Beard reappears

BBC News - The 'pushy parent' syndrome in ancient Rome

Mary Beard, the Professor of Classics whose blog at The Times used to be good value (I assume it is behind the paywall now) makes a welcome appearance at the BBC, talking about Roman families.  This bit about the useless nature of ancient doctors caught my attention:

There was no such thing in the ancient world as reliable family planning.

 Roman doctors recommended having sex in the middle of the woman's menstrual cycle if you wanted to avoid pregnancy (as we now know, precisely the time when you are most likely to get pregnant). Not to mention the range of almost completely useless contraceptive creams and potions they peddled.

The fact is there must have been vast numbers of unwanted babies. Many of them would have been literally thrown away - left out on a rubbish dump to be "rescued" maybe by a passer-by and turned into a slave.

Calculating your family size was made even more complicated by the terrifying rates of child mortality before modern medicine. In ancient Rome roughly half the kids born would have been dead by the time they were 10.

Three pieces of Slate

Three stories from Slate last week:

* Yay! A complaint about Word leads to hundreds of comments, amongst which, if you go down far enough, are ones by the hidden secret devotees (and users) of Wordperfect. This is a secret cabal to which I belong too; although I must say that I have found the latest version of Word to be much better than earlier versions for some things.

Many people in that thread mention the wonders of Reveal Codes - a Wordperfect feature that does often let you work out a formatting issue, and which Word has never implemented.

I am often amazed when I have had young people out of university, and who have never known anything other than Word, still can't solve some formatting mystery problem in the program that I assumed I couldn't fix simply due to lack of familiarity.

Long may Wordperfect live (it's still updated every 2nd year or so, you know.)

* A complaint about tattoos also makes claims close to my heart (and is rather brave. Mentioning strong dislike of this trend is usually met with some very rabid insults about how us clean skins just don't understand.)

But what is most interesting is that part - a link to an article about research on the possible health consequences of some of the stuff in tattoo inks. I mentioned this before here. Doesn't sound so hot.

* American teenage birthrate is down, and it seems due to increased use of contraception.

I put it down to the decline of the influence of Sex and the City too. Maybe the second movie was so bad that it convinced teenagers who saw it that the show never got sex and relationships right.

Digital cinema and what it means

Movie Studios Are Forcing Hollywood to Abandon 35mm Film. But the Consequences of Going Digital Are Vast, and Troubling 

A few months ago when I went to one of the big, refurbished, cinema complexes (which I usually avoid in favour of cheaper venues), it looked to me as if they must have gotten into digital projection.  The bright looking result looked pretty good to me, and I assumed that it must indicate that Australian cinemas were finally following the US trend I had been seen mentioned on the 'net over the last couple of years.

The big attraction for studios is that digital distribution saves an enormous amount of money in printing copies of movies on film and couriering them all over the country.

Yet, I had also read that Spielberg (amongst other directors) does not want to shoot on digital cameras.  His films are still shot on film and then converted to digital format.   But increasing, I think,  films (especially special effects heavy ones) are made with digital cameras too.

Anyway, the changes this all means to the movie making business are all set out in interesting detail in the above article.

One of the most surprising things is that, as with computer file format wars generally, the movie industry doesn't have its act together on this yet:

 And even after the films are converted to digital, Jan-Christopher Horak, director of the UCLA Film & Television Archive, calls the challenges of preserving them "monumental." Digital is lousy for long-term storage.

The main problem is format obsolescence. File formats can go obsolete in a matter of months. On this subject, Horak's every sentence requires an exclamation mark. "In the last 10 years of digitality, we've gone through 20 formats!" he says. "Every 18 months we're getting a new format!"

So every two years, data must be transferred, or "migrated," to a new device. If that doesn't happen, the data may never being accessible again. Technology can advance too far ahead.

Anyhow, I just found the whole article a good read.

Climate change, probabilities, etc

Well, the scientific debate about how to properly think about the effects of climate change continues.

John Nielsen-Gammon makes a point about the extraordinarily warm March in much of the US not being quite as extraordinary as it seems. But in doing so, he seems to play into the hands of skeptics whose inclination has long been to shrug shoulders and say things like "what, so global warming might only add 1 degree to what was already a heatwave? Big deal."

Michael Tobis has a problem with this approach, and has a post with a good analogy, and some important diagrams.

