Reading the unreadable. "In 1864, the French lay missionary Eugène Eyraud -- the first known non-Polynesian resident of Earth's most isolated inhabited island, Easter Island -- reported in a letter to his superior that he had seen there 'in all the houses' hundreds of tablets and staffs incised with thousands of hieroglyphic figures..." In the world of alphabets and writing systems, there are only a few big unsolved mysteries. There's Etruscan, some varieties of ancient Persian, the Mayan glyphs, and (leave it to Easter Island), the 'Talking boards', semi-translated and related to just about nothing else, at least if you discount rumors of a connection with the also-undeciphered writing of the Indus valley civilizations, 4000 years previous and half a world a way. Welcome to the world of rongorongo.

Teaching old masters new tricks. In the late 1990s the British artist David Hockney started theorizing that many 16th-18th century painters worked with the aid of various optical devices -- lenses, mirrors, camera obscuras, etc. The evidence supporting this theory came not from the usual, historical sources (studio inventories, accounts left by portrait-sitters) but rather from the paintings themselves, which exhibited, according to Hockney, a measurable "optical look". The New Yorker ran Lawrence Weschler's account of Hockney's early theories with the provocative (and unapproved by author or artist) title, "Did the Old Masters Cheat?". Needless to say, hackles were raised -- here was a man challenging a central belief of art historians, using methods foreign to the field (i.e., a mix of artistic hunches and experimental physics). A couple of years later, Hockney had refined his theories enough to merit a second, illustrated Weschler profile, a book (Secret Knowledge), and even a conference ("Art and Optics" -- several of the featured panelests can be heard in this radio program). It's all very fascinating, though one gets the feeling that the theory makes most sense when Hockney and his allies are explaining it. I'm sure Newton sometimes had the same problem.

Unchained melodies. "Do you delete the letter Q from the alphabet just because you don't use it as much as the others?" So said Folkways Records founder Moses Asch when critics asked him why he never trimmed his company's catalog of thousands of records, even though some of them had sold only a few hundred copies. When Asch died in 1986, he left his company and collection to the Smithsonian Institutation, with the stipulation that every recording -- from Woody Guthrie to "Music from Southern New Guinea" to "Polish Concentration Camp Songs" to recordings of sounds made by frogs, office equipment and even the Ionosphere -- all of them would remain in print, in perpetuity. And so they are, available on tape and CD from Smithsonian/Folkways Records. That the twentieth century spawned and prospered one such musical visionary is already cause to wonder. And we haven't even mentioned Alan Lomax. . . .