History
terrasig | November 29, 2009I had the honor today of witnessing the recognition of a civil rights landmark here in The-Town-That-Tobacco-Built.
This afternoon, North Carolina Historical Marker G-123 was dedicated at the site of the 23 June 1957 segregation protest at the Royal Ice Cream parlor, just north of downtown Durham.
The 1960 Greensboro sit-ins sparked a national movement but were not the first such action. Individual and group protest actions prior to 1960, generally isolated and often without wider impact, took place across the state and region. A protest in 1957 in Durham had wider consequence, as it led to…
pharyngula | November 28, 2009This is a fascinating article about Hitler's library: he was an avid collector and reader, and part of his collection still exists, and you can even stroll down to the Library of Congress and ask to browse through the stockpile. The bulk of the books are about military strategy and tactics, and a subset are Hitler's personal favorite light reading, cowboy stories. But there are also many religious texts that give insight into the way his mind worked.
Experts since then have been of two minds on the matter of Hitler's spiritual beliefs. Ian Kershaw argues that Hitler consciously constructed an…
clock | November 27, 2009
Explained here. Critiques in the comments are (mostly) valid, but for a first effort at using this kind of visualization technique, I'd say it's pretty impressive.
oracknows | November 25, 2009You know, I have three manuscripts in the hopper with two of them having recently been returned to me with reviewers' comments. Frustratingly, one of these is a manuscript that I've been trying to get published for nearly a year now. Given that I appear to have some work to do over the long holiday weekend coming up in order to answer reviewer criticisms and get the manuscripts ready for resubmission (you know what I'll be doing either Friday or Saturday--and it won't be shopping), I truly appreciate this bit of advice on how to deal with the wayward reviewer who doesn't appreciate the…
pharyngula | November 24, 2009Today is the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species, and a few sites have taken notice.
A new science blog, The Whirlpool of Life, opens today.
CNN has published a brief retrospective from Richard Dawkins. It focuses entirely on "militant atheism", which is odd since the book itself did not promote unbelief, but also indirectly appropriate, since the concept did end up undermining the argument from design, and contributed significantly to making god irrelevant.
And…that's about it. No fireworks, no triumphant announcements, no scientists standing outside in…
emjohnson | November 23, 2009
David Rovics sings his song remembering the hundreds of Irish recruits in the US invasion of Mexico in 1846 that turned on their commanders and fought on the side of Mexico. While this event is little known in American history, what is even less known is that some of the soldiers in John O'Reilly's battalion were former slaves who escaped from their owners in the US army to fight alongside the Irish and Mexican San Patricios.
As James Callaghan wrote in American Heritage magazine:
Mexican sources state that O'Reilly quickly recruited forty Irishmen and four esclavos negros--slaves brought…
emjohnson | November 21, 2009Now that his plan has backfired drastically (his own website has removed the link to his "Introduction" of Darwin's book) and more people were offended by his distortions than anything else, let me briefly point out some useful information. Comfort makes the following assertions in his introduction:
Adolf Hitler took Darwin's evolutionary philosophy to its logical conclusions [and] the legacy of Darwin's theory can be seen in the rise of eugenics, euthanasia, infanticide, and abortion.
As the National Center for Science Education has pointed out:
This is simply hyperbole on Comfort's part.…
terrasig | November 20, 2009
Denise Gellene in the New York Times is reporting this morning that Scottish physician, Sir John Crofton, passed away on 3 November at age 97.
Crofton is best known for implementing a combination drug regimen to treat tuberculosis, the insidious lung infection with Mycobacterium tuberculosis which decimated the US early last century and still kills 2 million a year worldwide. The concept of using drug combinations to increase individual drug potency and slow the emergence of resistance is now a mainstay of therapeutic approaches for cancer, HIV, and other infectious diseases.
Gellene…
emjohnson | November 17, 2009On November 24, 1859 Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. Then, as now, many people were made uncomfortable to think that human beings could be related to the "lower" animals and this discomfort was regularly represented in popular depictions of Darwin during the 19th century. An excellent study on this was written by Darwin scholar Janet Brown in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. Interestingly enough, it was believed that the most cutting insult to Darwin (or perhaps just the funniest) was to compare him to a primate. Primates have often made people…
emjohnson | November 17, 2009
See thro' this air, this ocean, and this earth
All matter quick, and bursting into birth:
Above, how high progressive life may go!
Around, how wide! how deep extend below!
Vast chain of being! which from God began;
Natures ethereal, human, angel, man,
Beast, bird, fish, insect, who no eye can see,
No glass can reach; from infinite to thee;
From thee to nothing.--On superior powers
Were we to press, inferior might on ours;
Or in the full creation leave a void,
Where, one step broken, the great scale's destroyed:
From Nature's chain whatever link you like,
Tenth, or ten thousandth, breaks the…
aardvarchaeology | November 16, 2009
On Tuesday 17 November 17:30 I'm giving a talk as part of Mathias Klang's information security course at the University of Gothenburg. The theme is "Ãrtusendenas glömska: arkivsäkring i det riktigt lÃ¥nga perspektivet", which may hint to the intelligent reader that I'll be speaking in Swedish. I'll cover ways that information has survived from the distant past, and aspects of how data from archaeological sites and museum collections can be safeguarded for a long future.
