History
oracknows | December 13, 2008The Hitler Zombie definitely approves of this movie:
Too bad I don't speak German or Norwegian, because here's the movie website, and here's another trailer sans subtitles:
I wonder if I can take some stills from this trailer to use the next time I feel "inspired" (at least I like to call it that) to pen yet another Hitler Zombie epic.
oracknows | December 9, 2008My original post that asked the intentionally provocative question Was Nazi science good science? provoked a lot of comments, some of which made me think, which is good. This post was inspired by an article in which historian of the Nazi era Richard Evans was featured in a story about Nazi science and expressed his amazement at how much Nazi science was treated just like any other science, with little or no comment by other scientists of the era about the completely unethical and downright evil nature of the experiments, which reduced human beings to the status of laboratory animals, and…
drorzel | December 8, 2008I made a run to the library last week on one of the days I was home with SteelyKid, as an excuse to get out of the house for a little while. I picked up three books: Counterknowledge, The Devil's Eye by Jack McDevitt (an Antiquities Dealers Innnnn Spaaaaaace novel, and a good example of Competence Fiction), and a pop-science book titled The Age of Entanglement: When Quantum Physics Came of Age by Louisa Gilder, because it looked fairly relevant to my own book-in-progress.
Amusingly, my RSS feeds yesterday brought me the latest in a series of posts in which ZapperZ waxes peevish about the book…
evolvingthoughts | December 7, 2008Siris has an interesting piece on the nature of the liberal arts. I loves me some 13th century, I does.
Bora objects to Obama's choices being characterised as "elites" and therefore bad. On the other hand, the term "groupthink" was coined to characterise the elite advisors of the first American Camelot. And an open letter to Obama here on the failures of the Healthcare Information Technology proposals in the US. IT won't solve problems that aren't informational in nature.
PM of Notes from the Floating World discusses the constitutionality and sense of the proroguing of the Canadian Parliament…
oracknows | December 4, 2008I've long had an interest in World War II history. Ever since I was around 11 or 12 years old, a major portion of my reading diet has consisted of books and articles about World War II. Back when I was young, my interest was, as you might expect, primarily the battles. The military history of World War II fascinated me, and I build many, many models of World War II fighter aircraft and warships when I was in my early teens. (No cracks about how the airplane glue obviously affected me, although it is true that back then it was real airplane glue, chock full of toluene and lots of other organic…
aardvarchaeology | December 4, 2008
Here's something neat. Annika and Bengtowe Angare are photographers and digital retouch artists (check out their site and hover your cursor over each picture!). They've photographed the early-16th century sword I found at Djurhamn in 2007 and stuck it point first into the find spot on a vintage map of Djurö!
This post is timely as I have a short talk scheduled for tonight about my work at Djurhamn. Wish me luck!
Thanks to Annika & Bengtowe for permission to blog publish their © image.
evolvingthoughts | December 1, 2008
The chair of a course on religion, philosophy and ethics at the University of Gloucestershire (being English, they'll pronounce that "glostersheer"), David Webster, is calling for people to give the worst argument in Britain. Go leave yours. Caveat: They already have the full complement of creationist nuttery, and anyway most of it's American, which is too easy.
Personally, I think that, as there are an infinite number of ways to mess up an inference, there is no single "worst" argument, so this is really about aesthetics.
pharyngula | December 1, 2008The Atlantic has republished Asa Gray's review of Darwin's Origin from 1860. It's a fascinating read: Asa Gray was a general supporter of Darwin, and the two of them corresponded regularly, and the review is generally positive, pointing out the power of the evidence and the idea. However, Gray is also quite plain about the way the implications of the theory make him very uncomfortable, and you can see him casting about, looking for loopholes.
The prospect of the future, accordingly, is on the whole pleasant and encouraging. It is only the backward glance, the gaze up the long vista of the…
evolvingthoughts | November 28, 2008
I haven't done much philosophical blogging lately. There are Reasons. I'm preparing to move to Sydney over the next few months (and there may be a period in which I have no laptop too), and trying to catch up on a bunch of projects I have in play and which deserve my attention. Also, there's a stack yay high of books to review. To impress you all and disgust my editors, they include the following:
Books
Sober, Elliott. 2008. Evidence and evolution: the logic behind the science. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press.
This continues Sober's general project of giving a…
aardvarchaeology | November 28, 2008
Here's something pretty damn cool: Ossington airbase in Nottinghamshire, England. From 1942 to 1946 it was an RAF bomber airfield, and then it reverted to farmland. Just look at the big X on the aerial photograph from Google Maps. Six decades of abandonment, and it's an archaeological landscape!
