History
oracknows | April 19, 2010I've pivoted immediately from attending NECSS and participating in a panel on the infiltration of quackery into academia to heading down to Washington, DC for the AACR meeting. Then, after a packed day of meetings yesterday followed by spending yesterday evening with a friend whom I haven't seen for a long time, there's--gasp!--no new material today. Fortunately, there is this amusing little thing from two and a half years ago (which means it's new to you if you haven't been reading that long). It's also very appropriate, given that I'm at a big cancer research meeting and the decreasing…
clock | April 11, 2010
The other night I went to the opening night of RENT at Duke, the latest production of the Hoof 'n' Horn ensemble, the 'South's oldest student-run musical theater organization' (find them on Facebook and Twitter). Here's the promo video, released before the opening night:
I always have difficulty judging plays by amateur ensembles - at exactly which standard should I hold them? I have seen amazing high-school plays and horrible professional ones (I mentioned both in this post), as well as, of course, amazing professional ones. The Duke group is a mix of people with some stage experience and…
emjohnson | April 9, 2010With yesterday's announcement of the historic nuclear arms treaty signed by Russia and the United States (that would reduce existing stockpiles by as much as 30%) I thought I would repost my piece on Edward Teller's nuclear legacy from September, 2003 that was originally commissioned by The Nation magazine (though ultimately went unpublished). Also see my posts Intimidating the Soviets: A Hiroshima Anniversary Memorial and The Population Bomb, Nuclear Winter and the Role of Science in Public Advocacy. Yesterday's treaty is the first step in dismantling the nuclear policies that this would-…
drorzel | April 8, 2010Via Twitter, Michael Barton is looking for some good books about physics. I was Twitter-less for a few days around the period of his request, and this is a more-than-140-characters topic if ever there was one, so I'm turning it into a blog post.
The reason for the request is that he's going to be working as an intern at the Einstein exhibit when it visits Portland, which makes this a little tricky, as relativity is not an area I've read a lot of popular books in (yet-- that's changing). That will make this a little more sparse than it might be in some other fields.
There's also an essential…
pharyngula | April 5, 2010I'd known for a long time that the term "scientist" had been coined in the early 19th century, but I just ran across a first-hand account of the event by the fellow who came up with it, William Whewell. The context is this: many in the science establishment of the day had been chafing at the premier British institution, the Royal Society, which had grown stodgy and was infested with politicians, bishops, and other such hangers-on, and they formed a new institution, the British Association for the Advancement of Science. As part of the process of establishing their identity, they struggled…
aardvarchaeology | April 3, 2010I was annoyed and surprised to learn from a publicist that this weekend the History Channel is airing a programme named "The Real Face of Jesus" that takes a credulous approach to the shroud of Turin. The shroud is a 14th century fake relic, as has been well documented by historical sources and radiocarbon analysis. Here's a quick machine-assisted translation of a 2004 article I wrote on the subject.
The shroud of Turin, a linen cloth, 4.5 x 1.2 m, with the image of a wounded male body. The wounds are consistent with the New Testament's portrayal of the last days and death of Jesus of…
aardvarchaeology | March 29, 2010Asked Felicia:
"... those Viking saga kings, Ragnar Lodbrok and Björn Järnsida. I'd like to know if there exists any evidence at all that these persons ever existed?"
In the present, the categories "real person" and "fictional character" are pretty distinct. But when we look retrospectively at the first historically documented centuries in any given area, things get fuzzy. And it's even worse if we look at people who are supposed to have lived before the introduction of writing to an area, and who are mentioned in early or foreign texts. These centuries to either side of the introduction of…
oracknows | March 27, 2010As far as silly Internet memes go, given my interest in World War II history, I have a weakness for Downfall parodies, which have grown up on YouTube like kudzu over the last couple of years. I also thought it was only a matter of time before someone did something like this and wondered why it hadn't been done before:
(Note: In case you don't know or remember who Poul Thorsen is, read this.)
I love it:
"Perhaps that 14 Studies website was too high brow." Heh.
"Now I'll have to pay for another stupid telephone survey." Heh heh.
"But what's the use? Orac will only make fun of me." Heh heh heh…
terrasig | March 25, 2010Have you ever taken one of the now-over-the-counter heartburn relief remedies like Tagamet, Zantac, or Pepcid?
How about the beta-blocker atenolol (Tenormin) or metoprolol (Lopressor) for antihypertensive therapy, or the original less-selective beta-blocker propranolol (Inderal) for migraines, presentation anxiety or stage fright?
If you answered yes to either question, you owe a debt of gratitude to Sir James Black, the Scottish physician who left us earlier this week at age 85. The best obituary I have seen memorializing Sir James comes from the UK Telegraph.
Black was called the father…
cagapakis | March 24, 2010Happy Ada Lovelace Day! Today we blog to celebrate women in technology and science and remember Ada Lovelace, the woman considered to have written the world's first computer program back in the 1840's.
