History
oracknows | July 14, 2007While perusing my comments yesterday, I became aware of what looks like a promising new blog, Occam's Trowel by Scott Prinster. Check out his self-description:
Scott Prinster is continuing his graduate studies in the History of Science department at the University of Wisconsin. His current interest is in the interaction of religion and science in the pre- and early Reformation period in Eastern Europe, especially as part of the movements known as the Radical Reformation. Scott has also been a Unitarian Universalist minister for 12 years, and has served congregations in Michigan and here in…
pharyngula | July 10, 2007
Uh-oh. The creationists are going to love Darwin's skull-topped walking stick — it's wicked.
I think I love it, too. Where can I get an imitation?
omnibrain | July 10, 2007Everyone thinks the printing press led to increased literacy among the average man in the middle ages, but that just might not be the case. Dr Marco Mostert a historian from Utrecht University is instead suggesting that the availability of cheap paper was the main reason more reading material became available. While this isn't surprising the source of the new cheap paper is. It seems that, according to Dr. Mostert,
"These rags came from discarded clothes, which cost much less than the very expensive parchment which was previously used for books. In the 13th century, so it is thought, as…
evolvingthoughts | July 9, 2007
I probably agree with Christopher Hitchens on many substantive points. But I won't be reading his book. Instead, we can thank this reviewer for their critical, ascerbic, and I suspect in the end accurate review of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything.
omnibrain | July 9, 2007This weeks Pseudoscience of the past is brought to you once again by the New York Times from November 21, 1851. In this episode we demonstrate how you can tell nearly everything about a person from...wait for it.... wait..... yes! Their Hat!
Now this isn't something you can tell from how fashionable the hat is - but instead, people's hats conform to the shape of their skulls. So basically if you have a sloping head of a certain shape you are a revolutionary and all that one would need to do to determine if you have a treasonous head is to do a little hat measuring!
I'm seeing it now...
"…
oracknows | July 8, 2007Given that my electronic leash is always with me and that ubiquitous pagers and cell phones make doctors reachable 24 hours a day, it's amazing to contemplate a time when a PA system at a hospital was considered new and high tech:
I especially like the part touting the volume control, as if that were some technological wonder that one wouldn't expect on a P.A. system!
Personally, when I see such a system, I can't help but think of the Three Stooges in Men In Black. Of course, when it comes to any paging system, be it a PA system or a pager, there are times when I feel like doing exactly…
aardvarchaeology | July 3, 2007[More blog entries about architecture, history, Sweden, Victorian; arkitektur, historia, oscariansk, Wallenberg, Saltsjöbaden.]
The area where I grew up once belonged to the village of Neglinge, a group of small holdings on the inner margin of the Stockholm archipelago. The nearby inlet was briefly used as a harbour by a foreign fleet in the High Middle ages, but apart from that, Neglinge didn't really make the news until the 1890s. A Stockholm banker, Knut Agaton Wallenberg (whose family still rules the Swedish economy), bought the area in 1891 and turned it into a summer resort for his…
omnibrain | July 2, 2007Have you ever wondered why your left hemisphere is better developed than your right? Are you worried about the negative impacts of hypnotism, crossed eyes and convulsions? The NY Times may have the answer for you!
It's all about how you sleep as a baby and what's in your cradle.
From Nov. 26 1880:
Not only do they provide answers for these questions they express these other very elucidating views on imagery:
See you again next week with a story on the study of Phrenology in Dogs from the Chicago Tribune on October 20th 1895!
omnibrain | June 30, 2007Today starts a new series that I perhaps blatantly stole from Shelley over at Retrospectacle, but it's such a darn great idea! From the mouth of Shelley:
Pretty much I'm just going to dig back into the forgotten and moldering annuls of scientific publications to find weird and interesting studies that very likely would never be published or done today (and perhaps never should have.)
Clearly I'm not doing the same thing, but her idea gave me one of my own. We here at Omni Brain will be digging into classic media coverage of all things science (usually brain related - clearly). I have a…
oracknows | June 29, 2007I love these old ads. Remember, keep fresh batteries in your house or you might poison your baby!
