Mr Singh and his wife first came across the penguin when they were out walking after a long day of work on the beach at Birdlings Flat, a settlement south of the city of Christchurch. Footage of the penguin posted on Mr Singh's Facebook page showed the penguin appearing lost and alone. Mr Singh proceeded to call penguin rescuers as he was concerned that the penguin was not getting into the water, thereby making it a potential target for other predatory animals roaming the beach.
He eventually got through to Thomas Stracke, who has been rehabilitating penguins on New Zealand's South Island for about 10 years. He is worth the effort: rigorous but sprightly, an ideal academic and thrilling company. When I contacted him out of the blue on a Thursday afternoon to propose an interview, within five minutes of picking up the phone he was quoting verses from the Egyptian Book of the Dead to me in a quavering voice.
Days later, he sent me a photocopy of his booklet, Senet: The Rules of Play, which was published in In the top left corner he had written: "Hypothetical, but based on best evidence! He had done it once already. Dr Kendall's rules are not dramatically different to Bell's, but there are a few interesting alterations. Dr Kendall refers to the 30 squares as houses, and introduces a neat spatial element that makes the game a little more tactical.
A single draughtsman on his own - that is, one placed in a house between two empty houses - is classed as undefended, and may be captured by another player.
If two matching draughtsmen are placed together, however, they are defended, and are effectively blocking other players from landing on them. More importantly for the pacing of play, captured pieces are not removed from the board, but are knocked backwards, making for a game that has a little less bloodshed and a bit more pushing and shoving to it.
Dr Kendall also has a lot to say about the final houses on the board. House 27 is the House of Waters, since it was often decorated with wavy lines in Senet boards from the New Kingdom from the 16th century BC to the 11th century BC onwards. A piece that lands in the water must return to house 15, which is known as the House of Repeating Life.
Dr Kendall also suggests that players may continue a turn until they have thrown a two or a three, and they should complete their throws before any moves are made, opening up greater tactics, since, should you throw a four and a three, say, you could either move one piece by four houses and another by three, or move a single piece by seven houses.
When Dr Kendall isn't in the Sudan, he lives in Salem, Massachusetts, and it's here that I finally catch up with him for a proper discussion on Skype one morning. His laptop camera reveals a cheerful man with busy white hair, fine-rimmed glasses, and a deceptively delicate air to him. His voice is quiet and aristocratic and he seems slightly sunburned from a recent trip abroad. A gentleman adventurer, he is the sort of man you might put behind the wheel of a Saab.
Also: he is very surprised to be having a conversation about Senet. Senet, in other words, has not been his life's work. But I mean, gosh, that's a long time ago. Even so, I am struck by the thrill of this. Archaeology isn't just about working away in the sand with a toothbrush, trying not to break something precious as you pull it out of the earth.
It can be a creative, theoretical enterprise, a means of reconstructing the thought processes as well as the material culture of ancient people - a way of getting inside their minds as well as their tombs.
We know what their objective was, they had to get on this beautiful house, and then they had to cross the water square, and then they had to get off the board. You have a certain amount of information that is absolutely proven. The question is: you know they weren't jumping back and forth from one line to another, so it had to be a kind of competition for position on the track, the S-shaped track.
So what next? Dr Kendall is unambiguous. That's the only invented thing. Because we actually know how the throwsticks were used to move the game along. I ask Dr Kendall if he can remember the first game of Senet he played after reconstructing the rules.
A good-natured groan. I guess it's like designing a computer or something. You have to get all the bugs out of it. It's the same with games. I pause here because I know that, after I close down Skype, I'm going to load up that Steam version of Senet again - a version that is based on an amended set of Dr Kendall's own rules - and I'm going to have a second, proper go on it.
And to do that I need to know a bit more. I need to know what Dr Kendall honestly makes of Senet as he has it. Senet that is "hypothetical, but based on best evidence". It seems as if there was a little bit of skill involved, that would help to make it more fun. But it's hard to figure out how you can put the skill in when everything is just based on the numbers that come up on the throwsticks.