And over at AGW Observer, a whole batch of papers looking at the Russian heat wave of 2010. Even Nielsen-Gammon seems to like this paper in that list, which gives a good explanation of how you can reconcile apparently conflicting statements about climate change and the heatwave.

Update: and as if on cue, a person commenting at John N-G's blog takes exactly the wrong message in the way that I (and others in the thread) thought would happen. It should be obvious which one I mean.

Unhealthy expeditions

Mind Hacks notes an extract from a 2008 Lancet article on mental health issues that arose during polar expeditions. I don't recall hearing about the last one before:

Frequently, the entire crew of a polar expedition would experience melancholy and depression, as was the case of the Belgica expedition to Antarctica in 1898–99. As described by the great polar explorer and expedition physician, Frederick A Cook, “The curtain of blackness which has fallen over the outer world of icy desolation has descended upon the inner world of our souls. Around the tables, in the laboratory, and in the forecastle, men are sitting about sad and dejected, lost in dreams of melancholy from which, now and then, one arouses with an empty attempt at enthusiasm.”

Cook tried to treat these symptoms by having crew members sit in front of large blazing fires. This baking treatment, as he called it, could be the first recorded attempt to use light therapy to treat symptoms of winter depression or seasonal affective disorder. Other expeditions, such as the Greely expedition of 1881–84, met a far worse fate than the Belgica exploration. In their attempt to establish a scientific base on Ellsmere Island in the Arctic, the crew of the Greely expedition was driven to mutiny, madness, suicide, and cannibalism, leaving six survivors of a crew of 25 men.

This interesting looking site "Time to Eat the Dogs" (about science, history and exploration) does say that there were "rumours" of cannibalism on the Greely expedition that circulated in the press at the time. Certainly, one man was executed for stealing shrimp from the communal mess pot. Mind you, they were stuck in the Arctic for 3 years before rescue. No wonder they got stressed.

British humour

Well, that went against expectations.

Over Easter, I took the kids to see the latest Aardman film, Pirates! - Band of Misfits. It got a very high 91% approval rating at Rottentomatoes from British and Australian critics; I liked Wallace and Gromit in their movie and TV outings; what could go wrong?

I thought it was pretty awful. Somehow, the jokes were obvious but just not laugh-out-loud, or even charmingly witty. You virtually had to be an adult to get most of them, but even then, they just came across as a bit, I don't know, trying too hard? Certainly, you could tell from the increasing restlessness of the younger members of the audience that the film was just not hitting that target at all. My kids said afterwards that it was only so-so. At least it gave me an opportunity to talk about Charles Darwin and evolution, but a springboard for some mild education is not why one goes to see an Aardman film.

Then today, my wife had hired Johnny English Reborn on DVD for the night (it's school holidays still). I knew it got so-so reviews (38% on Rottentomatoes) and (I now know) made an embarrassing $8,000,000 at the US cinema. (It made more than that in Australia alone.)

Yet we enjoyed it a lot. It's a well crafted, good looking movie with just the right mix of witty satire of James Bond and outright silliness, all without the excessive crudeness of the Austin Powers movies.

Strange how expectations can be upended.

Drug reform and economics

A week or two ago, the issue of drug law reform was again in the news because some advocacy group no one had heard much of before put out a bit of PR stuff about how a panel had met (largely comprising retired politicians, it seems) and decided the "war on drugs" had failed and there should be reform.

When I actually looked at their glossy press release, I thought it was remarkably lightweight and hardly worth the attention. One prominent person on the panel, Dr Alex Wodak, has been calling for drug easing for decades, although how he expects it to help the already heavy drug using population of inner Sydney that he treats has never been clear to me.

Anyway, I was quite happy to see on the weekend that a sort of backlash against the wooliness of this exercise appeared in both Fairfax and News Limited.

Bruce Guthrie wrote:

I am still wondering how the release of their wafer-thin report got the whole country talking about surrendering to illicit drugs. I'm left to conclude that the one-day wonder - for it flamed, burned and went out in less than 24 hours - spoke more to the state of media malleability than it did to our drug laws.

The product of a think tank called Australia21, the basis for its call seemed to be little more than a round table at which a bunch of retirees talked about what they should have done about the drug problem when they had jobs that empowered them to do it - people such as former West Australian premier Geoff Gallop and former federal police commissioner Mick Palmer.

