Once you start looking, commonalities between George and Ramses II can be found everywhere, but we'll end our examination with just one more example. Early into his Presidency, George Washington was named the "Father of our Country". This is particularly ironic, because evidence indicates that George was infertile. He and Martha were never able to have children.

Ramses II, on the other hand, was pretty darn literally the father of his country. Researchers Aidan Dodson and Dyan Hilton now believe there is monumental evidence that "seems to indicate that Ramesses II had around 110 children -- 48-50 sons and 40-53 daughters."

All accounts show that Ramses was a successful, popular leader, with a country that was prosperous throughout his reign. That, of course, is where he got the loot to pay for all those erections...of statues.

So, Ramses II lived three times longer than anyone else and was a stud to boot. Why do we care? And how could this possibly be relevant to what we cover here in Computing Unplugged?

Moving a statue (with a little help from satellites)
It's all about backstory. This has all been a lead-up to the story of moving a 125 ton statue of Ramses, shown in Figure A, about 22 miles from downtown Cairo to the Grand Egyptian Museum, near the Gaza Pyramids.

FIGURE A


This big beast is getting a new home (photo courtesy AP). Roll over picture for a larger image.

The statue was originally found in Memphis (no, not that Memphis), back in 1954, where it was chopped into six pieces and lugged to downtown Cairo and reassembled. Unfortunately, like pretty much everything else in the world, Cairo's become pretty crowded in the last 50 years and ol' Ramses II's statue, having survived more than 3,200 years, couldn't endure 50 years of our modern world's corrosive pollution.

So it needed to be moved. The problems were epic. First, officials have been arguing for more than a decade about where it should wind up. Gotta love bureaucrats -- they're the same world-over! Anyway, once they decided on the Grand Egyptian Museum, the trick was to move this monster through the crowded (massive understatement) streets of Cairo.

Back in August, teams of contractors encased the statue in a steel cage, secured it with steel beams, and packed it onto two flatbed trucks, as seen in Figure B.

FIGURE B


All dressed up and 15 miles to go (photo courtesy AP). Roll over picture for a larger image.

Most of our readers are happy to let me meander all over the planet, pretty much writing about whatever I like, knowing that most of the time I'll run reviews of silly iPod add-ons, or explain the inner workings of surprisingly interesting technologies like RFID. But there's always a few readers who get indignant if they can't see why a story we cover is related to, well, computing.

Fine. For you readers, I'll actually get to the point.