(Roughly) Daily

The folks at The Citizen Science Alliance, a transatlantic collaboration of universities and museums, are dedicated to involving everyone in the process of science.  Readers may know their wildly successful Galaxy Zoo project, which lets volunteer astronomers crowd-source the classification of objects captured by the Hubble Space Telescope…

Now, in collaboration with Oxford University, CSA has launched Ancient Lives— which invites any and all to help transcribe papyri belong to the Egypt Exploration Society, the texts eventually to be published and numbered in the Society’s “Greco-Roman Memoirs” series in the volumes entitled The Oxyrhynchus Papyri.

Readers have but to click here, then (using the interface pictured above) begin re-writing history.

As we satisfy our Indiana jones, we might recall that this date in 31 AD was the first Easter– according to Dionysius Exiguus (Dennis the Small, Dennis the Little or Dennis the Short– any/all of which have traditionally been taken to mean Dennis the Humble).  Dionysius invented the Anno Domini (AD) era (used to number the years of both the Gregorian and the [Christianized] Julian calendars); and at the request of Pope John I, calculated the date of the first Easter and created a table showing all future Easter dates.

 D.E., the coiner of “AD” (source)