Haringey Paleontology Museum in reduced circumstances

The Museum's glass display cases from the side


The Haringey Paleontology Museum's collection of over 300 scale model dinosaurs (and skeletons, and other prehistoric animals that aren't dinosaurs) has been forced to move from its current accommodation in Haringey, just round the corner from The Salisbury pub.



Sauropods (left), Cetiosaurus (in dark blue, a British sauropod, by Invicta, for the Natural History Museum, centre) and one of the Haringey collection's more recent acquisitions, a Siberian mammoth skeleton. Photo from a couple of weeks ago, when they were all still on display.


Birds and dino-birds from the Haringey collection, including a 1980s "terror bird" in purple and an Archaeopteryx, with some miscellaneous armoured dinosaurs (bottom, centre).



The Hall of Therapods. The big one is a Gigantosaurus, and the grey-green one on the left with the narrowish snout and the ridge along its back is a rare Acrocanthosaurus model. There are also overflows from the iguanodonts (front, to the left) and from the Hall of Mammals, including Andrewsarchus (the one that looks like a dog) and a modern aardvark.


Well over a dozen Dimetrodons, left, including one dating from the early 1960s that I found in the garden. Other non-dinosaur reptiles are shown, including a rare Longisquama model from Poundland, Moschops (a licensed Marx retread from Dapol from their factory shop in Llangollen, and several takes on mammal-like reptile Cynognathus. And some modern reptiles.



In the centre is a rather expensive Kaidyo model of a Camarasaurus all the way from Japan.



The diplodocus annex.


Iguanadonts, some in the kangaroo-like pose of early 1970s reconstructions. Centre left is a rare Camptosaurus model by Mini-Machines.



Numerous ceratopsians and iguanadonts.


Top left: headbutting dinosaurs including Stygmoloch, centre: terror birds, bottom right: ankylosaurs, nodosaurs, Scelidosaurus, armoured dinosaurs. Background right: standing Diplodocus model by Safari. The big, mostly white long-necked mammal is a very expensive indriocothere (aka Baluchitherium).



The Hall of Marine Reptiles




The Pterosaur Wing


Therapods, including "strange therapods", Baryonyx, and a scratch-built Crylophosaurus conversion (with yellow crest,from a pound shop Dilophosaurus). In the background in various shades of grey is an obscure Delta Dromeaosaurus



Top left: Camarasaurus, case of therapods at the top, top right: an obscure ceratopsian and a Natural History Museum Troodon, in the case at the bottom left: giant ground sloth (a Marx Toys knock-off?), Brontotherium (ditto?), Saltasaurus, Triceratops, head of a Plateosaurus.

The collection, some of whose dinosaur models date to the early 1960s, was mostly built-up when cheap dinos flooded the market in the wake of the first Jurassic Park film. A surprising number of really obscure species of dinosaur turn up as models on sale in poundshops to this day.

Negotiations are currently under way for a limited Haringey Museum of Paleontology display, that will eventually be established in Finsbury Park. In its new form, it will be a rotating display, with - for examples - "This month: therapods" or "This month: Dimetrodons" or "This month: prehistoric probiscidians", or "This month: Dinosaurs from Africa" or some such.


Some of the Museum's collection already boxed up for the move.

For another Haringey Museum facing homelessness,the Haringey Museum of Egytpology for Under £5, see here.

Belief in genies ‘helps English’

From the EL Gazette archives. This appeared in EL Gazette back in 2012.
(My recent news stories for EL Gazette are now here).


TRADITIONAL BELIEF in djinns – genies or supernatural beings created out of ‘smokeless fire’ and mentioned in the Koran – is helping candidates pass English exams in the Klang Valley surrounding the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur, according to national newspaper the Star, quoting the local Harian Metro newspaper.

For 350 Malaysian ringgit (£72), local bomoh (shamans) reportedly sell a charm made from a betel leaf, which they claim contains the spirit of a djinn.

A student giving his name as Azman testified to djinn’s power in getting him through English exams at the unnamed institute of higher learning where he studied, saying, ‘It does not matter if others believe in it or not. But for my friends and I, the results proved it is effective.’

Another student, ‘Rashid’, said djinn charms had improved his English exam performance from the ‘borderline passes’ he previously achieved, and knew of ten other satisfied djinn charm customers.

Haringey Museum of Egyptology for Under £5 faces uncertain future

ONE OF THE London Borough of Haringey's lesser-known museums, the Haringey Museum of Egyptology for Under £5, faces an uncertain future as its owner prepares to move out of his flat in St Ann's Ward.

