Pirates and academics : Pharyngula

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PZ Myers is a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris.
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« Dawkins in Kansas | Main | Typical DI tactics »

Pirates and academics

Category: Academics • Pirates
Posted on: October 19, 2006 10:28 AM, by PZ Myers

Some people find the connection evades their understanding, but Ian has found it.

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Comments

Posted by: Bobryuu | October 19, 2006 11:13 AM

Now I really want to become a professor. Now I have to choose between Art and Physics...

Posted by: bdaggerlee | October 19, 2006 12:42 PM

Ynd dow naught forgete alsow ye sodome, anowther connekshun. Ynd I speke as ye sodomite.

Captain B. Dagger Lee

Posted by: Jim Harrison | October 19, 2006 1:19 PM

Pirates and academics are also akin because they speak an argot incomprehensible to outsiders. The explanation for the similarity in their use of language is that both scientists and pirates are polyglot comglomeration thrown together in cramped quarters, a paper in SCIENCE or the Jolly Rogers as the case may be. If your crew consists of Swedes, Dutch, Portuguese, French, Indians, Arabs, Caribs, and Lascars or, in the alternative, Hungarian matematicians, German-Jewish physicists, and Taiwanese statisticians, it's no wonder that you have to resort to hand waving and obsenitites to keep your desperate crews in line. People just won't admit how much Henry Morgan there was in J. Robert Oppenheimer.

Posted by: postblogger | October 19, 2006 3:45 PM

And, of course, without academics, Global Average Temperature will increase.

Speaking of that thermoregulatory effect, why are pirates so cool?

Because they arrrrr...

Posted by: Umilik | October 19, 2006 3:52 PM

I thought Lascars are (east) Indians - or are you referring to North American indians ? But were there any pirates among those ? Strikes me as unlikely.

Posted by: Jim Harrison | October 19, 2006 5:33 PM

The Lascars are mentioned in an early 19th century narrative by a guy named Trelawny (Adventures of Young Son). I actually shortened his list of nationalities: he mentions Mussulmans, Daccamen, and Cooleys ("samples of almost all the seafaring natives of India"). I found the quote in Louis-Jean Calvet's book Towards an Ecology of World Languages. Calvet has a section on the linguistics of the pirate life.