History
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…
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…
evolvingthoughts | January 16, 2008
This isn't something I would often write, but I think that the recent protest against the Pope speaking at the secular university La Sapienza in Rome is misplaced.
Critics say that the Pope, when he was of more humble rank, had in 1990 defended the Inquisition's judgement against Galileo in 1633.
Signatories to the letter protesting the planned visit recalled a 1990 speech in which the pope, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and head of the Roman Catholic Church's doctrinal watchdog, seemed to justify the Inquisition's verdict against Galileo in 1633.
In the speech, Ratzinger quoted an…
oracknows | January 16, 2008Only someone who's a bit of a tech geek who hasn't yet decided which format to purchase for HD video and is a World War II and Holocaust history buff could find this video as hilarious as I do. (Not to mention someone who, due to a confluence of craziness in professional and personal life, didn't have any time yesterday to do more substantive posts, as the output of brief and/or lighter weight fare today demonstrates.) I do have to admit that I struggled with whether the creators of this video must have had a visit from a certain undead Führer, who had taken a chomp out of their brains, but…
omnibrain | January 16, 2008
"Have trouble concentrating on your studies? Try the German learning egg."
Those Germans! Always coming up with great feats of engineering.
-Via Modern Mechanix-
Or course you could always get a pair of 0.50$ ear plugs, but hey if you've got the money ;)
aardvarchaeology | January 15, 2008
Conservation of the early-16th century sword I found back in August continues apace at Studio Västsvensk Konservering. Its preservation is exquisite, and as usual with conservation of metal objects, a lot of new discoveries are made in the lab. Check out Vivian Smits' photographs!
This is clearly a battle-worn weapon that has been lost during combat. The edges have several fresh parry nicks that would have made the sword hard to sheathe, damage that would have been seen to after the fighting's end. But the sword was most likely dropped into the sea.
Update 16 January: Vivian Smits adds, in…
evolvingthoughts | January 14, 2008
In an article on the Catholic or otherwise virtues of Harry Potter (didn't we do all this a while back), L'Osservatore Romano has an article claiming that Harry Potter is the wrong kind of hero. Why is that? Not, as you might think, because there are wizards in it - apparently Tolkein is OK. But because
[d]espite several positive values that can be found in the story, at the foundations of this tale is the proposal that of witchcraft as positive, the violent manipulation of things and people thanks to the knowledge of the occult, an advantage of a select few: the ends justify the means…
razib | January 11, 2008Martin had a comment below:
You equate language groups with ethnic, even political, groups. That's quite a stretch. Western archaeologists abandoned that idea in the 1970s.
I think I should expand a bit on my comment where I address Martin's assertion. I think I made it pretty clear that when it comes to burial styles or pottery motifs I render unto archaeologists their expertise, on the other hand, there's the old joke that archaeologists reduce the entirety of the past to material artifacts. Obviously such remains loom large because we unfortunately have no access to time travel machines…
razib | January 11, 2008My post which sketched out the model of Slavic expansion northeast into the lands of the Finnic peoples generated a fair number of comments. I tend to agree with those who suggest that Slavic access to more efficient or superior agricultural traditions is probably the explanation for why they absorbed the Finns, and not the reverse. But while thinking about these topics, I thought it might be useful to make explicit an idea which I think we're all using implicitly as a background assumption: location matters. The Slavs were more likely to have access to innovations because they were…
razib | January 9, 2008In my previous post I contended that biology is an important causal factor to keep in mind when we model the behavioral ecology (a.k.a., history) of H. sapiens. A separate, but complementary, tack is to use genetic data to supplement what we know from other historical sciences (history, archeology, economic history, etc.) to obtain a better picture of the dynamics which were operative in the past and the sequence of events which result in the shape of the present. The Etruscan genetics story is a perfect case study; genetic data pretty much sealed the deal in allowing us to distinguish…
razib | January 8, 2008When I was a teenager I read William H. McNeill's Plagues and Peoples, an attempt to sketch out a brief history of the world shaped by the parameter of disease (I also recommend The Human Web: A Bird's-Eye View of World History, where the same author takes a broader view of events). Though I enjoyed it, I was a different person then, and since I know quite a bit more evolution, history and basic biology now, I thought I'd check it out again. And I am glad for it, Plagues and Peoples was published in the 1970s, but it prefigures many of the points brought up in recent works such as 1491 and…
evolvingthoughts | January 8, 2008
Some things I spotted today..