But for real detail on why drug law reform should not remove prohibition, have a look at Henry Ergas' column in the Australian, and (perhaps more importantly, since he links to his source material), his blog entry.

I had not realised that there were economists had considered the question in such detail. While I am generally suspicious of Ergas, as he appears to be climate change skeptic and has devoted much time to criticism of the Gillard carbon pricing scheme, his take on drugs is detailed and (it seems to me) well argued.

I would also point out that you can tell that the issue is a complicated one when you even get strong disagreement on the issue amongst the readers of soft Left blog Larvatus Prodeo.

[And here's news: when checking that LP link, I just saw that the blog is ceasing to exist. Quite a surprise, even though it had become pretty dull in the last couple of years.]

CO2 coming first and last

Shakun et al. Clarify the CO2-Temperature Lag

Skeptical Science has a good explanation here of the recent paper in Nature which looked afresh at the question of whether CO2 increases preceded or followed the start of the bout of global warming that ended the last glacial period 18,000 years ago.

Nothing coming from nothing critiqued

‘A Universe From Nothing,’ by Lawrence M. Krauss - NYTimes.com

Found via Not Even Wrong, this review attacking Krauss' key idea in his book ""Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing" is well worth reading.   The key point:

Where, for starters, are the laws of quantum mechanics themselves supposed to have come from? Krauss is more or less upfront, as it turns out, about not having a clue about that. He acknowledges (albeit in a parenthesis, and just a few pages before the end of the book) that every­thing he has been talking about simply takes the basic principles of quantum mechanics for granted. “I have no idea if this notion can be usefully dispensed with,” he writes, “or at least I don’t know of any productive work in this regard.”

But you should read it all.

Snakes and spiders (or at least, snake and spider)

I got quite a surprise today when outside to see if the possum was home (in her hidey hole under the deck just outside the front door).    A rather large (well, about a metre, which is large enough) snake on the rocky garden bed spotted me before I spotted it, and shot off at high speed in front of my feet into the bushes.    Snakes going past me at a distance of 50 cm or less is too close for comfort, no matter what species they are.

The good thing, I suppose, is that  although it was out of sight very quickly, I did at least get to see that it was pretty much a uniform olive green colour, and looking at this website, I would be inclined to think it was a common green tree snake, which is non venomous.   Most of the dangerous snakes seem to have some pattern or banding on them, although the potentially dangerous yellow-faced whip snake seems devoid of pattern too.   In fact, now that I look at this other site, the whip snake seems a distinct possibility.  I mean, do green tree snakes end up on the ground very often? 

Despite living in this house for about 8 years now, with rather large bushes and trees in the front, and bushy neighbours’ gardens, as well as rats in the roof and (sometimes) seen in the back yard, this is the first snake of any kind I’ve ever encountered.  I’m sure they must be around, but out of sight out of mind is the best policy as far as snakes are concerned.

As for spiders, this one was sitting prominently in the sun this afternoon, and stayed still for a close up with my cheapish camera.  

The body colours remind me a bit of the patterns of Jupiter. (Just a little.):

It would appear to be a female St Andrews Cross spider.  Now you know.

Fear of white

A review of White Bread, a new book about our nation’s fear of flour. - Slate Magazine

What an interesting story told here about the history of white bread, and how it's been the subject of much condemnation well before my lifetime.  Some extracts:

 As Aaron Bobrow-Strain makes clear in his epically well-researched White Bread, our culture’s tendency to focus what we as individuals put in our mouths often goes along with classism and xenophobia. Just as whole wheat acolytes pity white-trash white-bread eaters, and gluten-free converts showcase their discipline through vegetables and lean proteins, so, too, did turn-of- the-century crusaders attempt to spread the gospel of good food to less enlightened masses.

Between 1890 and 1930, Bobrow-Strain writes, Americans transitioned almost completely from homemade bread to store bought bread—and specifically to bread made in large factories. Hygiene fears were a major reason. The emerging understanding of germ science led pure food crusaders to preach against the dangers of mother’s kitchen, which couldn’t hope to achieve the level of cleanliness of a large bread factory, nor the heat necessary to kill the “yeast germs.” “You and your little oven cannot compete,” one newspaper article informed women after the turn of the century. Scientists and food reformers also warned against mom-and-pop bakeries, whose reputation for substituting cheap substances like chalk and alum was further undermined by the presence of so many swarthy immigrant workers, whose hygiene was considered suspect.

