History
aardvarchaeology | November 14, 2007My friendly colleague Claes Pettersson heads excavations in Jönköping, a town in Småland. His team is working with 17th-century urban layers in a part of town that was laid out and settled by royal decree starting in the 1620s. Here are his pics of a few cool finds.
A shard from a painted window.
Part of a sword hilt, decorated with sweet non-sword-wielding little putti. (This piece is going to be sooo pretty after conservation.)
A baker's mould depicting King Gustavus II Adolphus. In modern times, there has arisen a tradition to eat cake bearing the king's image on the anniversary of his…
aardvarchaeology | November 6, 2007
History is the study of past societies through surviving text and images. I just got back home to Sweden, whose narrative history starts in the 9nd century AD and is even then really patchy for centuries. I have spent the past two weeks in China, where recorded history starts some time in the mid-2nd millennium BC. And what did I find in my long-neglected in-box when I got home? The makings of the 58th History Carnival!
A blog carnival, for those of you who don't already know, is an ambulatory and periodical collection of good blog writing relevant to a certain theme. Here today, somewhere…
pharyngula | November 5, 2007Perhaps you haven't noticed, but we've got a serial spammer in the comments. This twit, calling himself Peter Moore (also known as Ken DeMyer, or Kdbuffalo, as he was known on Wikipedia before being banned there), is repeating himself over and over again, asking the same stupid question, never satisfied with any answer anyone gives him. Forty nine insipid comments in three days is enough.
I will answer him one last time. Any further attempt to spam multiple comment threads with his demands (and this alone makes him an ass: an incompetent, unqualified hack like Moore is in no position to make…
evolvingthoughts | November 3, 2007
[This started as a discussion of the debate mentioned below. It got lost somewhere, and became me riffing on my favourite topics. Sorry.]
I love it when people I know have a barny* in public, but it presents some delicate choices and sensibilities to be honoured. The case in point today is between Malte Ebach and David Williams in the red corner, and Joseph Felsenstein in the blue. I'm not the referee - I'm just the seasoned journalist in the front row...
The issue is what counts when we classify in biology, and why. Malte and David argue that there are some notions of classification…
terrasig | October 31, 2007Welcome, Reader: This post was updated on Halloween 2009 to remedy linkrot and add an interesting tidbit on the famous Macbeth passage. As it is likely you ended up here via a search engine, click here to go to the updated post.
Have you ever wondered, perhaps on 31 October, why witches are depicted as riding brooms?
The answer is alluded to by Karmen Franklin at Chaotic Utopia in her post as to why witches need to know their plant biology.
The excerpts I'm about to give you come from a superb and accessible pharmacology text entitled, "Murder, Magic, and Medicine," by John Mann, host of…
sb admin | October 31, 2007Another in the hilarious vintage BBC Look Around You series, this is 4 - Ghosts. Bwa-ha-ha.
aardvarchaeology | October 30, 2007
Came to Luoyang in Henan province on the Yellow River by train yesterday morning, passing factories and quarries, fertile fields and homes cut into hillsides like hobbit homes. We were booked into the Yaxiang Jinling hotel, a high-rise in Luoyang's vast new area of airily spaced skyscrapers outside the old town. Such developments surround all major Chinese cities these days and give a strange impression, as if Manhattan had been stretched out to cover all of New York State, the intervals filled with car parks, lawns and expressways. The hotel has 23 floors, all decorated in a space-themed…
sb admin | October 29, 2007
You lol'ed at science education spoof Look Around You: Brain, and now for Halloween here's Look Around You: Ghosts. In this nine minute pseudoscience mockumentary you'll learn things like, "Ectoplasm is perfectly safe to eat, and tastes like pig's milk." Spooky!
pharyngula | October 27, 2007The Beagle Project is having a fundraiser — they're selling t-shirts and other gear to raise money for their project of reconstructing Darwin's ship and sending scientists off to sea on it. I'm eyeing that large mug with the Beagle blueprints on it myself.
pharyngula | October 27, 2007Tild uncovers a real treasure: a book from the heyday of patent medicines, full of advice specifically for women, and loaded with testimonials for Dr Pierce's ‘prescription’. When you find out what was in the concoction, you'll understand why all the accompanying photos show women looking both cheery and glazed.
The results were startling. Richardson’s Concentrated Sherry Wine Bitters had 47.5 percent alcohol; Hostetter’s Stomach Bitters, 44.3 percent; Boker’s Stomach Bitters, 42.6 percent; Parker’s Tonic, “purely vegetable,” 41.6 percent. Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound had relatively…
pharyngula | October 26, 2007Adam Cuerden sent along this old political cartoon that doesn't really make much sense to me. Are we supposed to sympathise with William Gladstone? He's the guy with a big knife trying to murder the lovely creature who just wants to cling to his rock and be left alone. Tattooing his tentacles with the the words "rebellion," "lawlessness," "outrage," "sedition," etc. doesn't change the action we're witnessing.