Whether you win or lose something. I don't know. I don't have any good ideas about that. I haven't put my mind to this in a very long time, but it seems like all of these games are pretty much throw-the-dice-and-move-the-pieces. Unless there was an intellectual component, where you have to recite certain texts or something. He nods. Gambling's probably, you know, what made it a little more exciting.
Dr Kendall left me with the sense that I wasn't playing Senet correctly. Our chat reminded me, in a roundabout way, of my first night in Cairo back in the late '90s, on which I stood nervously at the curb of a busy downtown junction for about 10 minutes waiting for a break in the clamouring procession of lorries and cabs. I was tiny and alone beneath a full-building advert depicting an avocado bathroom sink, four storeys tall and drawn in a disconcertingly heroic high style.
I would probably still be on that curb right now if it hadn't been for a long-limbed, rather beautiful Egyptian man in gigantic specs and a flapping Hawaiian shirt who lead me out into the traffic with a dangerous confidence, saying, "Boy, come on.
You have to learn to walk like an Egyptian. I never did learn. For Senet, weird and naff as this sounds, maybe I had to walk like an Egyptian.
My theory up to this point was that, hey, people are people wherever - and whenever - you go. Maybe Senet was actually arguing otherwise. I loaded up Steam and tried to understand this strange back-and-forth game. I tried to look at it differently. Boy, come on. And, well: partial victory. Senet's not a dull game, but it is fiddly. As it's about getting your draughtsmen off the board, there's a sense of bureaucratic pushing and shoving to it - a bit of a packed elevator experience.
With all the squares that require specific throws, and all the squares that are blocked and defended, the RNG is rather strong. And, since in many cases you don't really have a choice of which piece to move, as the end-game approaches, it gets progressively less tactical.
After an hour or two I had yet to play a game in which the likely outcome didn't veer back and forth madly in the final two minutes. This could be exciting, but since most of the action is actually relegated to the last 5 of the 30 squares - no! Senet feels, more than anything, like a game that is won or lost by stragglers. It's certainly not a game with a massive scope for heroism. Leave the heroism to the gods and the giant bathroom sinks. You can see why people may have felt inclined to bet on this.
And yet I felt something else, too. Talking to Dr Kendall had reminded me that I was engaged in an activity very similar to something that Nesperennub may have known. If I had met him, through some as yet undiscovered technology, we might be able to commune over this. I could almost imagine reading his body language and facial cues: the smile of delight when he knocked one of my pieces into the water, the comradely shrug when I rolled my fourth consecutive three and had to retire, again, without a useful move.
Nesperennub, long, aristocratic head leaned low over the board. Nesperennub, squeezing his lips together as he ponders his options.
Senet, eh? The passing game. The great leveller. Maybe - and this seems almost blasphemous - games really have changed. Maybe people have changed, and today we want different things from games than the ancient Egyptians wanted from Senet. Maybe they found the shuffling rhythms of the game of passing to be thrilling, or at least true : the smallness of human life captured against the unchanging vastness of the landscape of the gods. Is that it?
Senet is a game in which the player can often feel irrelevant, halting and endlessly undecided when contrasted so sharply with the beautiful order of the three lanes, the 30 houses. And the only objective? The only hope? To get off the board. Not quite an escape. More an understanding that we were never meant to be there in the first place. I was guessing, frankly, so to get a better insight into the world to which Senet belonged, I went to the British Museum to visit a friend and colleague of Dr Kendall.
Dr Irving Finkel is a reader and translator of Cuneiform the first written language on Earth and also a word that I discover, three minutes into our conversation, that I have been seriously mispronouncing for 20 years , a leading authority on the pre-Biblical flood narrative, and also an expert on board games - ancient and, I suspect, otherwise.
