History
oracknows | May 28, 2007I didn't see this one in time to include it on my list of Memorial Day links. In it, Brett confesses:
Here's a confession: I don't really get Guernica -- the painting, that is, not the event.
Read the whole thing and see what he means.
oracknows | May 28, 2007Here in the U.S, it's Memorial Day, the day that we set aside to pay tribute to our men and women in uniform who have put their lives on the line to defend our nation in its wars. On this day, I'd like to present a few links and thoughts:
Here's my post about Memorial Day from last year.
Memorial Day 1942. Shorpy is my favorite picture blog. it regularly features amazing historical pictures from the first half of the 20th century.
The last full measure: 1863.
From the History News Network, here is a list of posts about the origin of Memorial Day.
Tom DePastino argues that we ought to…
oracknows | May 27, 2007I've been a bit remiss in my blog carnival plugging; so here's my chance to make up for it. Here are some carnivals worth checking out:
Carnival of Bad History #14: The Backlog Edition (The name speaks for itself.)
Carnivalesque #27 (Ancient, medieval and early modern history.)
Tangled Bank #80 (Science.)
The Creation Museum (The blogosphere's skeptical response to Ken Ham's creationism museum, which recently opened. Unfortunately, I forgot about this, and didn't write up something suitably snarky myself, but fortunately plenty of other bloggers did. Alas, the message will be lost on the…
aardvarchaeology | May 24, 2007[More blog entries about history, carnival, ancient, classics, medieval, middleages; historia, antiken, medeltiden, klassisk.]
Welcome, everyone, to Aardvarchaeology and the 27th Carnivalesque blog carnival! Aard is a blog about archaeology and skepticism and stuff, hosted here at ScienceBlogs among a bunch of natural-science blogs, most covering the life sciences. Carnivalesque deals in Ancient, Medieval and (in even-numbered instalments) Early Modern history, subjects in which I am interested but of which I am largely ignorant. Yes, I am a prehistorian. Let me classify your kitchen ware…
pharyngula | May 23, 2007An article titled "Darwin misconceptions in textbooks slammed in biology journal" sure sounds like it ought to be a hard-hitting criticism—we ought to look into that. Larry Moran did, and wow, what a bust. It's pathetic. It's a list of seven "errors" made in discussions of Darwin's biography in textbooks, which is little more than a lot of nit-picking over details that are not so important to a biologist, but are more a matter of historical accuracy. Some of them are trivial matters of emphasis—saying that Darwin published the Origin after he returned to England is quite correct, and unless…
oracknows | May 23, 2007Well, well, well.
Remember about a year ago, when Libertarian wingnut Vox Day shot himself in the foot big time by using a warped logic to argue that because it was "possible" for Hitler to round up six million Jews in four years then it's not "impossible" for us to round up 12 million illegal immigrants, a contention that I had a great deal of fun royally fisking (as did Sergey over at Holocaust Controversies) and that was so bad that it was apparently deemed too offensive even for WorldNet Daily, which edited it to water down Vox's horrible historical analogy? (If not, please check out my…
terrasig | May 23, 2007The 2 May issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute has an interesting news article on the advancing use of arsenic trioxide against a variety of human malignanices, mostly cancers of the blood.
The medical uses of arsenic reach back more than 2,000 years, but only recently has Western medicine embraced its surprising rise from folk cure-all to proven cancer treatment.
The January announcement of positive results in a 6-year NCI-sponsored phase III clinical trial to treat a rare form of leukemia is merely the latest in a series of kudos for arsenic's medicinal prowess. The latest…
evolvingthoughts | May 22, 2007An oldie but a goodie:
With respect to the theological view of the question; this is always painful to me.-- I am bewildered.-- I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I shd wish to do, evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae symbol with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.…
pharyngula | May 22, 2007Sad news: Stanley Miller died on Sunday. If you don't know who he was, go read this interview.
(via Evolucionarios)
evolvingthoughts | May 22, 2007
Since Linnaeus' birthday is tomorrow, my time, and I stuffed up the last post, here's another little treat for you:
Carl Linnaeus (1707–1770, from 1761 Carl von Linné, or Carolus Linnaeus)
There are many myths about Linnaeus that are due to the properties, real or imagined, of the system named after him (Cain 1994; Koerner 1999; Larson 1968; Winsor 2006). In fact the so-called "Natural System" as it came to be known, was on Linnaeus' own view an artificial one (Cain 1995), and it did not spring forth fully formed from his brow, no matter how much he saw himself as a "second Adam". His…
evolvingthoughts | May 21, 2007
In honour of Linnaeus' 300th birthday, and to rescue him from the canard that he merely applied Aristotelian logic to biology, I offer up this essay on his view of classification and species. I do not think Linnaeus was an essentialist in the Mayrian sense - he nowhere specifies that species have essences, only that there are diagnostic descriptions or definitions that allow naturalists to identify species in the field or in museum collections. But I'm no Linnaean scholar, so if anyone has information to the contrary, let me know.
