Reptiles in ancient Egypt
鈥淒id prehistoric people consider themselves as equals or unequals?鈥� asks from 2020. The question is broader than it may appear. An earlier study by the same scientist suggests that some of those people weren鈥檛 people. It suggests they were reptiles.
Archaeologist Emmanuelle Honor茅 at the Free University of Brussels in Belgium studied ancient drawings and paintings found on rocks in south-west Egypt. About 900 of those look like stencilled outlines of hands, but in a report from 2016, Honor茅 and her colleagues noted that 13 of the hands are 鈥渜uite tiny鈥�. The report, , was published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. It says: 鈥淭iny hands have previously been considered to belong to human babies. We challenge this identification鈥� Evidence suggest [sic] that the hand stencils belong to an animal, most probably a reptile.鈥�
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The researchers reached their conclusion by measuring the tiny-hand drawings and comparing them with the measurements of hands of 鈥渓iving pre-term babies鈥�. The tiny 鈥渉ands鈥�, they decided, are probably made by tracing the feet of young lizards or crocodiles.
Honor茅鈥檚 later study sidesteps the earlier reptiles-or-humans question. Its arguments take an on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand approach to the equals-or-unequals issue, and make use only of the larger 鈥� evidently human 鈥� stencil-drawn hands, not the tiny, maybe-reptile extremities (or paws, or whatever). The study鈥檚 final sentence urges further research, 鈥渂earing in mind that different kinds of archaeological evidence can also be in contradiction鈥�.
The joys of accounting
Almost by tradition, people assume that accounting is boring. And that accountants are, too.
Those assumptions may be very wrong. Consider the essay titled , which Geoffrey Whittington at the University of Cambridge presented as a lecture in 1995. So intense was the provocation that the paper has since been cited in more than 20 publications 鈥� an average of around one citation per year.
Others in the profession argue that accounting and accountants aren鈥檛 boring enough. And that there is too much floccinaucinihilipilification.
What is this? The answer is plain to anyone who reads the study by Raymond Chambers at the University of Sydney, published in the Australian Accounting Review in 1996 on the heels of Whittington鈥檚 thunderation.
Chambers explained: 鈥淔loccinaucinihilipilification is the habit of treating things as trivial, as of no account鈥� Treating significant differences between things as of no account is the source of much that is confusing, vacuous and fruitless in accounting debate.鈥�
Chambers identified three great solecisms that had crept into the professional ways of too many accountants. He thundered: 鈥淭he third solecism proceeds from the blunders of the first two. It is the fallacy of what Whitehead has called misplaced concreteness.鈥� Chambers doesn鈥檛 identify who Whitehead is or was.
But too much thunder can scare off the young 鈥榰ns. Ingrid Jeacle at the University of Edinburgh in the UK analysed the ways big accountancy firms try to attract new hires. They use recruiting tricks designed to 鈥渃amouflage the spectre of the stereotype鈥�. For details, see her study .
On boredom
Just from their titles, decide whether you want to read these two studies published in the British Journal of Educational Psychology: and : The mere anticipation of boredom exacerbates its occurrence in lectures鈥�.
After you calm down, decide whether to read this third paper, from the 2018 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association: 鈥淥nly boring students get bored? A new perspective on academic boredom鈥�.
If you knee-jerkily decided no to that one, maybe this will change your mind: here is the final sentence of that paper鈥檚 abstract. 鈥淥verall, recent findings on academic boredom suggest that it is a considerably more complex emotional experience than stereotypically perceived in terms of it being not only highly variable, domain-specific, and situationally dependent, but also consisting of multiple 鈥榖oredoms鈥� that vary in both valence and arousal.鈥�
The last word on this is a study called , by researchers at the University of Alberta and the University of Manitoba in Canada. It is short: one page. The researchers give a clear description of what they did: 鈥渨e tested changes in students鈥� knowledge about boredom pre-and-post video鈥�. Then comes a clear description of what they found: 鈥淥ur results showed students indicated more knowledge about boredom post-session.鈥� That sentence can be read in two ways.
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