It's Alfred Russel Wallace's birthday. Mike Dunford has a post card. I always think that if Wallace had recognised that selection is not all about survival, he could have come up with an account of social selection causing big brains (the so-called Machiavelli hypothesis) instead of Spirit.
The Environmental Action blog is calling for the resignation of the head of the EPA for refusing to allow California to regulate emissions. See also Effect Measure.
Two really good Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy articles have been just published:
Animal Cognition…
aardvarchaeology | January 7, 2008
Turquoise mosaic dragon and bronze bell in rich male burial at Erlitou, phase II, c. 18th century BC.
A really good historical source is coeval with the events it describes, or it may even form a part of those events, such as in the case of a land deed. It is written by a knowledgeable participant in the events, one who is not strongly politically biased or whose bias is at least known. And any statement in a good historical source is ideally corroborated by other independent good historical sources.
Now, in no part of the world is there any historical source older than the first proto-…
razib | January 5, 2008The Christian Science Monitor has a nice piece highlighting the role of forensic anthropologists in exploring the question of the fate of the Norse of Greenland:
"You don't find bodies in and around the ruins," says William Fitzhugh, director of the Arctic Studies Center at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. "People are being properly buried in church graveyards right up into the 15th century, so it doesn't look like they were wiped out by marauding Inuit or other big disruptions."
Another indication of an orderly reÂtreat: no valuables such as crucifixes, chalices, or chandeliers at…
evolvingthoughts | January 3, 2008
Some bloggable items not worth a post on their own:
George MacDonald Fraser died. The author of the Flashman series, which I loved. Creating one of the best rogues in literature, Fraser also managed to get the history right.
Peter Hare died. Hare was one of the leading moral philosophers of the 20th Century.
Bradie and Harms have updated the excellent SEP entry on evolutionary epistemology.
Godfrey-Smith and Sterelny have updated their excellent piece on biological information also in SEP. I missed this at the time (October).
evolvingthoughts | December 31, 2007
OK, so the next door party finished about 1.30, but the family disputes finished about 5 am, so instead of thinking, I'm going to let others think for me, and round up a few New Years Day links...
Wesley Elsberry at Austringer has a nice piece on why creationists use the conflict model for the relation of science and faith.
Thinking Meat asks if life was "nasty, poore, brutish and short" as Hobbes thought, or things were simply just as much about survival as they are now, in preagriculture.
PsyBlog asks how well Epicurus, one of my favourite Greek Philosophers, fares in the light of…
oracknows | December 30, 2007The other day, I posted about how quacks and pseudoscientists seem to find Ron Paul's promise of "health freedom" as irresistible as moths do flame. Now it seems that Ron Paul has another most excellent endorsement to add to that of Stormfront, Dr. Mercola, and Mike Adams, not to mention to the support of the likes of David Duke and 9/11 Truthers.
Yes, indeed, it's Hutton Gibson:
(Hat tip: Orcinus and VoteRonPaul.com.)
Because nothing adds to the credibility of a candidacy with overwhelming support among pseudoscientists like the endorsement of a Holocaust denying conspiracy theorist, who…
evolvingthoughts | December 29, 2007
The New York Times has a long overdue article on the stupidity of airport security measures for those flying to, within or in markets affected by the United States post-9/11. Pointing out that the security screening at airports in no way reduces any threats (but screening luggage does considerably), and that anyway it is the role of government enforcement agencies to prevent terrorism the old fashioned way, using police work techniques, Patrick Smith highlights the loss of rights, the incredible costs, and the increase in inefficiency of a mode of transport that was supposed to improve our…
evolvingthoughts | December 28, 2007
Found in an old manuscript in the ruins of an old university:
Well this year has been pretty much the same as those that went before. We planted crops, most of which failed because we only had the poverty of seeds we could find by the side of the now-decayed roads. Out children died of diseases that were once thought to be gone. It is time at the end of this century to reflect on the past two centuries - the second dark ages...
It is astounding to think that we have come to this pass after rising so high in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We once went to the moon, but now we…
oracknows | December 28, 2007Over at A Blog Around the Clock, the mother of fellow ScienceBlogger Bora's is guest blogging. I mention this because she's blogging about a trip to Israel she took in November to attend a conference of Holocaust Child Survivors. I had no idea. So far, there are four parts:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
The series is well worth checking out.