Not much is known about the early education of poor Swedish…
aardvarchaeology | May 21, 2007
Dear Reader Arkein from the land of the Freedom Fries and EuroDisney set me a-thinking about Medieval barns, butcheries, kitchens and dinner-tables. I've got a story about that, and I believe it's far more likely to be true than that slanderous yarn about Louis XIV's pinkie.
The English language has different words for livestock species and for their meat. Cow -- beef. Pig -- pork. Sheep -- mutton. And there's a pattern to the linguistic descent of these words: the live-animal words were there already in Old English, whereas the meat words are French loan words appearing from the Middle…
evolvingthoughts | May 20, 2007
In a paper in PNAS, Ackland et al. argue that neutral cultural features can "hitchhike" along with some adaptive practice such as farming, in a way that ends up generating hard cultural borders:
The wave-of-advance model was introduced to describe the spread of advantageous genes in a population. It can be adapted to model the uptake of any advantageous technology through a population, such as the arrival of neolithic farmers in Europe, the domestication of the horse, and the development of the wheel, iron tools, political organization, or advanced weaponry. Any trait that preexists…
clock | May 20, 2007Via Snarkmarket, I found this (probably incomplete) Wikipedia list of the oldest companies in the world that are still operating today under the same name. The oldest one, a construction company in Japan called KongÅ Gumi, just went belly-up after serving their customers since the year 578AD.
And according to a commenter there, the oldest University in continuous operation is University of Al Karaouine in Fes, Morocco.
The oldest company on the list from the Balkans is Apatinska Pivara which has been brewing beer continuously since 1756. They produce one of the most popular local beers, the…
oracknows | May 19, 2007Let's face it. By their very belief in Holocaust denial, Holocaust deniers demonstrate day in and day out that they aren't the sharpest knives in the drawer (or the brightest bulbs on the Christmas tree, pick your simile). However, occasionally, I come across Holocaust denial that brings stupid to a whole new level, and I was made aware of a couple of such examples last week. Naturally, I could not resist sharing them with you, my readers.
First, Larry Fafarman makes his case for the prize of Stupidest Holocaust Denier Statement, with such gems (excerpted from his "article") as:
"Who in the…
aardvarchaeology | May 19, 2007
Here's a story I heard a long time ago about syphilis. I don't know if it's true: you tell me, Dear Reader.
You know how posh little old ladies and flamboyant gay men like to hold their pinkie finger in the air when drinking tea? This is because of syphilis at the court of Louis XIV in 17th century Paris. Those people were severely pox-ridden. And they were the cultural elite of their time, emulated in every detail of dress and behaviour by Europeans everywhere.
One thing syphilis does to you is damage the joints of your fingers. After a few years, you are no longer able to bend your pinkies…
oracknows | May 16, 2007Here are a few typical eugenicist quotes from early last century:
"It is an excellent plan to keep defective people in institutions for here they are not permitted to marry and bear children."
"[Scientists who are working at the task of improving the human race] would like to increase the birth rate of families having good heredity, while those people having poor heredity should not marry at all."
"At the present time there are in the United States more than a million people with serious hereditary defects, and to reduce their numbers by even a few thousand would reduce the amount of…
evolvingthoughts | May 16, 2007
Its is here. It's a largish PDF, about 81Mb, and this is only a temporary site until I get the proper files to Archive.Org for assembly and OCR.
Philip Henry Gosse was a well-known naturalist in the early 19th century. Huxley referred to him as "that honest hodman of science", and he was responsible (I am told) more than anyone else, for the new fashion of keeping aquariums.
Gosse's son, Edmund, wrote a rather unhappy memoir about growing up with a devout and strict father, called Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments, in which he mentions this book:
My Father had never admired…
aardvarchaeology | May 15, 2007[More blog entries about history, humour, engineering, catholicism; historia, humor, teknologi, katolicism.]
The Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm is advertising a position as lecturer on the subject of bridge-building, in other words, a Pope.
One of the most ancient honorary titles of the Supreme Pontiff is Pontifex Maximus, literally "Greatest Bridge-maker". Explains Wikipedia:
"The Pontifex Maximus was the high priest of the Ancient Roman College of Pontiffs. This was the most important position in the Ancient Roman religion, open only to patricians, until 254 BC, when a plebeian…
evolvingthoughts | May 14, 2007
John Locke, in his Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) argued that the rule of law and the imposition of religion ought to be two different things, and only the former ought to be a civil matter. All religions were to be tolerated. Having done a good thing in the context of the religious wars of Europe, Locke then did a bad thing which continues to echo today. He wrote:
Lastly, those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of a God. Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in…