History
aardvarchaeology | August 20, 2009In Nazi Germany and its occupied territories there were many ways to get thrown into an extermination camp. But Friedrich Marby broke some kind of record: he was sent to Dachau for publishing too silly ideas about runes. He survived.
The Nazis themselves were no strangers to occultism, particularly Heinrich Himmler, whose neo-Pagan religious movement I've touched upon before. Movements similar to today's New Age, neo-paganism and occultism flourished in the early 20th century. But Marby was too much even for Himmler: he invented runic aerobics.
Marby's ideas took off from the cosmic and…
pharyngula | August 19, 2009It's the 100th anniversary (we can't say "birthday" for a deposit laid down half a billion years ago, I don't think) of Walcott's discovery of the Burgess Shale formation in British Columbia. I'm not quite sure what one does to celebrate on such a momentous occasion…maybe someone has a suggestion.
emjohnson | August 19, 2009
Mark Dery, guest blogger for Boing Boing, has a piece up on the "philosophical investigation into the paradox of horrible beauty and the politics of 'just looking.'" In it he highlights the 17th century crypt where the Capuchin's (the religious order, not the monkey) buried their deceased brethren. I visited the crypt when I was in Rome a few years ago and, I can assure you, it's every bit as creepy as he describes.
From 1631 until 1870, the monks buried their dead here---some four thousand of them, reportedly. The musty, mineral smell of the hard-packed dirt floor mingles with the sweaty…
emjohnson | August 19, 2009
The only known photograph of famed head case Phineas Gage was discovered last month (on Flickr of all places!). Jack and Beverly Wilgus had the above daguerreotype for thirty years before realizing what it was. As they describe the image's history at their website:
We called it "The Whaler" because we thought the pole he held was part of a harpoon. His left eye (we have flipped the picture since the daguerreotype is a laterally-reversed mirror image) is closed so we invented an encounter with an angry whale that left him with one eye stitched shut.
We would still be telling that story if…
emjohnson | August 17, 2009
The monthly history of science carnival is now up at The Dispersal of Darwin. This is one of the best collections produced yet, proving that The Giant's Shoulders' second year is getting off to a tremendous start. Head on over to check out these great posts.
My favorites in this edition include the following:
Bora at A Blog Around the Clock praises the difficulty of doing work in the history of science:
Many scientific findings were made by adventurous explorers, not people with long and sophisticated scientific training. The line between science and fiction was not very clear. While today…
aardvarchaeology | August 17, 2009Sean B. Carroll's latest book has been sitting on my reading shelf (and been read by my wife) for over four months, but now I've finally read it. Remarkable Creatures is a collection of mini-biographies of people who have made important discoveries in evolutionary biology.
I won't mention names, but we've got both of the scientists who discovered evolution, the guy who discovered mimicry, the man who found the first Homo erectus fossils on Java, the man who discovered the Cambrian Burgess shale with its soft-part fossils, the man who found the first dinosaur nests, the father and son team…
oracknows | August 12, 2009I hadn't planned on writing about this topic again. Really, I hadn't. The reason is mainly that politics is usually not my bag. I've said it time and time again: political bloggers are a dime a dozen, and I have no reason to suspect that my pontifications and bloviations on politics would be any more valuable or worthy of your attention than anyone else's pontifications and bloviations on politics. Besides, I've made quite the little niche for myself in the blogosphere writing about skepticism, critical thinking, and science in medicine, in particular how unscientific or pseudoscientific…
oracknows | August 10, 2009
Remember the Hitler Zombie? He doesn't show up all that much anymore. The reason is not because a lot of brain dead Nazi analogies aren't being used to demonize political opponents. In fact, If I had a mind to, I could probably populate this blog with nothing other than people whose brains have obviously been eaten by the zombie, leaving so little intellectual firepower left that they actually believe that comparing President Obama to Hitler makes sense. Mainly, the reason that I don't do Hitler Zombie bits so often anymore is that the monster has chomped so many brains, producing so much…
emjohnson | August 5, 2009Japanese artists' depiction of the horrors at Hiroshima.Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum
On August 6, 1945 the United States dropped "Little Boy," the first of only two nuclear bombs ever used in warfare, on the Japanese civilians at Hiroshima. In an instant flash of light an estimated 140,000 people were either incinerated or suffered an agonizing death that lasted several days. The standard mythology is that President Truman dropped the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki (three days later on August 9) in order to avoid having to send half a million American soliders to their deaths in a…
aardvarchaeology | August 5, 2009[More blog entries about mining, Norway, abandonedbuildings, photography; gruvor, Norge, övergivnahus, foto.]
