History
grrlscientist | February 16, 2008New York's subway station at 81st and Central Park West (CPW), also known as the AMNH subway station, was first opened on 10 September 1932, and rennovation of this station was completed in 1999 after the planetarium had been added to the Natural History Museum in 1990 (at a great cost that still has not been paid off, might I add). The art at this subway station was produced by the MTA Arts for Transit Design Team in cooperation with the Museum of Natural History and is a study of the evolution of life from the big bang to the present day. The entire collection at this station is entitled…
evolvingthoughts | February 9, 2008
So, it's Darwin Day tomorrow my time. So what? What's so great about Darwin?
I mean, Darwin did some very cool science, and often was remarkably perceptive about the nature of biology, but he's not the only one in his day. In fact, he was beaten by a great many people on various notions like the Tree of Life (Heinrich Bronn), Natural Selection (Patrick Matthew, and possibly Alfred Wallace), universal common ancestry (his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin), transmutation (Pierre Maupertuis, Lamarck) the struggle for existence (de Candolle), division of labour (Adam Smith, of course),…
oracknows | February 3, 2008It's Superbowl Sunday. Even someone who's not much of a football fan and who doesn't really care much one way or the other about either team can't help but get caught up in the hype a little bit. In any case, there seems little point to doing any serious blog posts today, given that (1) it's a weekend and traffic plummets on the weekend and (2) it's Superbowl Sunday, which leads me to expect that traffic will be even lower than a typical Sunday. Oh, and also because I just learned that Hitler was a Cowboys fan:
I've posted a parody of this particular scene from the German movie Downfall…
grrlscientist | February 2, 2008tags: blog carnivals, history
The 61st edition of the History Carnival is now available for you to read and enjoy. This is a big carnival, and yet they saw fit to include a piece that I wrote (yeah, me!) so go there to learn lots of new and interesting things.
clock | February 1, 2008Many of you have been moved by my Mom's five-part guest-blogging on Holocaust Children (part I, part II, part III, part IV and part V), so I asked her to let me reproduce here her wartime story, as it appeared in the first volume in the series We Survived published by the Jewish Historical Museum in Belgrade.
It appeared here in five installments starting Monday and going throughout the week at the same time of day. This is the last part. Please ask her questions in the comments. Proceed under the fold:
I don't remember any of us ever being seriously ill. Uncle Vili would treat any minor…
clock | January 31, 2008Many of you have been moved by my Mom's five-part guest-blogging on Holocaust Children (part I, part II, part III, part IV and part V), so I asked her to let me reproduce here her wartime story, as it appeared in the first volume in the series We Survived published by the Jewish Historical Museum in Belgrade.
It will appear here in five installments starting Monday and going throughout the week at the same time of day so please come back and you can ask her questions in the comments. Proceed under the fold:
Left: Rea in Osijek, in 1941 or 1942. After she left Djakovo,
this photograph was…
oracknows | January 30, 2008Like most people, I have my limits. Actually, I have a pretty high tolerance for tastelessness. It's a necessity in a world like this, where tastelessness increasingly goes beyond the pale. But even I am not above finding something like this so tasteless and offensive that I can only shake my head:
RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) - A Carnival float with a pile of model dead bodies commemorating the Holocaust is causing unease before the lavish parades in Rio de Janeiro this weekend.
The Viradouro samba organization, or school, plans to feature the grim display when it marches in the Sambadrome…
clock | January 30, 2008Many of you have been moved by my Mom's five-part guest-blogging on Holocaust Children (part I, part II, part III, part IV and part V), so I asked her to let me reproduce here her wartime story, as it appeared in the first volume in the series We Survived published by the Jewish Historical Museum in Belgrade.
It will appear here in five installments starting Monday and going throughout the week at the same time of day so please come back and you can ask her questions in the comments. Proceed under the fold:
We arrived in Osijek on Sunday afternoon. I didn't know the city. There were people we…
grrlscientist | January 29, 2008tags: NYC Life, Brooklyn Bridge, Emily Roebling, NYC history
I have been watching the superb series of DVDs called New York, thanks to one of my currently vacationing pet sitting clients who owns it (now I wish to own this series too, so I can watch it over and over again). Because of this series, I was inspired to republish a story that I originally wrote in November 2004 about my adventure on the Brooklyn Bridge.
Brooklyn Bridge.
Image: Henri Silbermann.
Dans les champs de l'observation le hasard ne favorise que les esprits prepares.
(Chance favors the prepared mind.)
- Louis Pasteur
As…
clock | January 29, 2008Many of you have been moved by my Mom's five-part guest-blogging on Holocaust Children (part I, part II, part III, part IV and part V), so I asked her to let me reproduce here her wartime story, as it appeared in the first volume in the series We Survived published by the Jewish Historical Museum in Belgrade.
