History
oracknows | March 18, 2008You be the judge.
Words fail me (an incredibly rare thing, I know). Obviously, "Dr." Walid Al-Rashudi's brain failed him when he uttered the words above, and somehow I get the impression that that is not a rare thing at all.
razib | March 18, 2008I read Christmas: A Candid History walking home last night. It's a small compact book so walking and reading works well. In any case, there was some surprising information here. The basic outline that Christmas, as we understand it, is in large part a co-opted pagan complex of festivals is there. No surprise. But the author claims that the suppression of St. Nicholas and his festival during the Reformation in northern Europe had the side effect of enabling the resurgence of pagan supernatural folk-heroes! In other words, without St. Nicholas the rural peasantry of German and Scandinavia…
grrlscientist | March 17, 2008tags: echinodermata, photography, subway art, AMNH, NYC, NYCLife
Perhaps this is a bat star, Asterina miniata?
as portrayed in tiles on the walls of the downtown-bound landing of the NYC subway stop (A-B-C)
at 81st and Central Park West. (ISO, no zoom, no flash).
Image: GrrlScientist 2008. [wallpaper size].
The doctors instructed me to move my lower arm around without moving my upper arm at all, as a form of physical therapy, to make sure I don't lose my range of motion and fine motor skills in my left hand and arm. Well, that assignment seemed the perfect excuse to get out there and…
grrlscientist | March 15, 2008tags: astronomy, solar system, subway art, AMNH, NYC, NYCLife
Since I am having trouble getting out to roam the city and take pictures, I thought I'd return us to the upstairs subway platform at AMNH for a couple days to look at a few pieces that I haven't yet shared with you.
Solar system
as portrayed in tiles on the stairway leading down into the NYC subway stop (A-B-C)
at 81st and Central Park West. (ISO, no zoom, no flash).
Image: GrrlScientist 2008. [wallpaper size].
The lighting over this landing makes this mosaic difficult to photograph, unfortunately, since it is quite…
grrlscientist | March 12, 2008tags: mystery bird, fossil bird, subway art, AMNH, NYC, NYCLife
Since I am having trouble getting out to roam the city and take pictures, I thought I'd return us to the upstairs subway platform at AMNH for a couple days to look at a few pieces that I haven't yet shared with you.
Mystery bird -- Archeopteryx?
as portrayed in tiles on the downtown stairway landing of the NYC subway stop (A-B-C)
at 81st and Central Park West. (ISO, no zoom, no flash).
Image: GrrlScientist 2008. [wallpaper size].
Read more about the AMNH tile artworks and see the AMNH tile artworks photographic archives --…
evolvingthoughts | March 8, 2008
Yeah, yeah, OK, I know I've been absent except on the comments, but I'm traveling, all right? Everything I have worth saying gets said over beer or whiskey, tonight to Jim Lippard and John Lynch, the latter of whom is my present host. I must thank Malte Ebach for his hospitality over the past week too.
On to Utah on Wednesday. Lynch tells me I'm off to see fossils and stuff in Tucson tomorrow. I hope he means geological fossils, and not my contemporaries. Even I think I'm an old fogey.
Speaking of fogeys, it's PZ Mashgvsihem's birthday. He is only slightly less fogeyish than I - he has…
terrasig | March 5, 2008Yesterday, we received tomorrow's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine and, yet again, I nearly walked into a tree coming back from the mailbox. This (abstract, full text), folks, is a fascinating medical detective story rivaled only by (and similar to) the discovery that Parkinson's disease could be caused by contaminant from a faulty clandestine synthesis of an analog of the opiate, meperidine. (1979, 1983)
Here's the backstory: in the US, our newly-implemented restrictions on ephedrine and pseudoephedrine OTC drug products are due to the use of these chemicals as starting…
oracknows | March 5, 2008File this one under: "It seemed like a good idea at the time." It's a story that I couldn't resist because it combines my interest in skepticism with my interest in World War II history. Too bad there wasn't a way to throw some medicine in there as well; otherwise I could have had a trifecta.
Yesterday, I was sent a news story that demonstrates how a seemingly good idea can go horribly wrong. In the deepest, darkest depths of World War II, in 1940 and 1941, when Britain's very survival as a nation was in doubt as the Blitz pummeled its cities and even the stoutest Englishman, alone in at…
evolvingthoughts | February 28, 2008
Today marks the final day of the month in which, 150 years ago, a naturalist in what is now Indonesia wrote a letter to Charles Darwin in which he gave a theoretical account of how types can evolve by natural selection so that new species will arise. Give it up, folks, for Alfred Russel Wallace.
Darwin's receipt of this letter dismayed him. He wrote to Charles Lyell, 18 June 1858:
Down Bromley Kent
18th
My dear Lyell
Some year or so ago, you recommended me to read a paper by Wallace in the Annals [a natural history journal], which had interested you & as I was writing…
pharyngula | February 25, 2008Wilkins tagged me. It's all his fault.