Thanks to Kai for the tipoff.
pharyngula | November 27, 2008Or, for you non-Americans, happy Thursday! Or, for you Australians, happy Friday or Tuesday or whatever it is down in your topsy-turvy country where you've even got your seasons reversed.
Oh, heck, forget it. Happy Day! Find whatever reason you want to celebrate.
Again, for you non-Americans, this is a peculiarly American version of a fall harvest festival. We are supposedly celebrating an event in our history from the 17th century: the fellowship and cooperation between the Pilgrim immigrants and the native Americans that culminated in a shared feast. The truth is a little uglier and…
terrasig | November 26, 2008The recent passing of Studs Terkel and my conversations with African American colleagues after the Obama victory has given me pause to think about our life stories, especially the life stories of our elders. For example, I lost all of my grandparents before I could get their life stories on videotape, digital recorder, or writing - I also said I was going to do it during some visit home. My grandparents had some incredible stories about The Great Depression, the World Wars, even the history of my hometown that was farmland in the middle of factories only a dozen miles from one of the…
pharyngula | November 24, 2008As I've already mentioned, I was off in Philadelphia this past weekend, participating in a symposium entitled "Understanding Darwin: The legacy of evolution". I was a bit amazed to be there, since this was primarily a history and philosophy event with several big names in those fields, and I'm an itty-bitty biologist with more of a popular following than an academic one, but I was also glad to be involved and learned quite a bit, hob-nobbing with the big shots. Here's a short summary of the content of the talks.
John Beatty talked about Natural Selection of & Versus Chance Variation. He…
evolvingthoughts | November 23, 2008
Sgt Pepper... oops, wrong oeuvre...
On the 24th of November 1859, a green bound book was published. It made something of an impact on the way we think...
Hat tip to Professor Olsen @ Large
razib | November 22, 2008After reading American Colonies: The Settling of North America, I was struck by the incredible similarities in British modus operandi in North America and India the 17th and 18th centuries. These two imperial domains seem very different, but recall that Lord Cornwallis plays a prominent role in both Colonial and Indian history. This was a world-wide empire, the French and Indian War in North America was just a piece of the broader Seven Years' War, which also played out in India.
But aside from the broad-brush banalities of empire, it is notable the extent to which the early colonies used…
rallain | November 22, 2008One of things I like to think about in science is "how do we know that?" It is interesting how one thing builds on another. This is a story of how the Greeks estimated the distance from the Earth to the Sun (an important idea in the development of the model of the solar system). I like this story because it is not too complicated. In fact, one could easily reproduce these measurements themselves. So, here is what I will talk about:
Measuring the size of the Earth.
Determining the distance from the Earth to the moon and the size of the moon.
Calculating the distance (and size) to the Sun…
aardvarchaeology | November 21, 2008Polish bishop asks archaeologists to find the unmarked grave of Nicolaus Copernicus under the floor of Frombork Cathedral. Archaeologists find a damaged burial including a jawless skull, and note that it's a male of the right age and with signature wounds visible on contemporary portraits of the astronomer. But they're still not quite sure if they have the right bones. So they do something extremely smart.
They vacuum a book known to have belonged to Copernicus, kept in a library in Uppsala, and they get little bits of human hair out of it. Then they have the hairs and a number of bones and…
evolvingthoughts | November 20, 2008
The body of the man who started off the modern scientific revolution in the 16th century, Nicholas Copernicus, has been found and his face reconstructed.
razib | November 18, 2008The Dead Tell a Tale China Doesn't Care to Listen To:
An exhibit on the first floor of the museum here gives the government's unambiguous take on the history of this border region: "Xinjiang has been an inalienable part of the territory of China," says one prominent sign.
But walk upstairs to the second floor, and the ancient corpses on display seem to tell a different story.
One called the Loulan Beauty lies on her back with her shoulder-length hair matted down, her lips pursed in death, her high cheekbones and long nose the most obvious signs that she is not what one thinks of as Chinese.…
pharyngula | November 18, 2008NOVA is showing a new episode tonight, The Bible's Buried Secrets. It doesn't sound like the usual laudatory tripe we get on the cable documentary shows — in fact, it sounds downright skeptical:
A visually stunning two-hour special edition of "Nova" examines decades of archaeological studies that contradict much of what is in the Bible. The entire Exodus story is debunked, as is the idea that the Israelites were monotheistic following the contract made between God and Abraham. It turns out idol worship was common through the reign of King David and right up to the Babylonian exile.
I have to…