From my buddy Claes Pettersson, pix he took in July at the abandoned Christian VI mine of Røros, Norway, at 62°N. It's a copper mine that was worked from 1723 until shortly after 1945. Located near the Swedish border and far from the sea, this is one of the coldest parts of Norway, which means that the wooden structures don't decay much through microbial action -- they mainly just erode.
oracknows | August 4, 2009Wow. After I wrote a post last week about the "birthers," cranks who believe that Barack Obama was not born in Hawaii, and therefore is not a natural born U.S. citizen, and therefore is not eligible to be President of the United States. Like all good conspiracy theorist cranks, they trot out all sorts of reasons why all the evidence showing that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii 48 years ago today is invalid or how there is a huge coverup. (Isn't there always in any good conspiracy theory?) Meanwhile, they constantly demand that they be "shown the birth certificate." As if that would shut them…
aardvarchaeology | August 4, 2009
From Aard regular Christina Reid (she started commenting less than a week after the blog opened, bless her heart!), a few pictures from Mid-summer Eve at the Scandinavian Cultural Centre in Burnaby, British Columbia. Tina and her hubby are active in the Reik Félag reenactment group. And her brother is the singer of Viking/Tolkienian metallers Amon Amarth!
We're seeing two periods of Scandy history being celebrated here. Tina & hubby represent the Viking Period in the 9th & 10th centuries. The other people, the ones erecting a May pole, are into the rural culture of the 19th…
emjohnson | August 4, 2009In 1996 Cornell astrophysicist and science popularizer Carl Sagan posed the question, "What are conservatives conserving?" It was not something he asked lightly. The question appeared in his final book following a prolonged battle with bone marrow disease. Faced with his own mortality, he wanted to understand the individuals whose actions, whether consciously or not, threatened the lives of so many others. Sagan was a passionate advocate for science but, first and foremost, he was an advocate for humanity itself.
A kindred spirit, someone representing the same passion for science and…
terrasig | August 2, 2009Just a quick note this morning as I picked up the dead-tree version of The New York Times this morning in the PharmDriveway.
For some reason, I recognized the name of Anthony DeCurtis in the byline of this short essay on the Manson family Tate-LaBianca murders marking the demise of the 1960s counterculture movement. I posted yesterday on the speakers at the upcoming conference, U2: The Feedback and The Hype - DeCurtis is keynote speaker.
No surprise here since DeCurtis - Dr. DeCurtis, I learned below - has been a contributing editor to Rolling Stone mag and books, with many works in the NYT…
aardvarchaeology | August 2, 2009I just finished reading Nils Ahnlund's 1953 history of Stockholm up to 1523, which marks the end of the Middle Ages in Swedish historiography. Its 538 pages of text offer less concrete detail than an archaeologist might wish for, and I soon lost track of everybody named Anders Jönsson and Jöns Andersson, but it was an interesting read nevertheless. Here are a few of the best things I learned.
Now I finally understand why the inhabitants of Dalecarlia play such a large role in the city's and country's history. I mean, OK, there's reasonable farmland up there, but it is way north and the…
emjohnson | July 30, 2009In a review in PLoS Biology Axel Meyer discusses a new book by Sander Gliboff on the history of evolutionary biology in Germany following the publication of On the Origin of Species. While many are familiar with evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel, few may know about the scientist who is primarily responsible for the wide acceptance of Darwin's work in Germany: Heinrich Georg Bronn (see right). A paleontologist by training, Bronn translated Origin into German within four months of its initial release. He also provided extensive commentary within the published translation as well as…
bcohen | July 28, 2009Not the best title for a post, and by best, I mean most accurate. If you'd like to get to the bottom of it, though, try this new dispatch over at McSweeney's: "The Elevator to Room 1028." It has elevators. It has intrigue. It has secrecy. It has stacks of books. And it has elevators.
This is part two of "Days at the Museum." Part I was noted here. It had a better picture.
emjohnson | July 25, 2009On July 25, 1920 the English biophysicist Rosalind Franklin was born. She was instrumental in discovering the molecular structure of DNA, though her vital contributions were only posthumously acknowledged. After receiving her PhD from Cambridge in 1945 she worked as a research associate for John Randall at King's College in London. Beginning in early 1951 she took X-ray diffraction photographs of DNA that showed a helical form of the molecule, a finding confirmed by James Watson and Francis Crick who subsequently won the Nobel Prize for their DNA research. In lecture notes dated November…
emjohnson | July 24, 2009English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588 - 1679) is widely held as the "father of political science." His 1651 book Leviathan makes the case for why monarchy is the only political system that is consistent with human nature. He bases his argument on the following assumption about humans in "the state of nature" (what we would now call indigenous peoples):
Let us return again to the state of nature, and consider men as if but even now sprung out of the earth, and suddenly, like mushrooms, come to full maturity without all kind of engagement to each other . . . Whatsoever therefore…
ejohnson | July 23, 2009
Four decades ago, Neil Armstrong became the first person to step foot on the Moon. His "one giant leap for mankind" is one of the most recognizable achievements in the history of American science. The success of the Apollo 11 mission represented not only the possibilities of space exploration, but of the entire field of science; it drove home to hundreds of millions of viewers the opportunities that investment in science could create. Now, as the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing is celebrated, NASA may be ready to turn its attention to a new celestial goal: Mars.
The Moon! on…