The by-appointment-only Museum has showcased Egyptology gathered from the secondhand shops of the capital over many years, as well as some items that were briefly on special offer in souvenir shops around the British Museum, and from poundshops as far away as Dalston.

This sarcophagus pencil case, priced at well under £5, is a recent acquisition

Now, as London rents become beyond ludicrous, the collection has to move out of its current location on top of the wardrobe, with a particularly popular attraction - the poundshop Anubis collection - housed in a special annex on top of the chest of drawers, which it shares with the Hall of Globes. (See also here.)

The poundshop Anubis collection was one of the Museum's particularly big draws. Also shown is the Hall of Globes, also acquired cheaply from charity shops

The current collection features numerous takes on Rameses, Nefertiti, sphinxes, several versions of the cat goddess Bast, one particularly cheap-looking plastic representation of the god Horus, and some artefacts that appear to have actually come form modern Egypt, via secondhand shops. The news of the collection's imminent move has put on hold an imminent acquisition from Norway, where the curator's brother assures him that every Norwegian over 40, particularly the slightly flakey ones, went on holiday in Egypt before the revolution, resulting in the charity shops of Oslo being absolutely jammed with Egyptology tat for only a few kronor a piece.

The Museum's collection may now have to go into storage in a probably not very big box. There are negotiations underway aimed at finding the Museum a temporary home in Islington, while other talks are in progress around the possibility of a temporary Suffolk Coastal District Museum of Egyptology for Under £5. A third possibility is a permanent Finsbury Park Museum of Low Priced Egyptology somewhere on the borders of Haringey and Islington.

In a previous incarnation at another address in Haringey, the Egyptology Collection was curated by Smute the cat (below), an expert on the 18th and 19th dynasties in particular

Photos: Copyright Matt Salusbury. Original Egyptian sculptures understood to be out of copyright

From the pages of Fortean Times

There's an index of my articles that have appeared in Fortean Times over the years here

Writing English Language Teaching books by algorithm?​

MATT SALUSBURY
writes

(This first appeared in EL Gazette, April 2013)




MACHINES that can write language learning coursebooks? It’s not as sci-fi as it sounds. A California-based business professor has developed a cottage industry in books generated by algorithms.



An algorithm-like very hard sum

Unlike the months or even years that language learning books take to develop, books written by Professor Phil Parker’s Method and Apparatus for Automated Authoring and Marketing
(Maaam) program are authored from scratch ‘in about twenty minutes or so’, and he’s cut development costs per title down to 15–20 US cents. Should the ELT publishing industry tremble at the prospect of its business model being destroyed overnight, replaced by titles churned out by the hour by a ‘method and apparatus’ that can do the job for pennies?

Well, no – not for the moment at least – but the phenomenon is still one to watch.

The Gazette attempted to contact Prof Parker via the INSEAD business school in Fontainebleau, France, where he is chair professor of management science. The faculty secretary told us that the
professor’s duties had taken him to Dubai, but that he would be in touch with us by email on his
return. We still await his reply.

Meanwhile, a video interview with him on INSEAD's website explains in detail how he machine-writes his books. The secret, he says in the interview is deconstructing ‘genres’ and ‘sub-genres’.

Maaam writes ‘certain very particular types of books’, for example ‘high-end business reports’ of over 200 pages – the sort that would normally be written by the likes of accountants Price Waterhouse Coopers. Maaam works by ‘reverse engineering what a financial analyst does’, in Prof Parker’s words. The program then does ‘quick editing of itself’ using small computer scripts to sort out ‘dangling widows’ and other typography that needs cleaning up.

Having cracked the ‘genre’ of business reports, he was able to use tools to other genres – limericks, sonnets, botanical factsheets, radio scripts for educational programmes for farmers, and then language learning books – and ‘develop the application for that sub-genres.'

His novel business model entails him putting his books on Amazon in the expectation that the vast majority of them don’t sell any copies, ‘but there’s enough that sell to enough people’ to finance the next project to ‘create another genre’.



In the event that someone does want to buy one of his many titles, Prof Parker’s books are printed on demand ‘someplace in Tennessee’. Automated software does the marketing for Prof Parker too, as well as the distribution and online advertising of works with snappy titles such as The 2007 Import and Export Market for Waste and Scrap of Unbleached Kraft Paper or Paperboard or of Corrugated Paper of Paperboard in Spain.



