History
revere | June 17, 2007Opposition to Turkey entering the EU is building and the Turks themselves are apparently ambivalent, but they once were one of the most successful immigrant groups Europe had ever seen. At least that's the conclusion of Professor Alberto Piazza, from the University of Turin, Italy, who is set to announce that there is overwhelming evidence the Etruscans, whose origin has been subject of vigorous dispute, were from Anatolia (southern Turkey).
Etruscan culture was very advanced and quite different from other known Italian cultures that flourished at the same time, and highly influential in the…
oracknows | June 17, 2007I've seen ads like this before in issues of LIFE Magazine from the 1940s that I inherited from my uncle, but they never cease to make me cringe when I see them:
(Click for a larger image and to read the text of the ad more clearly.)
Get a load of the text:
Family physicians, surgeons, diagnosticians, nose and throat specialists, doctors in every branch of medicine ... a total of 113,597 doctors ... were asked: "What cigarette do you smoke?" And more of them named Camel as their smoke than any other cigarette! Three independent research groups found this to be a fact.
One thing I could never…
evolvingthoughts | June 15, 2007
After the Flood, the earth is repopulated, and so R and P give us a list of notable ancestors. In 10:4-5 they say "And the sons of Javan; Elishah, and Tarshish, Kittim, and Dodanim. By these were the isles of the Gentiles divided in their lands; every one after his tongue, after their families, in their nations." [Taken from here]. This could mean either the coastlines of the nations or, as the NAS has it, the maritime nations spread out into their territories or something similar. No matter what the best translation, it is clear that each one of these sea peoples has their own language.…
evolvingthoughts | June 12, 2007
Marc Ereshfsky's entry on "Species" in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has been updated, though not to remove the classic "Essentialism Story" that has been called into question by a number of scholars lately. Under the fold, I will quote Marc's comments and critique them. [I can do this because Marc is a hell of a nice guy, and not at all precious about such stuff, at least not so far. I will test him, though. I should stress that Marc is not the originator of the Essentialist Story - it was developed between 1958 or so and 1982 largely by Mayr.]
Since Aristotle, species have been…
clock | June 11, 2007Skeptical Alchemist has the whole story.
Sign the petition to prevent the drilling.
evolvingthoughts | June 11, 2007
So the record for the "world's largest organism" has again been claimed for a fungus, something Stephen Jay Gould wrote about in his wonderfully titled essay "A Humongous Fungus Among Us" back in 1992, and which was included in his volume A Dinosaur in a Haystack.
The previous fungus, Armillaria gallica, is now replaced by a related mushroom stand, Armillaria ostoyae, in Oregon's Blue Mountains. But I have my doubts. The term "organism" here has a meaning rather different to "relatively undifferentiated mass of related stands". In fact, I want to talk about the notion of an organism, and…
oracknows | June 11, 2007After having been pointed yesterday to a video of an old Betty Boop short that strongly suggests that Boop may have been a homeopath, I couldn't resist clicking on the links to a couple of other old Betty Boop cartoons. One of them reminded me of just how different our culture was 72 years ago when this cartoon was released. What's astonishing to me, from the vantage of 2007, is the casual racism, done without a care in the world that it would offend anyone and done with the grossest racial stereotypes played for cheap laughs:
We can be grateful that such stereotypes are no longer…
oracknows | June 10, 2007While reading through a mailing list I belong to, I came across a link that demonstrates that alternative medicine has been ingrained in popular culture since at least the 1920's and 1930's. Indeed, I never realized that that icon of flappers, Betty Boop, practiced homeopathy. Don't believe me? Well, here's incontrovertible evidence in the form of a short called Betty Boop, M.D. released in 1932 and perhaps the most bizarre Boop short I've ever seen (particularly the last shot, which makes me wonder if acid had actually been invented six years before it was supposedly discovered). Basically,…
evolvingthoughts | June 8, 2007
This is the last section I will discuss in detail. It is, of course, the story of Cain and Abel. Cain is a farmer, and Abel is a herdsman. Both of these are agrarian pursuits, in the new agricultural period. But YHWH (just the single name now) seems to value meat more than crops, for when Abel brings him an offering, YHWH treats it with respect (sha'ah, meaning to gaze upon), but not Cain's. Since YHWH is still around chatting to the folk, he is still a physical deity, so I guess he needs his meat. His greens, not so much.
After Cain does the deed of murdering his brother in jealousy (…
aardvarchaeology | June 8, 2007
An old sorcerer has passed away. Karl Hauck was the single most influential contributor to the iconology, the interpretation of mythological imagery, of 1st Millennium AD Northern Europe. Hauck's interpretations built upon solid knowledge of later written sources, most importantly the Icelandic literature of the High Middle Ages. They were sometimes fanciful, always creative, and quite impossible to ignore for anyone working in that field.