And he is strangely perfect, vast hair and vast beard, tweed and corduroy, padding across the great bright hall of the British Museum to meet me.
He has that slight impatience of a person who lives inside his head a lot and is always having interesting conversations in there, and he has the absolute best route to the office of anyone I have ever met. Off to the left, past the Rosetta Stone, sharp turn after Ramses II or whoever it is, and briskly upstairs, towards the inevitable unmarked door that you would never normally notice.
And then, battered key already disappearing back into pocket, through to - what's this? I'm tempted to call it the real British Museum. The working building. Backstage, where the floor is suddenly scuffed concrete rather than marble and glossy parquet, where great things are stacked all around, where parchments are rolled and stuffed - carefully - in little wooden cubby holes, and where Dr Finkel himself has a narrow workspace, crippled bookcases overflowing on either side of a large window offering an unspoiled view of an entirely featureless wall.
There's an old computer on the desk and the entire room is held in the gentle gaze of a man in a faded sepia photograph that's been propped upon nearby clutter. Theophilus Goldridge Pinches M. Dr Finkel should probably know. In a multiple choice scenario you would not struggle to match his headshot with his occupation.
Unless one of the other options was "wizard". Dr Finkel is not an establishment type. He is scandalously entertaining to listen to, whether he's referring to the ancient Egyptians' "fatuous way of painting everybody looking like cardboard," or unleashing one of his elegant multi-part sentences that seem to prop up the traditional viewpoint of a subject before undermining it, fatally, with a jolting sub-clause that goes off like a landmine.
He met W. Bell, he of the suggested rules for "Senat", as a young boy, when he got Bell's book out of the library and then sent him a letter to tell him how much he enjoyed it. Bell invited him up to Newcastle - "it was the days before we were all worried about child molesting," - and talked to the young Irving Finkel about his collection of board games. Because he had a whole houseful of stuff and he was the sort of bloke who didn't have a lot of money, so he found things in junk shops and didn't know what they were.
And he made replicas of things that he couldn't find. He worked things out. Academically it's got holes in it, but it really got me involved. I try out my theory on Dr Finkel: that games offer what is potentially one of the more human perspectives on the ancient past.
That they provide a way of looking at ancient people in a way that makes them more recognisable. Dr Finkel, it transpires, is not a fan of Senet. Since the hurricane struck in September last year, several investigations by academics and journalists suggested the death toll was much higher than the official count, which for months stayed at For the first few weeks, the death toll was only put at The task of counting the dead immediately after or in the months following a major disaster is not an exact science.
There are also no state or federal guidelines in the US for calculating storm or hurricane-related deaths. The GWU study concluded the initial death toll only included those killed directly by hurricanes Maria and Irma - either by drowning, flying debris or building collapse. GWU researchers also counted those who died in the six months following as a result of poor healthcare provision and a lack of electricity and clean water.
The key part of the research is an estimate of "excess mortality" from September to February Put simply, this is the difference between the predicted normal death rate if the hurricane had not struck estimated using historical data , and the actual death rate for the period afterwards. The researchers also factored in migration away from Puerto Rico in the wake of the storms. One important issue the GWU study raises is the process of recording deaths after the hurricane. Acoustic test facilities which simulate these external pressure fluctuations can be used for structural and component testing.
Qualification tests can be designed to evaluate designs, to gauge reliability and to provide total system checkout. The WAS uses airstream modulation to product pressure fluctuations associated with high-intensity sound. The MU voice coil incorporates two concentric cylinders, each having rows of modulation slots. These cylinders form the stator and armature of the voice coil.
Slots are cut around the periphery of the armature so that axial motion of the armature against the suspension varies the openings formed by the two sets of slots that are in both armature and stator. With air pressure applied outside of the armature, air if forced through these slots.
The stator is mounted inside of the armature and has no spring slots. The stator and armature are assembled such that the beams between the armature modulation slots cover one half of each slot in the stator.
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