US-based dictionary publishers Webster’s are partners on Prof Parker for some language titles, including the Webster’s Online Dictionary: The Rosetta Edition. But the range of algorithm-generated language learning books offered is currently somewhat limited, restricted to compilations of bilingual crosswords (clues in one language, eliciting answers in another), and bilingual thesaurus dictionaries in languages for which little by way of teaching materials exists. No global coursebook series publisher need break into a sweat over Prof Parker’s Webster’s Sorbian (Upper Dialect) – English Thesaurus Dictionary or Webster’s Xhosa to English Crossword Puzzles: Level 1.



Prof Parker sees his algorithm-generated books as an activity in his spare time, but were a major multinational educational publisher to put some serious resources into algorithm-generated ELT books, one could imagine some sort of algorithm arms race, with competitors developing ever more sophisticated tools in this area.

Meanwhile, recent tech start-ups such as Palantir, Kaggle and Narrative Science are able to produce news stories from raw data through algorithms, freeing up journalists for more important tasks. And the iBooks 2 platform for textbooks on iPads already has a function that randomly generates ‘digital flashcards’ to test students’ understanding.

It’s in the area of taking the slog out of ELT textbook development, the grammer drills and so on – thereby liberating human textbook authors to concentrate on the creative side of the operation – that book-writing algorithms may become ubiquitous in ELT publishing.



Images for the purposes of a critique or review - Copyright, Trademarks and Patents Act 1988)

Pygmy Elephants - the book. Out now!

Just before Christmas, my first book for quarter of a century was published.

Yes, Pygmy Elephants - on the track of the world's largest dwarfs is out now, by Matt Salusbury, published by CFZ Press.

see the Pygmy Elephants blog for more, and for details of how to get a copy.

There's also a Pygmy Elephants, the book, Twitter feed.

Keep an eye on these for details of the London launch party!

The End of the World (book review)

This first appeared in Fortean Times FT 309, Christmas 2013

The End of the World
Reverend Billy
OR Books, New York and London, 2012
118 pages, illustrated
pb and e-book, 118pp, illus, refs, £7.00, ISBN 978-1-935928-93-5



The Rev Billy (left) and the Stop Shopping Choir at a summer 2013 "happening" outside Freedom Bookshop in Angel Alley, Whitechapel, during one of their occasional visits to London. Photo: copyright Matt Salusbury

REFRESHINGLY different to all that misanthropic Armageddon porn swirling around of late, The End of The World suggests we may already be at the "global going-crazy tipping point" of an already unfolding consumerism-fuelled climate change enviro-apocalypse, the "Shopocalypse." While most prophets of doom display an unhealthy relish at the prospect of unbelievers engulfed by extreme weather events or whatever, the Rev's take on the End of the World is strangely uplifting, with an obvious love of people and of life, even if all life on earth is about to disappear.

Its surreal gallows humour would melt the heart of the most curmudgeonly lizard-bothering End Times freak, with The End heralded by an imagined "white-hot two-day blowout sale as Best Buy" and by the appearance of new eco-disaster cash-in products like "drowning Elmo toys." A wonderfully vivid opening scene relates non-stop breaking news pay-per-view reality disaster movies still playing on the i-Phones clutched in the cold, dead hands in the piled-up mounds of corpses when it's all over. But there's a serious side, US Geographical Survey data on "the widespread mortality of their forests" also gets a look in.

As Rev. Billy reminds us, "We are part of the tornado," urging the reader to take personal responsibility for the coming Shopocalypse, and to take steps to avert a climate change Armageddon through political activism, or as his Church of Stop Shopping Choir so succinctly put it, "Changealujah!" The Rev. Billy's the alter ego of New York actor and street performer Bill Talen, and the Church of Stop Shopping's "Forest Faith" enviro-creed owes more to Occupy Wall Street than to any of "the disastrous religions."

Nor is it a haranguing "I'm better than you" critique from the sidelines – the Rev. Billy and his associates have actually gone out and done some of the things The End of the World describes – one chapter recounts an impromptu assembly held by Occupy mass-arrestees in underground cell under a New York police station, another a guerrilla Thanksgiving dinner in the lobby of the Bank of America.

The End of the World will fit neatly in your pocket, and its "impossible" poetry is up there with the best bits of the Beat Poets, but with much better gags.

VERDICT: 9 OUT OF 10

EXTRAORDINARY. PRAISEALUJAH!