The lecture is free and open to the public. The venue is at ForskningsgÃ¥ngen 6, square 2, floor 2, on the premises of IT…
oracknows | November 15, 2009Since I seem to have attracted several truly idiotic Holocaust deniers in the comments after this post, including, believe it or not, Eric Hunt, the anti-Semite who attacked Elie Wiesel at a San Francisco hotel in 2007 and who now runs a blog full of Holocaust denial and anti-Semitism where he recently bragged about attending an appearance by arch-Holocaust denier David Irving and bleating about a vacuous legal suit he's bringing against Steven Spielberg and Irene Weisberg Zisblatt over what he considers to be a "defamatory" documentary.
How do I deserve such "honors"?
In any case, while I'm…
terrasig | November 13, 2009Twenty years ago this morning, I had to defend a body of work that contained this paragraph on page 24:
HeLa cells are a human cervical carcinoma cell line having a doubling time of 24 hr and were obtained from Dr. Bert Flanegan, Dept. of Immunology and Microbiology, University of Florida. HeLa cells were maintained as subconfluent monolayer cultures in minimal essential media (alpha modification; GIBCO) with 10% fetal bovine serum (GIBCO) at 37° under a humidified atmosphere containing 5% CO2. Cells were maintained in logarithmic growth by subculturing every other day using 0.05% trypsin/0.…
oracknows | November 12, 2009I detest Holocaust denial.
Relative newbies who haven't been reading this blog that long may be wondering why I, a physician, booster of science-based medicine, and scourge of the anti-vaccine movement (well, at least in my mind, anyway) would blog about Holocaust denial, but in actuality my interest in combatting Holocaust denial predates my interest in combatting quackery by at least two years. Indeed, one of my earliest long-form posts for this blog, written more than a year before I joined ScienceBlogs and reposted after I joined relates how I discovered Holocaust denial, my confusion and…
pharyngula | November 10, 2009Larry Moran reminds us that today is an infamous day in the upper midwest.
aardvarchaeology | November 9, 2009
In addition to the archive reports on my two seasons of fieldwork at the Late Medieval and Early Modern harbour of Djurhamn, I have now published a paper that discusses and interprets the results. It's in a symposium volume from the Royal Academy of Letters, edited by my friend Katarina Schoerner and bearing the name SkärgÃ¥rd och Ãrlog. Nedslag i Stockholms skärgÃ¥rds tidiga historia. ("Archipelago and naval warfare. Case studies in the early history of the Stockholm archipelago"). Other contributors are Jonathan Adams, Kajsa Althén, Jan Glete, Sven Lilja, Peter Norman, Mary Pousette,…
emjohnson | November 5, 2009
Remember, remember the fifth of November,
The gunpowder treason and plot,
I know of no reason
Why the gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.
On this day, in 1604, Guy Fawkes was arrested in his attempt to overthrow the English monarchy by blowing up the House of Lords and assassinate King James I (who would have been present at the time). Since his arrest Fawkes' crime has been condemned as terrorism motivated by fanatical Catholic outrage against the Protestant regime of James I. However, is the religious angle enough to explain his actions and those of his conspirators? What was at…
oracknows | November 4, 2009As regular readers know, one of my interests outside of medicine is the phenomenon of Holocaust denial. Granted, I haven't written as much about it lately as I used to, but that doesn't mean I've lost interest. Actually, I think it may be because I seem to be encountering fewer and fewer major issues of Holocaust denial, although the Bishop Williamson case did draw my ire earlier this year, and I have been perturbed by Holocaust denier David Irving's traveling anti-Semitism show that's now slithering its way through the U.S. and is now in the eastern part of the country.
One thing that I have…
ejohnson | November 2, 2009
In honor of Halloween this weekend, we scared up some classic spooky ScienceBlogs posts. Brian Switek of Laelaps discusses ghosts, UFOs, psychics, witchcraft and other "paranormal rot" many people use to explain "rather ordinary phenomena." On SciencePunk, Frank Swain contemplates the mathematical improbability of vampires due to sure vampire population explosion. However, Frank also points out "Efthimiou's conjecture doesn't rule out the possibility of vampires--just that the outbreak hasn't happened yet." The not-so-obvious origins of witches flying on broomsticks is covered on Terra…
razib | November 2, 2009As I gave a nod to statistical tricks and subtle shell games very recently, the material I review subsequently should be viewed with skepticism and caution. A few days ago I also pointed to a paper which describes and models intergenerational transfers of wealth across various societies. In other words, what parents transmit to children. From the perspective of someone who reads this blog, obviously parents transmit genes to their offspring.
To the left is an old scatterplot from Francis Galton which shows the dependence of the height of children upon the average height of parents.…