White bread, untouched by human hands and carefully wrapped for hygienic transport, became a symbol of purity....

But during the '20s and '30s, the nation was gripped by panic over white bread. A wave of experts with questionable pedigrees began warning about white bread’s nutritional content, harkening back to the teachings of 19^th-century ascetic Sylvester Graham, who believed that refining wheat undermined God’s intent. (Graham had a number of interesting theories, including that consumption of meat, seasonings and rich foods lead to rampant masturbation.)

Dietician and radio show host Alfred W. McCann claimed that 400,000 children a year were sent to “little graves” because they were raised on white bread. Food pundits said that white bread could cause blindness and disfigurement. A 1912 article in a journal called “Life and Health” made the dubious claim that in countries where there was no white bread, there was no cancer. Bobrow-Strain writes that white bread was implicated in a slew of illnesses including “diabetes, criminal delinquency, tuberculosis … rheumatism, liver disease, kidney failure …” White bread’s fortunes sunk, and bakers, who preferred white flour in part because it was cheaper to mill and could be stored longer, were beside themselves.

The article goes on to explain that the food industry got pro-active, and by the 1940's, adding vitamins was one way they successfully fought against the anti-white cranks.   (Actually, as a child, I don't recall seeing any brand of bread advertising its additives, like they do now.  Maybe Australia never succumbed to fear of white bread?)

All very interesting.

More religion reading

I've been looking around for religious themed stuff for Easter.

Slate is having a hard time coming up with anything new. They have again posted a 2008 story on early Christian understanding of the resurrection, and I see that I linked to as a result of their 2010 re-posting of it.

I guess it is a bit of a challenge coming up with new ideas about it; unless, of course, you come up with something like the image on a cloth causing a whole misunderstanding. (See a few posts down below.)

In other religion stuff on the net, I see that Stephen Crittenden has been writing articles at the Global Mail website, and they are pretty good. One is a summary of the story about the forced resignation of Bishop Morris of Toowoomba (a story about which I have always had some trouble finding the details); and a somewhat more critical than I expected review of the troubled leadership of recently resigned Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. (Williams is only 61, I learned to my surprise. His eyebrows seem decades older than that.)

I only know of Crittenden because of his hosting the (now axed) Religion Report on ABC's Radio National, but I see from his Global Mail profile that his background is more in arts and culture generally. He's not snobbish about it, though, writing a piece about how much he likes the Simpsons. (He notes with approval some American analysis that points to the way it both satirises but re-affirms the nuclear family. As I have been watching it in re-runs a little more often lately, and catching up with episodes and evolving storylines over the years since I stopped regularly watching it, the number of times the show does this has been on my mind lately. I was also pretty surprised that the Simpson's Movie was so sympathetic to Flanders, given the degree to which he is routinely satirised for extreme religious conservatism.)

Anyway, I've strayed off religion haven't I...

How about this: a blog post from England about the question of why the Catholic Church still seems a little leery of cremation. However, given that, as with the writer of that post, I know of a Catholic Church with a newly installed columbarium (a place for keeping the ashes), it does seem that at the parish level, accommodation with cremation is being made (literally).

Evil rabbits

Someone at Fairfax has gone through an Easter slideshow at AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com* and picked out some good evil Easter Bunny photos.

Some people clearly have no idea when it comes to costume design.

* a site which is premised on a good idea, but which seems to show that too much of a good idea is sometimes too much.

The world catches up with me

Hydrogen Storage Could Be Key to Germany's Energy Plans - Technology Review

I've asked this question years ago (it got a mention at this very blog in 2007):  couldn't you potentially get around the "unreliable base load" issue with large scale solar power (at least for plants built near a permanent water supply) by devoting a portion of the electricity being produced on a good sunny day to electrolysing water into hydrogen, storing it, and then burning it to get a gas turbine going for a rainy day?

Seems that it wasn't such a stupid idea after all:

If Germany is to meet its ambitious goals of getting a third of its electricity from renewable energy by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050, it must find a way to store huge quantities of electricity in order to make up for the intermittency of renewable energy.

Siemens says it has just the technology: electrolyzer plants, each the size of a large warehouse, that split water to make hydrogen gas. The hydrogen could be used when the wind isn't blowing to generate electricity in gas-fired power plants, or it could be used to fuel cars.