So to celebrate, here's a clip of an interview with Rita Levi-Montalcini, one of my favorite Sassy Bitches of Scienceâ¢. At age 100, she is the oldest living Nobel laureate, sharp as a tack, still working, and a sassy dresser to boot. Her story is incredible and inspiring (especially in light of what I wrote about yesterday on DIYbio, oppression, and opportunity). Turned away from her position…
emjohnson | March 23, 2010Harvard Medical School physician and researcher J. Wes Ulm has a fascinating paper in the new edition of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, the quarterly academic periodical put out by Johns Hopkins University. His paper "The Cachet of the Cutthroat" investigates the legacy of ideas that formed the basis of laissez-faire social Darwinism:
Ultimately, Social Darwinism fails in practice because it never succeeded as a theory. It's not even Darwinist-Herbert Spencer, after all, had sketched out its contours even before Darwin published his own work. And when the great naturalist outlined a…
cagapakis | March 23, 2010I read R.C. Lewontin's Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA over the weekend and was struck in particular by one line in his wonderful diatribe against biological determinism and reductionism:
"Intellectuals in their self-flattering wish-fulfillment say that knowledge is power, but the truth is that knowledge further empowers only those who have or can acquire the power to use it."
This is something that was really hard to read at first, especially as someone who is overeducated and clearly spends a lot of time thinking about educating other people about science. But I realized that it…
emjohnson | March 20, 2010RaceWire is reporting that Thomas Hagan, one of three men convicted for the assassination of Malcolm X (and the only to plead guilty), was released after his 17th attempt at parole yesterday. Hagan, at the time of the murder, was known as Talmadge X and was a militant member of the Nation of Islam.
According to The New York Times:
Mr. Hagan said in a 1977 affidavit that he and several accomplices . . . decided to kill Malcolm X because he was a "hypocrite" who had "gone against the leader of the Nation of Islam," Elijah Muhammad. Mr. Hagan said that after one man shot Malcolm X in the chest…
laelaps | March 18, 2010
The preserved head of a California sea lion (Zalophus californianus), dissected and dyed to show some of the glands inside the head. From the collections of the New Jersey State Museum (originally from the College of New Jersey).
aardvarchaeology | March 17, 2010How long ago was the time of Emperor Augustus? Most educated people, including professional historians and archaeologists, will reply "about 2000 years" if you ask them. But a considerable number of amateur dendrochronologists say "about 1800 years". And because of an unfortunate peculiarity in how professional dendrochronologists work, it is very hard to convince these dissident amateurs that they are wrong. Because they're actually thinking straight given the data available to them.
If you look at published dendro curves for the transalpine provinces of the Empire, you find that they…
terrasig | March 16, 2010
This post is the third in a series on the origin and history of HeLa S3 cells. The first post details how I came about to ask this question when launching my independent research laboratory. The second post details the life and careers of the legendary physician-scientist pioneer, Dr. Florence Rena Sabin.
Today, we take up a discussion where we will finally learn the origin of HeLa S3 cells, complete with original literature citations.
A recap
We left our previous discussion with the final and still-productive years of Dr. Florence Rena Sabin. After graduating from Johns Hopkins Medical…
razib | March 16, 2010There's an article in The New York Times on the recent paper which extracted genetic material from remains in Xinjiang dated to 4,000 years ago. Remember that these remains exhibited male lineages which were west Eurasian, specifically R1a1, while the female lineages (mtDNA) were more heterogeneous, both eastern and western. This particular twist in history is of very strong interest. I think there are three reasons for this. First, it is counter-intuitive, as we don't have a good grasp of how mobile ancient nomadic populations were. Most of their history is unaccessible because they were…
emjohnson | March 12, 2010(updated below - Update II - Update III)
CIA peppered bread with LSD in 1951 Image: The TelegraphYesterday the UK newspaper The Telegraph published an article revealing that a mysterious 1951 outbreak of mass hysteria in France was actually the result of a secret experiment performed by the Central Intelligence Agency when they spiked the village's bread with LSD:
The mystery of Le Pain Maudit (Cursed Bread) still haunts the inhabitants of Pont-Saint-Esprit, in the Gard, southeast France.
On August 16, 1951, the inhabitants were suddenly racked with frightful hallucinations of…
emjohnson | March 10, 2010It is a common argument by those who are opposed to evolution's implication for religious belief to label Darwin as a social Darwinist and a racist. Adrian Desmond and James Moore's book Darwin's Sacred Cause has gone a long way towards dispelling any claims that Darwin sought to justify black inferiority (in fact, as they show, countering such arguments was an important part of Darwin's work). However, the claim that Darwin inspired social Darwinism is a persistent argument and those that proffer it will stoop to any level in order to discredit him. As I pointed out in my series…
terrasig | March 7, 2010This post is the second in a series on the origin and history of HeLa S3 cells. The first post can be found here. In this post, we discuss the life and careers (yes, careers) of the remarkable physician-scientist, Florence Rena Sabin.
"Too bad you're not a boy, you would have made a good doctor."
Florence Rena Sabin was born in the mining town of Central City, Colorado, on November 9, 1871, two years after her sister and lifelong companion, Mary. Florence's father. George Sabin, had moved from Vermont to Colorado in the midst of the Colorado gold rush and a notable 1859 gold strike between…