Photo Depository

Shaun P Downey's Photo Depository is the first of two new blogs I have created as a showcase for my photos.

The Depository includes pretty much all of the photos I have taken on shoots this year (plus photos from Paris) that I have converted from RAW to JPEG. I have also included a number of photos taken between 2007 and 2010.

They are in chronological order but not tagged. Still I hope you find them interesting.

The link can be found in the Artists and Writers link section on the right hand bar

Another lovely little hymn

Some devotional music for a Sunday Evening

More covered

© 2011 Shaun P Downey

I appear to have committed an indiscretion...

Bah, a three year old could have done those drawings... oh wait

The BBC  reports that prehistoric etchings found in a cave in France are the work of children as young as three. The so-called finger flutings were discovered at the Cave of a Hundred Mammoths in Rouffignac, alongside cave art dating back some 13,000 years.

Cambridge University researchers recently developed a method identifying the gender and age of the artists.It is thought the most prolific was a girl aged five. The artists ran their hands down the cave's soft surfaces.

"Flutings made by children appear in every chamber throughout the caves," said archaeologist Jess Cooney, who has pioneered the research in conjunction with Dr Leslie Van Gelder of Walden University in the US. "We have found marks by children aged between three and seven years old - and we have been able to identify four individual children by matching up their marks.The most prolific of the children who made flutings was aged around five - and we are almost certain the child in question was a girl."


Each year thousands of people visit the caves in the Dordogne region of western France to admire drawings of mammoths, rhinoceros and horses found within the 8km cave system, which were discovered in the 16th Century. It was not until 1956 that experts realised that some of the most dramatic were prehistoric.

Archaeologists first determined children had produced some of the finger flutings in 2006. Unlike the sketchings that appear elsewhere in the caves, the markings are made without the application of a colour pigment.

"One cavern is so rich in flutings made by children that it suggests it was a special space for them, but whether for play or ritual is impossible to tell. We don't know why people made them," said Ms Cooney, adding that they may have been part of "initiation rituals" or "simply something to do on a rainy day".

Well there you have it. I like to think that there were some pissed off cavement after their kid went in and daubed over their hard worked drawings....

Woo hoo it's Ig Nobel time again!

It may not have been a bumper night for Britain at the Ig Nobels but it is great to see that one award will be coming home to Blighty!

Dr Anna Wilkinson, of the University of Lincoln flew the flag for Britain winning the 2011 Ig Nobel in physiology. She spent six months training a red-footed tortoise called Alexandra to yawn on command. She then used the trained tortoise to work out whether other tortoises would yawn whenever Alexandra did.

"With tortoises we've found evidence of social learning, fantastic spatial cognition and brilliant visual perception, so we wanted to know what else can they do," said Wilkinson. "I thought it would be really interesting to test one of these high-level hypotheses with a species which, it is very clear, do not possess empathy."

Her tortoises, however, showed no evidence of contagious yawning. The result lends weight to the idea that the behaviour is indeed controlled by higher-level cognitive mechanisms.

Anna Wilkinson, we salute you!

Interestingly the winner of this year's chemistry Ig Nobel are the inventors of a fire alarm for the deaf - one that sprays Wasabi essence rather than rings a bell that which would be as useless as a chocolate teapot.

The Japanese researchers who came up with the horseradish-based alarm system, were honoured for their lifesaving piece of work with the award of the Ig Nobel prize for chemistry.

The scientists and engineers who came up with wasabi alarm tried hundreds of odours, including rotten eggs, before settling on the Japanese condiment – a favourite of sushi lovers. Its active ingredient, allyl isothiocyanate, acts as an irritant in the nose that works even when someone is asleep. "That's why people can wake up after inhalation of air-diluted wasabi," said Makoto Imai of the department of psychiatry at Shiga University of Medical Science, one of the team that won the Ig Nobel for chemistry.

The other winners were:

Medicine Prize: Shared by two teams whose independent research jointly established that people make better decisions about some kinds of things, but worse decisions about other kinds of things‚ when they have a strong urge to urinate.

Psychology Prize: Karl Halvor Teigen of the University of Oslo, Norway, for trying to understand why, in everyday life, people sigh.