Producing hydrogen is an inefficient way to store energy—about two-thirds of the power is lost in the processes of making the hydrogen and using the hydrogen to generate electricity. But Siemens says it's the only storage option that can achieve the scale that's going to be needed in Germany.

Unlike conventional industrial electrolyzers, which need a fairly steady supply of power to efficiently split water, Siemens's new design is flexible enough to run on intermittent power from wind turbines. It's based on proton-exchange membrane technology similar to that used in fuel cells for cars, which can operate at widely different power levels. The electrolyzers can also temporarily operate at two to three times their rated power levels, which could be useful for accommodating surges in power on windy days. 

Some day my rightful place as CEO in charge of the Earth will be recognized by the planet, or at least aliens reading this blog who may have a better chance of installing me to that position.  They need to get a move on, though.

Improving mouse houses

Animal testing: Be nice to mice… | The Economist

Quite a charming report here with mouse information that's news to me:

Although medical science’s favourite critters relish temperatures of a little over 30°C, laboratories routinely keep them at five or ten degrees below that. This is not in order to torture the beasts but, rather, because when kept warm they are unmanageably aggressive. The downside is that they have to eat more than they otherwise would, in order to keep their bodies warm. That changes their physiology. And that in turn alters the way they metabolise drugs, with possibly confusing results.

The report then notes a study suggesting that labs don't have to increase temperatures to get them responding better to drugs; they just have to provide them with paper with which to build nests.   

Nice.

In the toilet

Hey, it's Easter, which always calls for its fair share of religion posts.

Does it count if it at least comes from Biblical Archaeology Review? Yes, that's enough of a connection for me. (The magazine is often pretty interesting reading, actually.)

Today I am recommending: First Person: Privies and Privacy

It's a quick look at some of the history of privacy while attending to one's daily toilet needs, and makes this observation:

We have long known that ancient notions of privacy are different from ours. But how different and in what ways remain far from clear. At several Roman-period sites, like Ephesus, Rome and Pompeii, archaeologists have found long benches with rows of adjacent toilet seats with no provision for privacy. What is less well known is that these provisions were not for the ordinary person but were for the elite.

Which leads me to another observation: The higher the social station, the less concern for privacy. Which brings me back to Eglon (and Henri III): Royalty was unconcerned with privacy. But the issue may not have been privacy at all. Royalty could do what it wanted. What might be distasteful for the average person was a prerogative of status. What would be offensive to or for the average person was permitted to royalty—indeed, may even have been a mark of privilege.

Well, that's interesting, when in the more modern setting, lack of toilet privacy is generally seem as something that de-emphasises privileged status. I remember as a child being surprised when watching the 1950's movie "No Time for Sergeants" on TV, which featured a key sequence involving a barracks latrine. The thing was, this was a row of toilet seats with no privacy screening at all; something which I thought was taking military group cohesion a little too far. (You can it on a short video clip here.) Attending to this in the field is one thing, but making barracks with no toilet privacy seems quite another.

In fact, while everyone is aware that no privacy while showering was long a feature of public swimming pools and sports locker rooms, I have never known of anywhere where there was a lack of privacy for defecation.

Anyway, this also reminds of a recent story from India, a country renowned for its lack of toilets:

New data from the country's 2011 census shows 59% of Indian households have a mobile phone. Only 47% have a toilet on the premises (and that includes pit latrines that don't use running water).

Lack of toilet privacy is certainly no sign of higher status in that country.

So ideas of privacy change. I wonder what ancient Romans would think of someone doing the equivalent of posting about their sex life on Facebook, or a newspaper column. It would be the equivalent of having a board in the public square where you could pin notices about it, I guess, and might have been thought of as rather unedifying. I hope so, anyway.

The odd explanations for the inspiration for Christianity

Mystery solved? Turin Shroud linked to Resurrection of Christ - Telegraph

I meant to post about this a couple of weeks ago but forgot. Now I see that Australian breakfast television is doing a story on it for Easter Sunday morning. How odd.

Anyhow, short version: Cambridge art historian believes the Shroud of Turin is authentically the shroud in which Jesus was buried, but:

It was, suggests de Wesselow, seeing the Shroud in the days immediately after the crucifixion, rather than any encounter with a flesh and blood, risen Christ, that convinced the apostles that Jesus had come back from the dead.

