History
clock | December 28, 2007Here is the fifth and final installment of my Mother's travelogue. Feel free to ask questions. I will try to copy and post her published chapter from the book "We Survived" in about a month from now.
Family
Tuesday, November 13th
A beautiful, sunny day. I am trying to make myself look nice for the re-union with eight members of my family. They are coming from different parts of the country . We are meeting in the restaurant "London" at 10.30. A couple is coming from the North - a far-away kibutz - but that has not prevented them to be the first to arrive. I invited Isabelle to meet…
aardvarchaeology | December 28, 2007
I've known for some time from the local papers that the site of the old Tollare paper mill is badly polluted. It's only 1.6 km from my home, on the opposite shore of the Lännerstasundet inlet (one of the main historic shipping routes into Lake Mälaren). A couple of years ago, a large area in the water outside the site was fenced off with floating länsar to keep the bottom sediments from moving. Apparently, this was one of those paper mills that used mercury in a big way. They've recently started covering the polluted sediment with geotextile, cement and crushed rock. (Hope no interesting…
oracknows | December 28, 2007Lately, bloggers, including some of my fellow ScienceBloggers, have been expressing various concerns about the phenomenon that is Ron Paul, the Republican candidate who's ridden a wave of discontent to do surprisingly well in the polls leading up to the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primaries. First, Jake and Greg have pointed out that Ron Paul apparently does not accept the theory of evolution. The other day, Ed Brayton and Sara Robinson discussed a story about an open letter by Bill White, the leader of the American Socialist Workers' Party, in which White claimed that Paul and his aides…
terrasig | December 27, 2007After hearing this morning of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan, I had wondered if any science bloggers might weigh in since Bhutto had attended Oxford and earned a BA at Harvard's Radcliffe College.
Fellow ScienceBlogger, Greg Laden, relates a story from when Bhutto returned to Harvard to give the commencement address.
Beyond the chaos among the general population, I cannot imagine trying to conduct scientific research in the current climate of Pakistan. The University of Karachi, in particular, maintains an excellent Department of Pharmacognosy in the School of Pharmacy - we…
clock | December 27, 2007Here is the fourth installment in the series - the fifth is coming tomorrow. Please comment and my Mom will respond.
Fulfilled lives of Dina and Jovan Rajs
Sunday, November 11th
The Hotel Dining room could accomodate all 800 participants. Members of the Conference Committee used the oportunity to let Israeli officials, polititicians and scientists address the audience and point out the significance of our gatherings. To me it was an oportunity to watch them all and imagine them as children, like me, who were lucky as I was, to stay alive in spite of all that could have happened…
clock | December 26, 2007This is the third post in the series. I mentioned before that my Mom taped her story for the Shoah project. You can access the tapes through the RENCI site.
Also, regulars here know that my Mom reads this blog and sometimes comments. I assume that she would not object to answering a couple of polite questions from readers.
Do the hidden Children Differ from the Others?
Saturday, November 10th
I liked the lecture of Robert Krell he gave this morning. He told us his "story". He comes from Holland, was hidden from 1942-1945 and after the war he reunited with his parents, who were…
evolvingthoughts | December 25, 2007
It is the default opinion of those who accept evolution and those who deny it, that before Darwin, or Lamarck at any rate, everyone was a special creationist. Even Darwin implies in the Origin that if one is not a transformist with regards to species, one is a special creationist. Is it true, and what work does "special" do when affixed to "creation"?
It's important to know if only because of those interminable canards creationists of today in which science is supposed to be based on the work of creationists like Newton because they Christians, and didn't believe in evolution. As if one…
aardvarchaeology | December 25, 2007Town life in Sweden started small in the later 8th century with Birka. The country's capital, Stockholm, is a late town by Swedish standards, having been founded only in the mid-13th century. One of the oldest extant buildings there is the great church beside the royal castle, Storkyrkan. Here, Satan Santa was worshipped for nearly three centuries.
Most of Europe was Catholic until Reformation in the early 16th century. All Catholic churches are devoted to a patron saint, which is the reason that the urban parishes surrounding the Old Town of Stockholm are named St. Claire, St. James, St.…
clock | December 25, 2007This is the second part of my Mom's travelogue from Israel last month:
Trauma of baptized Jews
Friday, November 9th
The Conference continues to work in groups. The topics are interesting but I had to choose one for the morning and one for the afternoon. The first group summoned together the people of the same age as me. I believed I had known much about the war and suffering. In the group of about 30 participants from different countries I realized how little I had known. Better to say, I knew quite a lot about what had been going going on here, in our country, but not much about the…
clock | December 24, 2007 A few weeks ago, my mother took a long trip to Israel to attend a conference of Holocaust Child Survivors. She wrote a diary of her trip and it was, in a slightly edited form (omitting most of the recounts of family gatherings), published in the Serbian newspaper Danas (Today) in its popular weekend column. If you click on the link, you can read the diary in Serbian language. She then translated her travelogue into English and asked me to publish it here, on my blog, for everyone to see. I will do this in a few installments, starting with the first one today and the rest will appear here…
razib | December 23, 2007From Different Matrilineal Contributions to Genetic Structure of Ethnic Groups in the Silk Road Region in China:
Although our samples were from the same geographic location, a decreasing tendency of the western Eurasian-specific haplogroup frequency was observed, with the highest frequency present in Uygur (42.6%) and Uzbek (41.4%) samples, followed by Kazak (30.2%), Mongolian (14.3%), and Hui (6.7%).
