October 2012 Archives

Jean Christophe Fouchier, a Parisian jeweler who works as Jean Christophe, has released a new collection of rings, called "Excessive". According to the press release, these are "a cry of hope in the face of our too gray, too urban world". They use bright lines of colored stones, Paraiba Tourmaline for blue-green, Tzavorite Garnet for green and Spessarite Garnet for orange, set in dark flat metal, probably blackened gold.

If you want to grab one in person, he's at 18 rue des Capuchines, in Paris.
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There's finally been some good progress on the decipherment of one of the last untranslated ANE scripts, the so-called proto-Elamite.  Researchers at Oxford, led by Dr. Jacob Dahl, have constructed a new system for photographing the tablets, which were really poorly made 5000 years ago, to allow them to be examined from all angles digitally.   All of the new images have been added to the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative, in the proto-Elamite section.

Part of the reason proto-Elamite is so hard to read is apparently the scribes weren't really very good, so the tablets seem to be much more filled with errors then the more professional Babylonian works,

It was used in administration and for agricultural records but it was not used in schools - the lack of a scholarly tradition meant that a lot of mistakes were made and the writing system may eventually have become useless as an administrative system. Eventually, the system was abandoned after some two hundred years.
(Dr. Dahl)

The massive-overkill sapphire case of the Richard Mille RM 056(previously mentioned) is enough to win it a moderate prize, the best watch of the year at the 5th annual Salon International Alta Relojeria (roughly Spanish for Salon International de Haute Horologie).

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Zenith has come out with their first repeater, based on their tried and true El Primero Chronograph.  That means the Academy Minute Repeater inherits the 36,000 BPH automatic movement and chronograph functions, though pared down to only a 30 minute totalizer. The drawback is that the El Primero is a pretty beefy caliber already, and adding a repeater on top has thickened it significantly, yielding a final case thickness of 16.5mm which, even on a 45mm case is pretty damn thick. The rest of the specs are as expected, for the case 18kt gold, AR-coated sapphire crystals and an alligator strap with 18kt deployant. Movement specs are 46 jewels and a power-reserve of 50 hours for the new El Primero 4043 caliber.

And a shot of the under-dial works, where all the repeating magic happens

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So a visitor to the Nuremberg Zoo lost her grip while changing lenses at the polar-bear enclosure and lost a Canon 70-200mm lens.  At least it entertained the bear a bit....

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