(click for larger image)
sb admin | October 26, 2007In time for Halloween:
Trailer for Central State: Asylum for the Insane. A filmmaker prowls a closed mental institution to "...uncover the mysteries left behind when the facilities closed in 1994." There's lots of shaky handheld camerawork in poorly lit tunnels, and shakier rumours of ghosts, but no exploration into the disappearance of former patients. Homelessness and prisons, that's scary, not the supposed ghosts that a supposed psychic says are "like a tornado" in the building.
What's actually "menacing and still threatening" is not an old hospital but the stigma attached to mental…
pharyngula | October 22, 2007I knew of D.B. Cooper, the famous mystery man who jumped out of a plane with a few hundred thousand dollars ransom money, and was never seen again — I grew up in the Pacific Northwest in the 1970s, so of course I was familiar with the story. Now here's a weird little twist: there's a new suspect in the crime, and he's the brother of a fellow here in Morris, Minnesota.
Not me, I didn't do it. I was only 14 when D.B. Cooper made his jump.
(Hat tip to Jeffrey Shallit)
oracknows | October 22, 2007A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned how Holocaust denier extraordinaire David Irving had gotten into some trouble with his former fellow travelers in the world of Holocaust denial. Apparently they didn't like the fact that he now concedes that the mass slaughter of Jews "may have" occurred. Of course he still denies that Auschwitz was a death camp (actually, it was both a work camp and a death camp) or that Hitler knew anything about the killings, but he's conceded more than his fellow Holocaust deniers would have liked him to concede, namely that as many as 2.4 million Jews may have been…
purepedantry | October 22, 2007James Watson, Nobel Laureate and member of the Watson-Crick duo that discovered DNA, has been suspended from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory after some comments about race and genetics:
James Watson, in London to promote a new book, was forced to return to New York after Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Long Island, relieved him of his duties because of his apparent views. It follows a hellish week for the 79-year-old geneticist who helped to unravel the structure of DNA more than 50 years ago.
After being quoted in The Sunday Times saying that he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of…
pharyngula | October 21, 2007You've still got time — I'm in the Ridgedale public library, and Hector Avalos is getting ready to give his talk on "How archaeology killed biblical history"…come join the crowd if you're somewhere in the Twin Cities area.
You're too late now! I saw several familiar faces at the talk, and there was a huge crowd — Minnesota Atheists has to be growing, because every meeting I go to is larger than the last one. We got a good discussion of the increasingly evident failure of archaeology to back up any of the claims of the Bible. Whereas once upon a time, serious scholars argued that portions of…
oracknows | October 9, 2007I love it when my efforts are noticed by those at whom they are directed. It's all the reward I need. (Warning: Depending on your place of employment, link may not be work-safe.)
oracknows | October 7, 2007Richard Dawkins really should know better.
That's why it's frustrating to see him put his foot in his mouth in a big way in a recent interview. Indeed, he did it in a way that leaves himself wide open to charges of anti-Semitism:
In an interview with the Guardian, he said: "When you think about how fantastically successful the Jewish lobby has been, though, in fact, they are less numerous I am told - religious Jews anyway - than atheists and [yet they] more or less monopolise American foreign policy as far as many people can see. So if atheists could achieve a small fraction of that influence…
pharyngula | October 6, 2007Cuvier, and his British counterpart, Richard Owen, had an argument against evolution that you don't hear very often anymore. Cuvier called it the laws of correlation, and it was the idea that organisms were fixed and integrated wholes in which every character had a predetermined value set by all the other characters present.
In a word, the form of the tooth involves that of the condyle; that of the shoulder-blade; that of the claws: just as the equation of a curve involves all its properties. And just as by taking each property separately, and making it the base of a separate equation, we…
evolvingthoughts | October 6, 2007
I found this interesting and still surprisingly modern essay by David Starr Jordan in 1897, at William Tozier's blog, where he had scanned it from a journal called The Arena. They had some good public discussion journals at the time.
So I took his scan and OCR'd and corrected it, and put it here. It is amazing how well Jordon managed to avoid the usual errors, and correct those that are with us still, so long ago.
The essay is beneath the fold. I left the headers in.
THE ARENA.
Vol. XVIII.AUGUST, 1897.No. 93.
EVOLUTION: WHAT IT IS AND WHAT IT IS NOT.1
BY DR. DAVID STARR…