The paper supports the idea that Uyghurs are an admixed population from Western and Eastern sources. But is this just an ancient cline of allele frequencies? In other words, are Uyghur lineage…
pharyngula | December 20, 2007Here's a cool animation of the progress of the Civil War — it's like the Confederacy is a giant gelatinous red blob spread over the South, punctuated with explosions as it occasionally makes amoeboid protrusions into the North, only to eventually succumb as it is driven back and chopped into bits.
Sorry, Southerners who read this blog, you may not want to watch. The Yankees will enjoy it, though. Except for the little meter with the casualty counts, which is spinning at a horrendous rate for both sides.
evolvingthoughts | December 19, 2007
Janet and Shelley have opened up the question of whether students and others should use drugs to enhance their cognitive performance. Janet thinks one shouldn't, and Shelley thinks that, in the absence of bad side effects, one might as well. So lacking any particular knowledge, a prerequisite for a philosopher other than Janet, I might as well weigh in.
If neurobiology, and indeed all of biology, is right, then we are the sum of the capacities of our chemical constitution arranged as cells in a coherent organism. What brains can do is in large part dependent upon what chemical signals are…
oracknows | December 19, 2007You can probably manage to tell a Picasso from a Monet. But can you do the same for Churchill and Hitler?
Inquiring minds want to know.
The website's Swiss, and it's written in German, but you should be able to figure it out. Just click on one of the four painting to get started and indicate Churchill or Hitler for each one. If your answer is correct, it will say either "Das war richtig," "Richtig," or "Genau." If your answer is wrong, it will say either "Nein" (even I could figure that one out), "Das war falsch," or simply "Falsch."
At the end, you'll get a score. I managed to get 8 out of…
clock | December 19, 2007I need to pick, buy and send a book on U.S. history to an old friend in Belgrade. It should be an objective, academic book, 600+ pages, not more than $50 used at Amazon. Is there such a thing and if so, what shall I get?
oracknows | December 17, 2007Would it have looked something like this?
And how would Thomas Jefferson have countered?
(Hat tip to Spinning Clio.)
pharyngula | December 12, 2007I have to consider this a rather dispiriting story:
In 1818, a whale oil dealer refused to pay a fish-product fine on whale oil, because a whale isn't a fish. The inspector insisted on the tax, and a spirited court and public battle played out.
It's dispiriting because you'd think the weight of scientific evidence (and if you prefer it, the testimony of no less an authority than Aristotle) would have settled this case easily, but no…the whale lost and was declared a fish.
oracknows | December 10, 2007If you've hung out in forums where Holocaust deniers, 9/11 Truthers, and other conspiracy theorists hang out, as I have done, one thing you'll notice is that these particular purveyors of dubious conspiracy-mongering seem to have a particular love of demonizing Jews (or, as the smarter ones tend to call them in order to try to skirt obvious charges of anti-Semitism, "Zionists"). If you believe such nuts, Jews are responsible for exaggerating the Holocaust, for destroying the World Trade Center, or even for for the destruction of the Space Shuttle Columbia or even Hurricane Katrina. Indeed,…
evolvingthoughts | December 9, 2007
For those who wish a copy of Gosse's famous Omphalos, I have uploaded it to Internet Archive. It's still only a PDF, but I hope that the IA folks will do an OCR.
Many thanks to Noelie Alito for buying me the copy. Now that it's scanned, I'll have it rebound, one day.
aardvarchaeology | December 7, 2007This 88-page booklet by Åsa Virdi Kroik is named "You'd rather lose your head than turn in your drum". The title refers to shamanic drums among the Saami. The book is based on an MA thesis in the history of religion defended at the University of Stockholm in 2006. Reading it, I soon realised that it can't simply be evaluated from a scholarly point of view: this is at heart also an ethno-political tract. I'll comment on the political aspects first and then on the scholarly ones.
For the non-Scandy reader, I should explain that the Saami are a sub-Arctic indigenous minority in Norway, Sweden,…