This is supposed to be a historical meme…why bother me with this? I think it's because philosophers have a professional obligation to annoy people with weird questions, and Wilkins takes personal pleasure in poking me now and then, the brute. Here's what I'm supposed to do.
Link to the person who tagged you.
List 7 random/weird things about your favorite historical figure.
Tag seven more people at the end of your blog and link to theirs.
Let the person know they have been tagged by leaving a note on their blog.
Favorite historical figure?? I don't…
evolvingthoughts | February 25, 2008
... a female deer. Oops, sorry, wrong thread.
Anyway, a medievalist, goblinpaladin, has tagged me with a meme. Now I don't' get tagged a lot with memes, possibly because folk know I have published on them, both for and more recently against, but you can't deny the buggers on the Interwubs. Here it is:
1) Link to the person who tagged you.
2) List 7 random/weird things about your favorite historical figure.
3) Tag seven more people at the end of your blog and link to theirs.
4) Let the person know they have been tagged by leaving a note on their blog.
It's hard work, because I don't…
evolvingthoughts | February 21, 2008
The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article discussing a study as to why there are so few conservative academics, in the light of the campaign by conservative activist David Horowitz to propose and "academic bill of rights". The answer? John Stuart Mill put it best:
What I stated was, that the Conservative Party was, by the law of its constitution, necessarily the stupidest party. Now, I do not retract that assertion; but I did not mean to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and…
grrlscientist | February 21, 2008tags: insect, wasp, photography, subway art, AMNH, NYC, NYCLife
I think this is an Ichneumon wasp species (but which one?)
as portrayed in tiles on the walls of the NYC uptown subway stop (A-B-C)
at 81st and Central Park West. (ISO, no zoom, no flash).
Image: GrrlScientist 2008. [wallpaper size].
Read more about the AMNH tile artworks and see the AMNH tile artworks photographic archives -- with all the animals identified.
evolvingthoughts | February 21, 2008
One of the more curious episodes in recent cultural history is the adoption, word for word, by Islamists particularly in Turkey of the American Christian fundamentalist antievolution schtick. Nobody knows more about this than Taner Edis, whose book An Illusion of Harmony: Science And Religion in Islam outlines how this came about and the relation between science and Islam (overall: not good).
Here's a nice short article by Edis, from the History of Science newsletter.
evolvingthoughts | February 20, 2008
In a recent paper on biological nomenclature in Zoologica Scripta, Michel Laurin makes the following comment about the stability of Linnean ranks:
However, taxa of the rank of family, genus or species are not more stable. ...
This sad situation should not surprise us because the ranks, on which the traditional (RN) codes are based, are purely artificial. As Ereshefsky (2002: 309) stated, ‘they are ontologically empty designations’. Ranks were initially thought to be objective because, for Linnaeus, each rank reflected the plan of the Creator and could be recognized on the basis of…
evolvingthoughts | February 20, 2008
From The Blackwell Companions to Philosophy series comes A Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography edited by Aviezer Tucker. It looks fascinating, especially essay 36 on Darwin...
oracknows | February 20, 2008Deep underneath the brick and steel of a nondescript building somewhere in Manhattan, within the very bowels of the city itself, not far from the Seed mothership, Orac waited. After over a year's absence, the monster had returned to consume the most unpalatable brain of a former Nixon speechwriter who had decided that he knew more about biology than biologists and that calling pseudoscience pseudoscience was akin to that tactics of Hitler and Stalin in suppressing dissent. Since then, Orac had noted an uptick in the monster's activity. Hooked into the primitive human computer network known as…
evolvingthoughts | February 18, 2008
A new paper, unfortunately not yet available to nonsubscribers on PNAS's Early Edition, has done some remarkable work on the evolution of canoe designs, putting some meat onto cultural evolutionary models.
The paper is nicely reviewed by K. Kris Hirst here, however. And when we mere mortals can get it, the paper is listed at the bottom of that and this post.
What Rogers and Ehrlich (yes, that Paul Ehrlich) did was analyse 95 variables in the design of the canoes of the "Lapita Complex", a group of Polynesians regarded as having colonised their islands around 1400-900 BCE. They found that…
evolvingthoughts | February 18, 2008
As I prepare my lectures for this semester (Australian universities start the academic year in late February, early March, apart from those poor sods who have summer semesters) I am moved by Moselio Schaechter's little essay In Defense of the Lecture to ponder what propaedeutic use lectures are. Or, in other words, do they help or hinder learning?
Years back, I had a friend who ran the Science and Humanities School at a small regional campus of Monash University who often said to me, with his psychology hat on, that lectures are the worst way to teach. I never found them all that helpful,…
purepedantry | February 18, 2008In honor of President's day I have some interesting Presidential pathology to present. I want to talk about Andrew Jackson and his myriad of diseases.
To say that Andrew Jackson had medical problems would be the understatement of the century. Starting with a head wound sustained while a prisoner during the Revolutionary War -- he was only 13 at the time, Jackson's entire life was spent plagued with one malady or another. He was shot at least twice in duels, both leading to chronic injuries. He also very likely got malaria during the War of 1812. This situation was complicated by the fact…