The tag line sounds almost like the reaction of an antivaccination loon to the polio vaccine.
pharyngula | June 26, 2007Darwin's home was going to be submitted to UNESCO's World Heritage committee for designation as a World Heritage site, but that application was withdrawn, to be resubmitted in two years after some reworking. Down House has some handicaps compared to other World Heritage sites:
But without natural wonders or spectacular architecture, Darwin at Downe does not tick obvious World Heritage boxes. Although he was surprised to hear of Downe's difficulties, Geoffrey Belcher, site coordinator for the Maritime Greenwich World Heritage Site in London, thinks that "A site with a limited range of…
aardvarchaeology | June 23, 2007
Longtime Dear Readers may remember me blogging about the excavations in my friend Jan Peder's garden last summer. Beside his house is a ruin mound full of heavily burnt and vitrified Medieval-style bricks, and he's gotten funds together to do some excavations there. The original idea was that the feature might be the remains of a defensive tower or other aristocratic building. Last year's work established that it was in fact the remains of a brick kiln, which is also evidence of somebody powerful in the vicinity. 16th century pottery found inside the kiln gives the latest possible date for…
oracknows | June 23, 2007There are lots of medical discoveries today that are breathlessly hyped far beyond what their actual benefits are likely to be. This, apparently, is not a new phenomenon, as this story shows.
(Click on the pictures above for larger images of all four pages of the article, which appeared in 1939.)
On the other hand, given the advances in medical care that have come about because of X-rays, such as radiographs, CT scans, nuclear medicine scans, and the use of radiation to treat cancer, this story is actually not exaggerating all that much. Unfortunately, there didn't appear to be a clue…
evolvingthoughts | June 21, 2007
I'm putting this up because I will use it to discuss the history of species definitions in a forthcoming talk. It's very interesting for a number of reasons, one of which is the species nominalism, and another that Lewes argues from evidence for biparental inheritance some years before Mendel, and against eugenics, despite his evident racism, and well before Galton.
Footnotes follow their paragraph, and have been slightly retagged for clarity.
Published anonymously by George Henry Lewes, (1856). “Hereditary Influence, Animal and Human.” Westminster Review 66 (July): 135-162. Parts of…
evolvingthoughts | June 20, 2007
A very thoughtful and interesting, dare I say almost philosophical, discussion of the Manichaean nature of the Bush Administration is in the present Salon here. A quote:
The power to order people detained and imprisoned based solely on accusation is one of the most extraordinary and tyrannical powers any political leader can hold. One of the core rights established against the British king by the Magna Carta in the thirteenth century was that the king could not order subjects imprisoned except upon a finding of guilt arrived at in accordance with legal process. The Military Commissions Act…
evolvingthoughts | June 19, 2007
In a well known quote, the nineteenth century historian and classicist Theodore Mommsen said that the origins of the Etruscans was "neither capable of being known nor worth the knowing". He had no idea of the results made possible by molecular genetic studies, naturally, as nobody did at that time, but it appears that now that it is capable of being known, it turns out to be worth the knowing. Who'd have thought?
[Updated to add links]
The Etruscans lived somewhat to the north of the Latins on the Italian peninsula, and also on Corsica. Their language is not identifiably related to any…
evolvingthoughts | June 19, 2007
What happens when you put journalists in contact with scientists? To hear some people tell it, it results in an antimatter-matter explosion that destroys careers and causing black holes of ignorance in the general population, particularly when the density is already great, as in political circles.
Tara, from the scientists' perspective, gave a list of rules for science journalists. Her commentators broadly agreed, ranging from gentle to vociferous. Chris Mooney leapt to the defence of what is, after all, his profession (and one he's damned good at if his book is anything to judge by), and…
razib | June 19, 2007In response to the Etruscan story comments like this keep popping up:
The articles in the press keep mentioning the Etruscans coming from Lydia. Lydian was an indo-european language. So, although there may be a linguistic link to Lemnos and a genetic link to Western Asia, there is no obvious link to Lydia and the classical accounts of the origins of the Etruscans.
On my other blog I placed "Lydia" in quotation marks because saying that the Etruscans were Lydian is about as accurate as saying that the Wyandot (Huron) tribes who resided north of lake Superior in 1500 were "Canadian." To the…
aardvarchaeology | June 18, 2007A very early classic of Swedish archaeology is the zoologist Sven Nilsson's 1838-1843 book Skandinaviska nordens urinvånare. The work is a seminal exercise in ethnoarchaeology, where Nilsson used contemporary ethographic accounts of lo-tech societies to interpret Stone Age finds. Nilsson opens the first chapter as follows (and I translate, as the 1866 English edition doesn't appear to be available on-line):
"Everyone knows that in Scandinavia, as in many other countries, one often finds in the earth artificially shaped stone objects that have clearly been wrought by human hands and made for…