As The Telegraph link above further explains:

What the apostles were seeing was the image of Jesus on the Shroud, which they then mistook for the real thing. It sounds, I can’t help suggesting, as absurd as a scene from a Monty Python film.

“I quite understand why you say that,” he replies, meeting me half way this time, “but you have to think your way into the mindset of 2,000 years ago. The apostles did see something out of the ordinary, the image on the cloth.

“And at that time – this is something that art historians and anthropologists know about – people were much less used to seeing images. They were rare and regarded as much more special than they are now.

“There was something Animist in their way of looking at images in the first century. Where they saw shadows and reflections, they also saw life. They saw the image on the cloth as the living double of Jesus.

“Back then images had a psychological presence, they were seen as part of a separate plane of existence, as having a life of their own.”

How does this rank with other "out there" theories for what inspired the establishment of Christianity? I would say: better than "The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross", the very 1960's inspired idea that the whole Christ thing was (more or less) one big hallucinatory story spread by "magic mushroom" folk of the middle east. As Wikipedia notes about the author (and his book, which was pretty big in its day):

The reaction to The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross ruined Allegro's career.[3][4] His detractors considered his somewhat sensationalist approach deplorable and his arguments somewhere between unconvincing and ludicrous.

The "Shroud of Turin is the resurrection" theory I would also rank above Barbara Thiering's so-called "pesher technique" reinterpretation of the New Testament, which caught the imagination of a certain type of ABC religious types in Australia in the early 1990's. (I seem to recall her getting quite a run on shows hosted by Geraldine Doogue.) I have just found this handy summary of the deficiencies of the professor's theory from the New York Review of Books:

Professor Barbara Thiering’s reinterpretation of the New Testament, in which the married, divorced, and remarried Jesus, father of four, becomes the “Wicked Priest” of the Dead Sea Scrolls, has made no impact on learned opinion. Scroll scholars and New Testament experts alike have found the basis of the new theory, Thiering’s use of the so-called “pesher technique,” without substance. The Qumran pesher—the word itself means “interpretation”—is a form of Bible exegesis which seeks to determine the significance of an already existing prophetic text by pointing to its fulfillment in persons and events belonging to the age of the interpreter. Professor Thiering, by contrast, turns the sequence upside down, and claims that the authors of the New Testament composed the Gospel story so that pesher technique could subsequently be fastened to it.

So, it's a bit of a step up from those theories: at least it acknowledges Jesus existed, and doesn't rely on the Apostles being off their face on magic mushrooms every second day. But still, it ranks quite highly on the implausibility stakes.

Botanic gardens, Brisbane

Looking on the bright side, I guess...

Indian girls become child brides instead of prostitutes. - Slate Magazine

India is a country still, shall we say, in need of some social reform:

  India accounts for more than 40 percent of the world’s child-marriage cases, according to a recent UNICEF report. But, this wedding and betrothal ceremony is actually a welcome event. That’s because these girls are the youngest generation of the Saraniya community, a nomadic Indian tribe that had once traveled with the Maharaja, where the men had sharpened swords and made weaponry while the women had "entertained” the troops. When India achieved independence in 1947, the Saraniyas found themselves out of work, and for lack of options, returned to prostitution as a means to support their community.

Over time the community became dependent on the income from prostitution. Although the government had allotted the Saraniyas some land, the former entertainers didn’t know much about farming, especially daunting on land without water, working wells, or any sort of irrigation facilities. Faced with a drought and no work, the number of sex workers pushed into the hundreds as villagers recruited new girls into its fold at age 10 or 12. “If a daughter is not engaged or married by the time she’s 10 years old, she’ll be pushed into the flesh trade,” says Mittal Patel, secretary of Vicharta Samuday Samarthan Manch, an Ahmedabad-based NGO that works in the community. Often it’s the mothers who did the pushing, as the families were desperate for some income.

The solar system's GPS

How interstellar beacons could help future astronauts find their way across the universe

Maybe I've heard of something similar before, but what a neat idea:  using x-rays from pulsars as a sort of GPS system for spaceships travelling the solar system and beyond. 

Could be accurate to within a few km, according to the article.  Provided you're not trying to land your spaceship with it, that sounds pretty accurate.