It will appear here in five installments starting yesterday and going throughout the week at the same time of day so please come back and you can ask her questions in the comments. Proceed under the fold:
When I grew up a little and began going to school, I also started learning ballet…
oracknows | January 29, 2008In nondescript dressing room in a nondescript studio in a nondescript office building in in a nondescript industrial park, a short, pudgy 63-year-old man with the stereotypical demeanor of a particularly boring economist was trying to squeeze into a pair of shorts.
"Why oh why did I agree to do this?" he muttered in a whining drone.
He continued to struggle to get into the black shorts, virtually identical to the ones worn by English schoolboys and still worn by Angus Young of AC/DC on stage. Even though Young is over 50, somehow he managed to get into them, and so will I, thought the man.…
clock | January 28, 2008Many of you have been moved by my Mom's five-part guest-blogging on Holocaust Children (part I, part II, part III, part IV and part V), so I asked her to let me reproduce here her wartime story, as it appeared in the first volume in the series We Survived published by the Jewish Historical Museum in Belgrade.
It will appear here in five installments starting today and going throughout the week at the same time of day, so please come back every day and ask her questions in the comments. Proceed under the fold:
Rea Zivkovic Reiss was born in Sarajevo on November 23, 1932. Her father, architect…
clock | January 27, 2008Alun Salt (of the Archaeoastronomy blog, sometimes known as "Clioaudio") recently wrote a post about the Portable Antiquities Scheme:
The Portable Antiquities Scheme is a voluntary scheme to record archaeological objects found by members of the public in England and Wales. Every year many thousands of objects are discovered, many of these by metal-detector users, but also by people whilst out walking, gardening or going about their daily work. Such discoveries offer an important source for understanding our past.
Chris Vallance of BBC was inspired by Alun's post and recorded this interview…
razib | January 26, 2008A few weeks ago, I posted some stuff about what genetics an tell us about the Slavic expansion into the lands of Finno-Ugric tribes. Obviously, I don't think this is a line of inquiry is specific to that situation; and used judiciously it can add a lot of value toward answering many questions. From PNAS, Maternal traces of deep common ancestry and asymmetric gene flow between Pygmy hunter-gatherers and Bantu-speaking farmers (Open Access). Here's the conclusion:
The mtDNA data presented here suggest that the ancestral population in CA [Central Africa] that eventually gave rise to modern-…
evolvingthoughts | January 25, 2008
Reacting to Jerry Coyne's guest blog on The Loom, Brian Switek at Laelaps discusses, among other things, the objection to Darwin's theories that Huxley put forward, both in personal correspondence and in print:
The only objections that have occurred to me are 1st that you have loaded yourself with an unnecessary difficulty in adopting 'Natura non facit saltum' so unreservedly. I believe she does make small jumps--and 2nd. it is not clear to me why if external physical conditions are of so little moment as you suppose variation should occur at all--
Darwin indeed used that phrase, which…
razib | January 21, 2008Genes, Culture, and Human Evolution: A Synthesis, Linda Stone, Paul F. Lurquin and L. L. Cavalli-Sforza.
aardvarchaeology | January 21, 2008
I just popped out for a burger at Arbee's, and I chose a seat with a good view of the full moon riding high over a Shell gas station. On the wall of the station was a large luminescent white sign bearing the words "Build Your Life on Eternal Truths". Chapel Hill has a huge number of churches, most being very small and privately run by their pastors, so I guess what the Shell proprietor really means is "Make sure to follow a culturally sanctioned subset of the many commandments in the Bible". Or perhaps "Spend a lot of your time participating in church rituals and talking about Christian…
terrasig | January 21, 2008
From "Lesser Known Wise and Prophetic Words of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr." by liberal writer and California Democratic Party delegate, Deborah White:
"Science investigates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power; religion gives man wisdom which is control. Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values.
The two are not rivals. They are complementary.
Science keeps religion from sinking into the valley of crippling irrationalism and paralyzing obscurantism. Religion prevents science from falling into the marsh of obsolete materialism and moral…
oracknows | January 20, 2008Via a fascinating blog that was pointed out to me (Morbid Anatomy), I came across a story from last winter about how a Colorado nonprofit organization is reviving a Victorian custom about which I had been largely ignorant, namely the custom of taking photographs of recently deceased loved ones as mementos. Indeed, the photographs were known as "memento mori." The group, called Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, takes carefully posed photographs that are truly astonishing. Although the concept may sound morbid, the results are not (although I really, really wish the website would get rid of the sappy…
oracknows | January 17, 2008Things are crazy now for me, both at home and at work. I mean really, really crazy. So crazy that even I, one of the most verbose bloggers out there, am forced to take two or three days off from my little addiction--I mean habit. Consequently, having foreseen that this time would come around these dates, I, Orac, your benevolent (and, above all verbose) blogger have thought of you, my readers. I realize the cries and lamentations that the lack of fresh material inevitably causes. That, I cannot completely obviate. However, I can ease the pain somewhat, and I can do this by continuing my…