latest edition is just ridiculous. Though the four-minute clip starts out with Galifianakis grilling James “Franko” about whether he’d ever “considering hosting the Oscars properly,” and asking which of the actor’s art projects made people roll their eyes the hardest, about halfway through, Galifianakis throws to musical guest The Lonely Island.

Cue “Spring Break Anthem,” the first single from The Lonely Island’s upcoming LP, The Wack Album. At first a song about roofies, beer bongs, beads, and boobs, “Spring Break Anthem” devolves (or evolves?) into a club banger about gay marriage. As the song goes, “let’s get fucked up and then find Mr. Right and get monogamous.” After all, spring break is for “planning the menu, picking out flowers, nailing sluts, and writing our vows.”

Featuring guest appearances ...

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Please forgive the title. It’s a portmanteau of “e” and “peepholes” that was too goofy to resist and not part of the official Fifth Element canon.

When the police have an apartment in lockdown, they have a special tool to evaluate individual citizens in their apartments. It’s an electronic peephole that allows them to see and communicate with the citizen inside their apartment. To use it, a police officer places a handheld device shaped something like an iron up to the door near eye height. Pressing a button at the thumb switches a status light from green to red and opens an electronic “hole” in the door, through which the officer can see, but out of which the citizen cannot.

While the eephole is activated, the intercom between the yellow circles in which the citizen has placed his or her hands glows orange, letting them know that the call is active. Then the officer can freely interrogate the citizen.

Officer: Sir, are you classified as human?
Korben: Negative. I am a meat popsicle.

Analysis

How the device works is something of a mystery, but we have to take its results at face value. We’re concerned about the interaction, and that works OK. The device has a single handle and flat plate that fits against the door readily. The thumb button is placed so it’s easy to activate while holding it up with one hand. The fact that it’s portable rather than embedded in the door means that it can be taken away by the police after their business is done, rather than leaving it there to be hacked.

If I had to make any improvements, I would hope to make the device stick to the door so the officer could have both hands ready for his weapon should he need it, or feel more free to dodge out of the way. I would also omit any of the many glowing lights that appear extraneous, at least to what we see in this scene. I might also provide some output to the officer that the interaction is under warrant, or maybe even that it’s being being recorded, to remind them not to abuse this breach of privacy. Clearly it causes stress among the citizens subject to it.

Finally allowing Lee Daniels to take his usual broad-stroke social commentary and glop it onto a larger historical canvas, The Butler—based on the true story of White House butler Eugene Allen—aims to cram three decades’ worth of racial turbulence and stereotypical cinematic signifiers of same into one little movie. And with all the requisite shots of cotton fields, segregated drinking fountains, and Black Panther meetings, there’s barely room in this trailer for The Butler’s supposed selling point: its crazy cast of actors playing presidents that includes Robin Williams’ Dwight Eisenhower, James Marsden’s John F. Kennedy, John Cusack’s Richard Nixon, and Alan Rickman and Jane Fonda’s Ronald and Nancy Reagan. In fact, there’s hardly space for anything to live under Oprah Winfrey’s suffocating speeches, which blanket everything here in a sense of heightened melodrama as overwrought as its score. Still, such are ...

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While Late Night With Jimmy Fallon is a post-midnight haven for televised hijinks most evenings, guest John Krasinski took the show’s tomfoolery to a whole new level last night with a lip-sync battle he suggested. The Office’s Jim went head to head with Fallon acting out dramatic ditties by everyone from Melissa Manchester to Das EFX. The highlight really comes when Krasinski takes on Boyz II Men’s “I’ll Make Love To You,” but his version of Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” is pretty great, too. [via Uproxx]

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The fake metro group on Flickr is devoted entirely to “public transit maps that are completely made up.” While there is a single surface commuter train that comprises the Baghdad Metro, there’s nothing like what’s represented in this imaginary metro map, posted to the group by @nsryberg. Perhaps one day…

For too long, people have been vulnerable to having their favorite TV shows spoiled on Twitter, by others who selfishly tweet out major plot points or discuss national tragedies that just make television seem so… insignificant. Now there's solution to the first problem, at least, besides maybe not looking at Twitter all the time: A 17-year-old girl named Jennie Lamere has created an app called Twivo, which allows users to automatically filter references to TV show names and characters from their timelines, thus preventing them from seeing anything they don’t want to see on Twitter, other than the usual, non-TV bullshit.

Lamere devised Twivo for a Boston-area programming competition, winning “best in show” over her all-male competition with code that currently exists only as a browser extension for Chrome, though she’s already been approached about turning it into a standalone app. And as you can see in ...

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commanderhyo:

pffft

rachel shared this story from ZooBorns.

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witchsistah:

basedjaysuave:

The video that no one wants to mention 

Such a humble, sensitive dude who literally saved lives and all the media (white corporations) & stupid people can think to do is make a joke out of him. Black men can only be clowns or killers regardless of what we do for other people or for ourselves no matter how selflessly it’s done. 

We can literally save White people’s lives and STILL be a damn joke to the very people we saved.

I can not even wrap my heart around what honest good this man tried to do and teh foolishness he is receiving

Disgusted and saddened by all of the condescension and casual racism Charles Ramsey is enduring, both in the mainstream press, and online. This is a remarkably kind, loving, strong, GOOD man. He deserves nothing but respect. Raised with class/race privilege? Never eaten McDonald’s for dinner? Congratufuckinglations. Ramsey’s not your personal court jester. He’s a hero.http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=zRoKuoQ6gZ8#!

The Ouya team sent the gentlehands at iFixit a retail unit of the tiny Android console to rip apart and gauge its openness and repairability. IFixit found only one moving component, the fan, in the entire little box and remarked on the hardware's "very clean and simple layout."

The Ouya scored a 9 out of 10 on iFixit's Repairability scale, because it uses standard-head screws, no weird glues, and most of its components are easily removed and replaced. IFixit factored in the Ouya controller to its score, knocking it for having the joysticks soldered to the circuit board, meaning a broken stick may necessitate an entire board transplant.

Tearing down an Ouya: iFixit finds it to be easily repairable originally appeared on Joystiq on Wed, 08 May 2013 22:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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― P.G. Wodehouse

Kyle Turley's fight for the mind Page 1 of 3 | UTSanDiego.com:

Former Saints offensive lineman Kyle Turley (all-time highlight) talks about his struggles with mental illness and suicide after leaving football

I’ve never understood the preoccupation with sneaking alcohol into places. It’s not that I don’t like to drink in public; I do, it’s fun and healthy. I just don’t understand why the age-old standby of putting liquor or wine into an empty can of pop doesn’t work for anyone else but me.

Take, for example, the iPhone flask. Nothing to see here, just a weirdly-shaped black plastic box covered in iPhone stickers that I’m drinking out of! No need to smell me, officer.

As a lawyer who works in Silicon Valley and Cambridge, Massachusetts, Len Nannarone has helped his fair share of tech companies. But the most important startup he’s advised is much closer to home: his 10-year-old son, Owen, a budding inventor and entrepreneur.