Writes Hagen Keller (and I translate):
"On 8 May Karl Hauck died, aged 90. He was the founder of the Institute for Early Medieval Studies and former…
aardvarchaeology | June 7, 2007A week ago, Australian historian Keith Windschuttle gave a talk in Sydney under the heading "Postmodernism and the Fabrication of Aboriginal History". The full text is on-line, highly recommended.
"The argument that all history is politicised, that it is impossible for the historian to shed his political interests and prejudices, has become the most corrupting influence of all. It has turned the traditional role of the historian, to stand outside his contemporary society in order to seek the truth about the past, on its head. It has allowed historians to write from an overtly partisan…
oracknows | June 6, 2007Sixty-three years ago today, Allied troops stormed the beaches of Normandy, thus opening up a Western Front in the war against Germany. It was the beginning of the end; eleven months later, Nazi Germany, beset from the East by the Soviet juggernaut and from the West by the Allies, collapsed. Today is a day that we should remember the sacrifice of the thousands who died storming Hitler's Fortress Europe in order to hasten the end of his vile regime.
Larry Moran over at Sandwalk has a tribute, as do Andrew Bell and Dave In Texas.
evolvingthoughts | June 5, 2007
The Fall. What can we say about the Fall that hasn't been said many times before? Well, if all you read is the text, quite a lot.
The Serpent is interesting, for a start. He talks, and so he's a magical creature. He has a human-like personality, for he is "crafty" (although I really prefer the old term "subtle", for it makes him sound like a lawyer). He talks about YHWH Elohim only as "Elohim", for a start - I don't know what meaning there is in that. It's not that the Tetragrammaton (YHWH) had become sacred, for it is spread through Genesis and you'd expect it to be elided by the Redactor…
pharyngula | June 3, 2007Historical perspective certainly does change one's views of our current little struggle with theism. Kieran Healy identifies the original atheists—those horrible people who were defying cultural mores and denying the traditional deities.
It was those uppity Christians.
Matters were very different with the Christians, who had ex hypothesi abandoned their ancestral religions ... The Christians asserted openly either that the pagan gods did not exist at all or that they were malevolent demons. Not only did they themselves refuse to take part in pagan religious rites: they would not even…
evolvingthoughts | June 1, 2007
So in chapter 2, we shift stories. Now we have a story that is far older than the first chapter, and is regarded by scholars as the "Yahwist" creation story, and it focuses primarily on humans. The story is far more familiar than the first chapter is (the first few sentences notwithstanding), so we can be pretty brief.
Here, the deity is referred to as "YHWH Elohim", and is translated in English as "LORD God". YHWH is the ancient name for a Phoenician deity of the inhabitants of Canaan. We don't know exactly how it was pronounced, but problably it is said as "Yahweh". In the Canaanite…
oracknows | May 31, 2007Via Ed Brayton, I've learned of an interesting commentary by Sasha Abramsky on a topic that's near and dear to my heart. Well, its' more like a major pet peeve, one that irritates me so much that two years ago I even created a character who's made regular, albeit increasingly infrequent, appearances on this blog. I'm talking, of course, about the Hitler Zombie, everybody's favorite undead Führer whose chomp on a pundit's brain results in stupid and ridiculously overblown Nazi analogies. Indeed, such analogies irritate me sufficiently that at times my attacks on them have been described by…
evolvingthoughts | May 29, 2007
Are you a philosopher? Then stop reading and go think about something [else].
Neil Levy is doing a survey of moral judgments which he wants the philosophically uncontaminated to take.
Click Here to take survey
oracknows | May 29, 2007This is not free speech; it's vandalism:
ORCAS ISLAND, Wash. -- Vandals burned dozens of small American flags that decorated veterans' graves for Memorial Day and replaced many of them with hand-drawn swastikas, authorities said Monday.
Forty-six flag standards were found empty and another 33 flags were in charred tatters Sunday in the cemetery, authorities said. Swastikas drawn on paper appeared where 14 of the flags had been.
Members of the American Legion on this island off Washington's northwest coast replaced the burned flags with new ones Sunday afternoon.
The vandals struck again on…
evolvingthoughts | May 28, 2007
The Missouri Botanical Garden Library has made a Web 2.0 site of botanical works, the Botanicus Digital Library:
Botanicus is a freely accessible, Web-based encyclopedia of historic botanical literature from the Missouri Botanical Garden Library. Botanicus is made possible through support from the W.M. Keck Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
As always I just love it when someone hands me facsimile copies of ancient publications (although they have some more recent stuff too), all under a Creative Commons license.
terrasig | May 28, 2007It doesn't take a hero to order men into battle. It takes a hero to be one of those men [and women] who goes into battle.
- Norman Schwarzkopf
Superb Memorial Day posts today from Orac at Respectful Insolence and Mark Chu-Carroll at Good Math, Bad Math.