Literature Prize: John Perry of Stanford University, US, for his Theory of Structured Procrastination, which says: To be a high achiever, always work on something important, using it as a way to avoid doing something that's even more important.

Biology Prize: Darryl Gwynne and David Rentz for discovering that a certain kind of beetle mates with a certain kind of Australian beer bottle. The pair have published two papers on the topic.

Physics Prize: Philippe Perrin and colleagues for determining why discus throwers become dizzy, and why hammer throwers don't.

Peace Prize: Arturas Zuokas, the mayor of Vilnius, Lithuania, for demonstrating that the problem of illegally parked luxury cars can be solved by running them over with an armoured tank.

Public Safety Prize: John Senders of the University of Toronto, Canada, for conducting a series of safety experiments in which a person drives an automobile on a major highway while a visor repeatedly flaps down over his face, blinding him.

Mathematics Prize: Shared by a group of doom-mongers for teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations -

Dorothy Martin of the US who predicted the world would end in 1954; Pat Robertson of the US who predicted the world would end in 1982; Elizabeth Clare Prophet of the US who predicted the world would end in 1990; Lee Jang Rim of Korea who predicted the world would end in 1992; Credonia Mwerinde of Uganda who predicted the world would end in 1999; Harold Camping of the US who predicted the world would end in 1994 and then later in 2011

Well there you have it. If the story makes you laugh then makes you think the purpose of the Ig Nobel Prize has been served!

I sang for the birds, for the river, the trees and the flowers but not the mullahs.

.Before I went to Paris last month I had never heard of Marzieh. It was only when discussing a visit to Auvers sur Oise  that I learned about this great woman.

Marzieh was born Ashraf os-Sadat Mortezai in Tehran in 1924. Her father, a moderate Muslim cleric, and her mother, who was descended from a family of artists and musicians, encouraged her to pursue a life in music. She studied for years with some of the greatest masters of Persian song before beginning her career in 1942 under the stage name Marzieh, a popular Iranian name meaning laudable or agreeable.

Her rich, throaty mezzo-soprano, was often likened to Édith Piaf’s, she was famed for her vast repertory, said to span a thousand songs. She was known in particular for her expressive interpretations of songs of love — ill-fated love, unrequited love, everlasting love — many of which were settings of the work of the renowned Persian lyric poets of the Middle Ages and afterward.

In 1979, after the shah was overthrown, Iran became a theocracy led by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. The fundamentalist clerics who ran the country deemed the arts, including music, inimical to the new order. As an artist who was also a woman, Marzieh, doubly marginalized, was barred from performing. She retreated to her farm in the countryside and did not sing in public for a decade and a half.

During this period, the restrictions on female singers were relaxed to a degree, and Marzieh was told that she could appear before audiences of women only. She considered this stricture unacceptable, she later said, and continued her silence, practicing in private where no one could hear her.

“I sang for the birds, for the river, the trees and the flowers,” she told The Washington Times in 1995, “but not the mullahs.”

In 1994, while visiting Paris, Marzieh defected. She joined the National Council of Resistance of Iran and for several years afterward lived in Iraq, where an affiliated organization, the armed opposition group Mujahedeen Khalq, had a training camp. There, she sometimes sang atop a tank, dressed in military garb.

Her association with Mujahedeen Khalq drew criticism in the West and from some Iranian exiles. The group, which advocates the overthrow of the Iranian government, supported Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-8.

Marzieh, who was 70 when she defected, also resumed performing in public, starting with a concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London in 1995. She later sang in Los Angeles and in several European cities. She gave her last major performance in Paris in 2006, at 82.

She died of cancer in Paris on 13 October 2010

Interviewers often asked Marzieh, who had been largely apolitical as a young woman, what had moved her to join the resistance. Speaking to the newspaper The Scotsman in 1999, she replied by quoting Rumi, the revered 13th-century Persian poet:


I am looking for that which cannot be found

For I am fed up with beasts and ogres

And I yearn for a human being.

Marzieh - Sange Khara

Marzieh - Raftam ke Raftam